There are no mission markers pointing you towards the next relevant section of the complex, bewildering, multi-floored station instead you’re scanning through emails for references to areas you’ve seen and poring over the map to spot an unexplored corner that might hold the key – occasionally even a literal one at that. That remains true of the remake to an extent that simultaneously feels like an archaic hold-over and precisely the sort of absence of instruction anyone schooled on a Souls game might expect and certainly appreciate. In its progression structure, System Shock offered little in the way of a guiding hand. Through SHODAN’s outbursts, the desperate voicemails and logs from doomed station workers, you would have to piece together not only what disaster had happened but what you next needed to do to undo it. Appearing on nearby computer screens she’d mock and taunt your every step, announce she’d pulled the rug out from under you, or launch an angry tirade as you defeated an aspect of her grand plan, her glitchy, stuttering delivery evoking both the callousness of a dispassionate computer program and the spiralling hysteria of an increasingly unhinged despot.
Image: Nightdive Studiosīest of all, the game’s antagonist, the AI known as SHODAN, was fully-voiced. With System Shock’s enhanced CD-ROM edition, many of these were even voice-acted – and the audio log as a concept was born. Instead, you found notes and voice recordings left by station staff on data sticks and computer terminals. Killing off (most of) the cast before the player arrives, and leaving you to explore an essentially abandoned space station, was a design decision made to avoid interactions with NPCs via the kind of basic branching dialogue trees employed by RPGs of the time. System Shock was always more narratively sophisticated than DOOM. Rough-cut, perhaps, but the same kind of brilliance shines through. It feels like the first sketch of the kind of improvisational combat encounters later seen in a Deus Ex or a Bioshock.
The choices you make over what gear to carry with you and what to store in the cargo lift on each level carry consequences that shape your experience of every encounter. Inventory space is tight and resources must be constantly managed.
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