If we see ourselves turn an almost omnipotent AI’s ethical restraints off, and then wake up a while later to see chaos all around, it’s not exactly much of a surprise as to what happened. Having said that, I feel like BioShock handled this slightly better by not effectively giving away the big reveal at the start. The lore feeds heavily into that atmosphere, as you stumble upon audio and text logs that reveal a little about what happened. If that still sounds nitpicky, imagine an action title or shooter using that generic 1970s Hollywood scream every time an enemy died it would make the story a lot harder to take seriously. Perhaps this sounds like a nitpick, but I think for a game relying on atmosphere, it’s important to have the imposing character sound imposing, and not have a voice that sounds like it was grabbed from a random soundboard of robot noises. The audio logs all have this rather generic sounding voice filter, where she glitches in and out and repeats words sometimes, which I think winds up doing more harm than good for the character. She does the Handsome Jack thing where she’ll call you up every so often to tell you how much you suck, but she also leaves audio logs around, which range from reminding you how great she is to actually shedding some interesting insight into her thought process. Shodan is the antagonistic artificial intelligence of Citadel Station and primary antagonist throughout your adventure. Speaking of which, that AI is worth a deep dive of her own, especially given how prevalent she is in the game’s art and marketing. It's surprising how effectively the early game can jump scare you without even really trying simply by having an enemy right around a corner or some such. Citadel Station feels lonely, gloomy, and oppressive, with no one to offer you comfort but hostile NPCs and a cackling AI voice over the intercom. There are some truly horrifying spectacles on display, which does a lot to make the game’s backstory feel like a tragedy that was really carried out. Much of the appeal of System Shock lies in soaking up the horror-esque atmosphere of a dead space station, seeing the chaos it has devolved into and piecing together events. You’re trapped on a space station, constantly being harassed by an unfriendly AI and her minions, and slowly unlocking more and more of the station as you explore. If you haven’t played BioShock either (which I was originally going to write something sarcastic about but then I realized it’s somehow 16 years old now, so I guess it's actually pretty reasonable to have not played it), then the best recent comparison I can come up with is 2017’s Prey. If you’re like me and happened to be three months old at the time of the original System Shock’s release, then BioShock is unsurprisingly a pretty good point of comparison. System Shock is very much a Ken Levine title through and through. Unfortunately, we weren’t smart enough to schedule the surgery on a location that isn’t the space station now being run by a rampant amoral AI, and so when we wake up we find a bunch of corpses, an army of zombies and unfriendly cyborgs, and a particularly sassy computer who isn’t especially grateful to us for her newfound freedom. With obviously no downside to this agreement, our hero readily complies and undergoes the surgery to get his new uber hax0r skills. We’re whisked away to a space station, where a mustache twirlingly evil man offers us freedom and even more leet hacking skills in exchange for disabling the station AI’s ethics protocols. Unfortunately, said hacking skills aren’t quite as good as we hoped, and as a result we get arrested for breaking into an important person’s stuff. It’s half past the future and we play as a standard silent protagonist with generic hacking skills. The initial plot of System Shock doesn’t take long to get started. It’s also a game I have fond memories of playing as a kid (albeit with a good chunk of help from some friends), and jumping into the remake now I was curious whether it would hold up today, or whether it would prove to be another game from my past buoyed by rose tinted glasses. The original System Shock is probably one of the most influential titles of the mid 1990s, and that’s saying quite a lot. On a completely unrelated note, here’s the System Shock remake. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, causing us to remember movies, TV shows, and, yes, games much more fondly than we probably should have. Getting older is a collective realization of two things: first off, that you definitely aren’t as good at a lot of things as you used to be (mostly athletic), and secondly that the things you used to enjoy definitely weren’t as good as they used to be. By Paul Broussard, posted on 30 June 2023 / 2,291 Views
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