System Shock

Surprisingly been on a roll with finishing games that I started last year haha, I just finished System Shock (2023) and also had a really good time with it!

I never had experience with the original or the second game, mostly because I was bad with any amount of horror and System Shock also gave off the vibe of being scary to me (roaming around a mostly dead space station, the creepy writing and blood, etc.) so I never picked it up until recently after working up my courage with other horror games. I was pleasantly surprised that the horror was mostly done atmospherically with the setting and not so much with jump scares (though some enemies spawning got me still).

I don’t have experience with the old game so I can’t comment on how faithful it was to the original, but I really did have a good time with the variety of weapons, enemy types, and exploration. The biggest nitpick being the map which was confusing whenever there were multiple floors, and of course cyberspace was… an experience. I had more problems with the camera swerving and the enemies being sometimes incredibly annoying to hit, the final fight was also a bit lackluster in my opinion. I felt that for a final confrontation I wished it was a bit more direct of a confrontation as opposed to fighting a representation of SHODAN, though there’s not much that could’ve been done.

The highlight of the experience for me was SHODAN though by far. I loved their commentary as the hacker progresses through the station, taking over the monitors, picking up the various audio logs that describe her methods, everything about SHODAN was great to me. I thought she was a fantastic antagonist and would loved to be called insect by her again!

I’ll probably take a break before I play the second one (I saw some posts about an enhanced edition coming out, so maybe I’ll wait for that!)