Bioshock Jungle Setting

I'm working on a semi-bioshock setting, but I'm going for something new... how would you try and create a Bioshock "Utopia gone wrong" setting in the Jungle?

Set in the 70s. A load scientist want to make the perfect "Eco sustainable" society based around flower power principles. Also they turn into mutants for some reason.

Well, for starters, why did they move to the jungle? What about it grants the same utter isolation that living in the bottom of the ocean can grant? That's why Andrew Ryan built down there, to assure the "evil governments above" couldn't intervene by force.

That said... if you want to mesh Bioshock with a jungle setting, you could find a useful philosophy in Social Darwinism. Until the Nazis made it politically unfashionable, this was a huge belief system touted all over the world.

Your "utopianists" came to the jungle to seek purity through strength, to winnow out the weak and make themselves stronger. Maybe focus on biotech and/or psionics; the strong command the weak, who live and die as the strong see fit.

The strong, of course, end up devolving with some ADAM-stand in - maybe a mutagenic virus contained in a deep jungle flower, ala Resident Evil 5? - and you have a lot of man-beasts and man-plants taking over what was supposed to be a bastion of racial purity and eugenically engineered strength.

...Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that eugenics and social darwinism are the best-fitting social philosophies to build your neo-Rapture from. These were legitimately popular beliefs in the 1800s and 1900s, up until the Nazis showed the world what their logical conclusion would look like. Dieselpunk meets biopunk, with a dash of toyed-with pulpy Darkest Africa for backdrop.

What type of jungle? Central America, Africa, South Eastern Asia? That's quite an important difference. Also who started the utopia? Do you have any basic ideals behind it prepared?

You can have them in a treetop village

And instead of skyhook or pneumatic tubes people swing around the place like Tarzan using engineered smart vines.

I'd probably go escaped Nazi Science trying to make an Ubermench Utopia.

You could run with the original plot of Bioshock 1. Cult deprogrammers have to go rescue an heiress from a cult that's taken "survival of the fittest" to it's absolute extreme, by splicing and modifying themselves into monsters.

Well for any pseudoshock game you need to figure out what cultural philosophy/ movement you want to have spiraling out of control, add about 20 years to when it was in vogue so it has time to go ape shit, and then pick an isolated place for everything to have gone wrong. Also what kind of crazy superpseudoscience you'll 've having

Something like this. An ecologist society founded in an extremely isolated valley, you either go there by air or travel weeks on a muddy river. Living in harmony with the nature, flowers and peace. Except their experiments with photosynthesis have gone wildly awry and it's become full Darwinian experiment, with some more fanatical member grafting chlorophyll implants onto their skin and feasting on raw flesh.

Said experiments have also produced super science with very capable solar power.

Players are a flying crew that crash landed nearby either by accident or design.

While everyone here is going for a Darwinian sort of philosophy, I'm going to go a complete 180 for my suggestion.

It's the late 1960s, right at the height of the counter-culture and rampant use of drugs by young adults in that era. A group of college kids are flying from some Central American hotspot for getting good, clean, "cheap" drugs and are partaking in them when their plane crashes due to a freak storm.

The group wakes up to find themselves being held captive by a decidedly "backwards" culture, a weird hybrid of Aztec, Inca, and Mayan architecture, dress, and dialect. They want to offer up these "sky people" back to the gods in the form of human sacrifice, which the group knows is not going to work.

Now they have to escape and survive from these weird natives, wielding weird powers "given" to them by "the avatar of the gods" for their most "noble" warriors. Said powers are because of a Nazi scientist who fled during WW2 and also crashed here, but was able to convince them he was an avatar of their gods and let them continue his inhumane and unethical experiments to create these powers, which are only possible because of some of the plants found in the area being distilled, purified, and combined with his Nazi deep science tech.