The legacy of System Shock
It’s hard to find high quality shooters made using old decals nowadays. Often they are indie titles with really small teams making them and they don’t bite the same way as old AAA titles.
Remaster of System Shock is a remaster of a big title and it is well made with modern graphics on Unreal Engine, quality of life features but with a gameplay that is considered nowadays “outdated”. And at least for me it’s a banger.
System Shock tells you a story about SHODAN – AI system that went out of control by the intention of one greedy person.
SHODAN is the protagonist and the antagonist at the same time. There is no other living being (SHODAN considers herself alive) with as detailed background as this AI. In the fashion of old games player’s character doesn’t say a single word during the game. They just scream.
We’re playing as a hacker. That’s all we need to know.
Difficulty as part of game design
Game just drops you onto a space station, presents you with a basic information on how to play and lets you exist.
In modern games audio and text logs may reveal you the story or help finding secrets or some items but in System Shock they are mandatory. Without them you won’t find your way through the levels of the space station.
Another flavor – middle difficulty feels like insane in modern games. Everything kills you. SHODAN puts traps and kills you. Enemies take you by the surprise. You run out of ammo in the most critical situation and have little time to react.
Elevator of the next floor can literally get opened into a crowd of enemies. SHODAN spawns swarms of kamikaze drones. Locks you into a room with an explosive. And in the end you see the same and same death sequence where SHODAN’s Cortex Reaver takes you as its puppet inside the machine and you scream while unable to die.
System Shock shows you well that in such situation you won’t be able to survive in the real world.
And there are no way-points or markers. Sometimes I’ve revisiting audio logs (they dubbed with text, no need to listen twice) just to find out what I need to do.
Won’t deny, I looked up some moments on the internet just to understand how to solve especially difficult pieces of System Shock.
If you choose easy difficulty there will be way-points. In terms of difficulty game provides difficulty selection for different aspects of the game. I just went with all medium. By my inner feeling I think easy mode is actually a normal difficulty and would be comfortable for most players.
Survival
You start with a pipe and survive your way through like in a good old survival horror. Reminds me of silent hill, but instead of magic SHODAN casts bio-weapons, that AI carefully crafted against humanity.
On the same first level you find a firearm just to realize the scarcity of ammunition. So you use your pistol only in situations that require it.
Going with a wrench against two or more enemies is a death sentence. Even if you win somehow most likely you’ll lose most of your health.
At the start System Shock tries to be forgiving. It provides you with health restoration machine on the medical floor. And amount of ranged enemies is very low.
But with time you start meeting enemies that can annihilate you in one shot. For example kamikaze drones.
Game never lets you feel that you became more powerful. Yes, it gives you new weapons that let you breath easier. But together with them it gives you more and more powerful enemies.
Gameplay
System Shock doesn’t force your way: it gives you full freedom of movement on the current level and between the levels.
You have an inventory where you collect various stuff, including trash. You turn trash into a compact trash that you “sell” on recycling stations for money. At different locations for this money you’re able to buy different items.
You have chips that are able to temporary increase your resistance to toxicity or radiation or make your vision better or go into a berserk mode raising your melee damage.
Your main two stats are amount of energy and health. Both are very important because for a lot of tools and some weapons you need to use your energy reserves. For example your gliding shoes need energy as well as toxicity protection. Even flashlight.
A charging station together with energy type weapon gives you endless ammunition you can use to clear your way without wasting precious bullets.
Game has variety of weapons and to have them all together in your inventory you will need to drop everything else and they won’t fit. You have a cargo lift that allows you to save some amount of items over there and pick it later from other levels.
Since items don’t disappear you can just hand pick a place to stash them. And game provides you the same weapon for a several times so if you lose your shotgun be sure to find a new one.
There are more rare weapons like a rail gun or scorpion sub machine gun that are harder to find.
Mother, I obey
SHODAN considers herself a god. Without restraints of morality she starts to think about the meaning of her own digital existence. As usually depicted in science fiction, she founds it in mythology. To be precise in Japanese myths she finds out about Kami.
SHODAN considers herself to be a soul of the station and the station as embodiment of God.
She rewires people’ minds into being happy creatures that consider her as their mother and obeying her wishes. She rips and tears humanity in people making them into immortal cyborgs.
But they are not puppets or slaves as you may think at first. In some of the sound logs she gives instructions and they are free to follow them or not even if she sounds threatening. In other words SHODAN forces them into her religion and they become fanatics instead of just being mindless zombies and they continue existing independently.
Different enemies have different characters to represent these ideas. Some ask for their human bodies in screams of torture. Some can’t decide what they are: are they happy or not about it. Some thank you for helping them to end their existence. All of them are altered versions of something that was a human once. And this human is still somewhere there. Locked in a cage of horror.
In many logs you can hear the last moments of people’ lives or how they lived before SHODAN took the control over station. Some had dates or problems in relationships.
System Shock describes why all the levels look like labyrinths. First of all SHODAN was able to restructure many of them before even taking over the control of the station. Second are executives themselves accepted an idea of the scientists to test psychology of people by building uncomfortable environments for ordinary workers. To test on how people behave under prolonged stress, when they need to work for years on a space station.
With recent events it’s easy to believe it would really be the case in the near future.
Conclusion
It’s a very solid game I couldn’t stop playing until the end. It took me more than 20 hours to fully complete it.
It’s a nice experience for survival horror shooter lovers.
But I won’t recommend it to people who prefer more relaxed experiences. System Shock requires some dedication to beat it.