When System Shock leans on its horror elements, thrusting you into a dark room with a groaning monster, I remember why I hadn’t played Dead Space System Shock is more my speed of creepy, but I can see how one became the next. When you charge your electric weapons in the charging stations, electricity dances on your fingers, and I remember how BioShock descended from this game. What does feel incredible is the way the flourishes of the remake highlight System Shock’s lineage even more. SHODAN’s presence still feels new, somehow - or maybe, everything old just becomes new again. As you make your way through the levels, she promises that she’ll strap you to a torture chair and that “you’ll learn more about pain than you ever wanted to know.” In System Shock, SHODAN’s hate is cold and pure, the way you hate insects when they get inside the house they’re below you, and not supposed to be here. GLaDOS is just SHODAN with a sense of humor and a sense of personal animosity toward the player. The character archetype SHODAN would create, of a female AI that’s lost its morals with an acerbic, glitchy voice, is now a cliche. If you’ve played Portal, you’ve interacted with a very close relative of hers. If you are a fan of video games, you’ve met SHODAN before, in some shape or form. SHODAN, it turns out, really needed those ethics protocols, and when you wake up after surgery, she has murdered everyone in the station and turned them into mutants and cyborgs. You’re whisked away to its orbital space station, called the Citadel, and given a job: join the corporation and get a fancy neural implant in exchange for removing the ethics protocols of their AI, SHODAN. It’s a dungeon-crawler wearing a shooter’s skin.įamously, System Shock is the story of the Hacker, who was caught hacking into the TriOptimum Corporation. You walk slowly - oh so slowly - down narrow hallways with flickering lighting, trapped in metal maintenance corridors as you try to make your way through the map. In your hands, your lead pipe hangs heavy in front of your face, swinging directly in front of your field of vision, sometimes slightly pixelated in the light. The lighting is often dramatic, your screen saturated in deep red with bright blue sparks emitting from the light fixtures. Smoke spouts from vents and dissipates into pixels. But it looks like the way games from 1994 appear in my memory. It’s not a fully reimagined game like the Final Fantasy 7 remake, nor does it wholly abandon the aesthetics and art style of the original like the remake of Shadow of the Colossus.
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Nightdive offers the Citadel to you not just as a space station but a puzzle, a map for you to unfold with little to no instructions on how to proceed When I first looked up the game, having heard it was a huge influence on pretty much every game that came in its wake, I instead found people on forums telling other readers to just go straight to System Shock 2. For a large part of my youth, System Shock, a game so old it was originally released on floppy disc, was distributed by fans via downloads of dubious legality. Too long had passed between the game’s release and the present day for System Shock to be accessible, not just in the sense that I was accustomed to more modern games with better UI and more intuitive controls, but also in the sense that it was not available to purchase anywhere. I had always wanted to play System Shock, to trace the lines of video game history, but as an older, PC-only game, it was hard to get my hands on. It also popularized some narrative techniques that now feel tired, like the general practice of telling your story through audio logs. Over time its legacy has grown, explicitly influencing games like the aforementioned BioShock and Dead Space, but also Dishonored, Prey, and Deathloop. Originally developed by Looking Glass Studios, it was a moderate hit at the time, but not explosively popular like its contemporary Doom. īefore I was deeply entrenched in the world of video games as a critic and a journalist, I knew about System Shock, but it wasn’t possible for me to play it. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule.
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