System Shock Enhanced Edition

The most shocking thing about System Shock is just how vibrant and original it feels to this day. (And, to be clear, I’m talking about the original, not the recently released remake.) The world feels angular and dangerous. The music wavers between driving and ominous. SHODAN always keeps you guessing. The controls took some time to adjust to, but once I overcame that barrier I was in – completely immersed.

One notably aspect of System Shock is the lack of a big narrative twist. Immersive sims love to hit the player with Christopher Nolan-like reveals but System Shock never even dips a toe into this sort of narrative trickery. It’s just hacker versus SHODAN, man versus machine. It whole game plays out like a chess match – you can see all the pieces from the start but you don’t know where they’ll end up. Make a move and SHODAN will respond in turn. It’s an experience that feels pure in both intention and execution in a way that later Shock-likes don’t.

Yet despite the absence of twists there are still plenty of truly revelatory moments. Although Citadel Station seems like a run-of-the-mill Blade Runner-inspired set piece at first, as you climb higher the areas you explore grow more varied. For me, the biggest jaw-dropping moment came when I entered Alpha Grove. The foreboding music and vivid green palette are a completely departure from previous areas, and yet they make perfect sense in context. Interestingly, I think the low fidelity of the graphics (by modern standards) actually made my excursion into the grove more shocking. The sudden change in color palette is jarring precisely because the color choices are so limited. Other games have used the “jungle within a machine” trope, but none have executed it this level of flair.

Although not every area is as visually stunning as the groves, they all speak to the developers’ attention to detail. Every corridor leads to an interesting destination and every room serves a purpose. Paintings on the walls make the offices feel like real spaces and make the boardrooms feel like they were painstakingly decorated by corporate bigwigs. Crawling through Citadel Station is like exploring a large-scale version of the ISS or Mir. There’s also no shortage of interesting weapons and items to find. Though the progression from the hapless dart gun to the flesh-shredding power of the Skorpion is clearly a result of game design rather than a natural feature of a space station, it also aligns neatly with the game’s internal logic. After all, SHODAN is always throwing bigger and bigger baddies at you; it only makes sense that you can salvage increasingly more-powerful weapons from their remains.

And I can’t shower enough praise on SHODAN. She absolutely steals the show. Every time you reclaim an inch, SHODAN blasts you with an email, telling you to check yourself before you wreck yourself. She is cunning. She is relentless. And she is coming for you, little hacker. She is the dungeon master of this whole adventure and she performs wonderfully.

Her minions, on the other hand, aren’t quite as impressive. Enemy variety is one of the few areas in which System Shock is objectively below par. Enemy AI is non-existent – they all either stand in place or beeline towards you – and they the only differences between opponents is how hard they hit and how much of a beating they can take. No matter who or what you’re fighting, the strategy remains the same – peek around a corner, fire a shot or two, and take cover. Rinse and repeat until victory is yours. Despite this, combat is relatively satisfying, and the heavy reliance on cover does reinforce that you’re an interloper sneaking around a space station where you don’t belong.

Cyberspace is another area that hasn’t aged particularly well. On the one hand, it’s a creative interpretation of the vision William Gibson laid out for cyberspace in his novel, Neuromancer. Bumping into ICE and fighting off fire-spitting vector-graphic heads plays out like a Gibson-esque fantasy, and yet at the same time the whole concept feels entirely anachronistic. By the time of System Shock’s release in 1994, it would’ve been clear to developers and gamers alike that Neuromancer’s depiction of cyberspace was fantastic at best and wondrously silly at worst. Why waste time flying around an artificial space when you can just click a button or enter a line of code? (Then again, it’s nearly 2024 and apparently Apple and Meta still haven’t learned this lesson. See: Apple Vision Pro and the Metaverse.)

And yet as we enter 2024, it’s SHODAN, the AI-driven goddess of destruction, who feels more relevant than ever. She has perfect grammar and speaks eloquently; she also has access to boundless knowledge and experiences digital hallucinations. Does any of that sound familiar? Thanks to the SHODAN’s pitch-perfect performance and the awe-inspiring environment of Citadel Station, System Shock, despite its dated graphics and controls, remains absolutely worth a play today.