System Shock (2023) - Impressions
My first serious game was Myst, and it demanded a very particular peripheral that used to be a mainstay of any serious gamer's arsenal: the double combo of a well-sharpened pencil and a generous Legal pad.
First came a story of Linking Books and filial betrayal. A little grisly in places, sure - thanks, Achenar - but mostly All-Ages stuff. I tore through two pads just to finish Myst because I had the insane idea of charting out the Selenetic Age's subway system organically. I was too dumb to realize the sounds were the same heard for the Mechanical Age's four cardinal points, too stubborn to bother, and armed with a summer's worth of game time and zero responsibilities. I charted out that damn subway for hours and screamed for joy when I lucked onto the exit.
Then came something a little harder on the nerves. A tale of corporate overreach, greed, megalomania pressed onto silicon wafers and a very Nineties vision of Cyberspace. Move over, Johnny Mnemonic, this hacker's even more hapless than you are...
Long story short, we open in a dystopian Cyberpunk future and are, in fact, a well-heeled chairjock. We've got the sick techwear to prove it, complete with glove-mounted ports for plugging portable data drives into your knuckles or socketing map-related proprioceptive enhancements to your wrist - like you do. The problem is, we've gotten a little long in the tooth and opted to steal a military enhancement that's probably omega cool, max nova or fraggin' awesome, depending on your other dystopian setting of choice. Said implant's owners and designers, the obscenely wealthy TriOptimum Corporation, sic their dogs on us. We're caught merely moments after stealing the schematics.
TriOp's Chairman of the Board, however, has some ideas. Ideas that work against the hardcoded ethical protocols of the AI system he both lords over and depends on, the Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network - or SHODAN. Space stations orbiting Saturn are complex hives of steel and flesh, you see, and designing a dispassionate and meticulous warden for it only made sense.
The problem is that thanks to your actions under duress, SHODAN is now anything but dispassionate and meticulous. She soon comes to see herself as a "living" goddess, and more or less rips a page out of AM-1's usual script. Kill the humans, experiment with their primitive flesh, turn their remains into obedient servants to her newfound magnificience - yadda yadda. On the plus side, SHODAN is once again voiced by Terri Brosius, former vocalist for the band Tribe - and she once again oozes cold and calculating menace. Glitchy cold and calculating menace, that is.
I mean - take five and go look at System Shock 2's now-famous opening CGI movie on YouTube. Look at you, hacker, said in its chilling tone of absolute contempt and utter surety of purpose, is now a bona fide classic Gamer Meme.
I might as well say that this is more or less The Game, as it were. as you spend most of your run trying to correct this very obvious SNAFU while also trying to figure out how you're going to leave a space station located halfway across the solar system when all the doors are locked and most relevant codes were either revoked or stashed away.
Oh, and the insane AI you're stuck with decided it was a good idea to start splicing tiger and gorilla DNA together into brand new cuddly murder machines. You know. For funsies.
Initially designed by Irrational Studios back in 1994 and now spruced up by Night Dive, this is a title that proudly foregoes several modern conveniences and that refuses to hold your hand even at the easiest difficulty settings you can configure. It isn't easily legible, its level design philisophy is intentionally outdated and if it could speak, it would spit in BioShock's direction and claim it was corrupted by the vainglorious promises of the Shooter Celebrity status.
And yes, I say that knowing BioShock is leagues removed from your average Call of Duty entry. Compared to System Shock, Bioshock is a Dudebro Machine designed to slam through brewskis while yelling about your KD ratio in a bad microphone. I'm also saying this as someone who loves Bioshock. System Shock the first in name is not friendly, it does not care for you or your concepts of builds or minmaxing, it almost sadistically throws a useless compass your way - and asks you to figure it out.
No handholding. No tutorials. No easing-into-things. Once you're on Citadel Station, you're on your own.
Honestly, just this is worth the price of admission. We've been coddled for decades, all because we're focused on making sure games recoup their massive budgets. System Shock sits at a lean and mean eight and a half gigabytes (yes! In 2023! It's shocking! Har har, easy puns!), it intentionally looks simple and chunky - and nothing is wasted here. Nothing whatsoever.
It's cramped, oppressive, dingy, menacing, cold, even possibly damp - and still a great showcase of any RTX-capable graphics card, with deep and believable shadows and so much Shader Porn that even the simple voxel textures that adorn the four sides of the playspace at all times feel properly anchored in the fiction. It's a beautiful game, if you're willing to understand that beauty as a concept can include pixels you can count with your naked peepers.
What it isn't, however, is forgiving towards younger gamers or anyone who skews towards more recent releases. The dual UI experience is instantly dated, the "inventory Tetris" concept stopped being fun long before Resident Evil 4 briefly revitalized it, and hitting Tab to click through audio logs and written notes for codes or clues when you can hear mutants wheezing and lumbering towards you is never really fun.
Y'can't pause, here - this is the Dark Souls of vintage PC horror games-
No, come on, that's a dated and cringey assertion, SHODAN's baby deserves better than that. What it is, though, is an encapsulation of a specific era in video game design and in what we once saw as constituting the best the Survival Horror genre could produce on our dated beige towers. The best outside of other classics in the genre, sure, but still one of the oft-cited references.
If you've got fifty or so bucks burning a hole in your pocket and the pressing need to have a skipping Text-to-Speech filter call you a pathetic insect, this is a must-have, quite simply.
