System Shock : The Story of how a Weeb Console Baby actually tried one of those “Classic PC games” and liked it (?)
I have a confession to make…
Despite the many games logged as “played” on this account, there’s one side of the videogame medium that I am powerfully uncultured about…
Western PC gaming
Now mind you, it’s not like I don’t have any knowledge of that side at all. I have played my fair share of Valve games, some Bethesda slop, Doom, Wolfenstein and other stuff I probably played because they were offered for free inside of cereal boxes (shoutouts to Spy Fox and Pajama Sam in particular) but outside of that, not much else. Most of my gaming culture comes from playing games on console, namely the Playstation but also Nintendo Portable handheld, when I got access to a PC, it was old, it was janky and PC gaming was much less accessible to the common folk ! Like I didn’t have anything that could run 3D games on it no matter what and I just didn’t know where to look for the good shit either.
What I did on my PC however is play a lot of flash/browser games, hence why my number of “played games” is so high since I’ve archived a lot of of those and phone games because I thought it would be a funny way to inflate numbers (But I assure you, I DID play them). And when I stumbled upon Emulation at roughly the age of 7 or 8, this changed my life forever.
Suddenly I was able to play a vast array of titles from all throughout history just a few button presses on suspicious websites away, every video game ever right at my fingertip. I can confidently say that if not for me discovering emulations, I simply wouldn’t be the omega-gamer I am today, I’m thankful every single day for the existence of emulators, of ROMs and all the people that let little old Cani play more videogames in a year than most kids with parents money. But PC games ? Like actual proper PC games ? Never managed to get a grip on them, mainly because my computer at the time sucked and most of the computers I had throughout history sucked ass, my current PC is something half-decent, not optimal but much much better than the microwaves I was playing with back in the day which even struggled to render 2D video games mind you…
So my experience with proper PC gaming was a bit sparse, caught a glimpse of Oblivion at my neighbours hose, some Lego Island here, lots of Minecraft cause it was one of the rare thing that did run on my PC, some Warcraft 3 at Cousin’s house I have played Valve games but… mainly because of the Orange Box on PS3 and not on Steam with the shitload of mods to make these games better/playable.
Immersive Sim ? Don’t talk to me about such nonsense, I didn’t even know that was even a thing, for me every game with an FPS view threw me off for some reasons, always associated them with Call of Duty and I was an edgy kid who didn’t play no Call of Duty ! I was too cool for that ! I played another kind of slop like Assassin’s Creed instead, real adventure games with real adventures ya feel me ? (sometimes I wish I could just kick myself in the balls because that was absolutely me coping with sucking ass at Shooters…)
The closest thing to an immersive sim I have played was the Bioshock series and mind you, Bioshock 1 is one of my favorite game of all time (meanwhile Infinite is an affront to god himself and deserve to have its legacy mainly being porn) but ask any through hardcore Immersive Sim gamers and they’ll tell you that Bioshock is baby shit, it’s not a true immersive sim, the game is too linear, the morality system is fake, the builds are limited as hell, the level design doesn’t allow you to do cool shit… and when they were talking like this, as I was nodding in silence saying to myself “But it’s peak tho ?” They kept mentioning this game being some sort of a spiritual successor to another franchise named System Shock.
System Shock for me, up until recently was just : “That game that inspired Bioshock with an AI lady I keep seeing in those TOP 20 VIDEO GAME VILLAINS” videos, nothing more, nothing else. But for several people, System Shock is much more than just that, it’s a pioneer, it’s an innovator, it’s the missing link to which many modern games owe their mechanics and game design tricks. From what I understand, outside of Ultima Underworld which probably invented the genre onto itself, System Shock is to modern PC games what Super Mario Bros was to Platformer…
So suffice to say, it was kind of a big deal…
So why ?
Why am I only now getting around to playing this game ? After all, I don’t mind the crust, I don’t mind old games in general, I play old games just for the hell of it all the time because I love to learn about the history of the medium and see the evolution of so many tropes that inspired the stuff I like and maybe find some favorites along the way. Well, those excuses are going to be pretty lame but there’s mainly two reasons for this.
Like I said at the beginning, I was a console guy first and a PC guy second. Consoles were dominated by mainly two things : Japanese Games and Scrimblo Bimblo Platformers, so naturally I gravitated towards these kinds of experiences more as I grew up than mostly anything else, so even if you told me that X obscure PC game from the 80’s or 90’s was super influential, I highly doubt they were influencing the type of shit that I was playing on the daily.
The second dumber reason is simply that these games…
Intimidated the fuck out of me, like you tell me there exist a whole genre of games where it’s like fully trusting you, the player, to fuck around with complex systems and the game engine to go through it however you like ? That is insane but also, you put me in front of a game with a character creator where you have to allocate points in certain statistics and shit like that was really melting my damn brain… I was just not used to this degree of freedom with my games…
With age, I started becoming more and more welcoming of these type of proposition, Kichikuou Rance is one of my favorite game and so are Lisa the Painful RPG and the Saga Series, games were every roads lead to Rome but each road is different and exciting enough that you can still find new ways to go to that destination and still have a blast at the end of the day.
But even these games were somewhat limited to the confine of their genre and the limitation of their engine which allows for a lot of replay value but not a lot of true player expression. For the record, I have a similar irrational fear with CRPG’s these games simply look too big to be true for me, when I heard about the shit you can do in Baldur’s Gate 3, my mind simply cannot process how much fuck it we ball energy developers expect from me if I’m able to do all of that…
What got me to start getting more interested in those were Majuular’s video on Ultima (a great retrospective series which I absolutely recommend), for the longest time, I was indeed a console baby, I thought Nintendo invented everything video game and what they didn’t invent were done by other developers on their platform. Like how I truly 100% believed that Dragon Quest was the grandfather of every JRPG only for someone to tell me “Ok but what about Ultima and Wizardry” and I was like “Yeah sure… but like how much did they truly contribute ?” and turns out… A LOT.
By the time DQ1 released, Ultima 4 was already out, it had a turn grid based battle system, a complete open-world structure where you can do anything in any order you want, fully customizable party, heck just having an entire party in general, no random encounters which is kind of insane and tons of things I may have forgotten about. Heck, by the time Ultima 4 came out, even the story of the game already went by the “kill demon lord phase” and now it was all subversive and shit and now the story was “The World is at peace, there is no threat, no bad guys, in this world, become Jesus Christ” and it’s the most insanely cool concept for a videogame ever if it didn’t look like some absolute dinosaur shit.
Because that’s also another barrier for me when trying these games, for some reasons, older western PC games always tended to be rougher to get into than old Japanese ones. People often complain about going back to old games and going “I like it but oooo the clunkiness” but oftentimes I find this argument to be vastly exaggerated but for western PC games ? Not only do they look ancient but they also feel ancient to play in a way most Japanese games simply aren’t, they might be more ambitious in scope and experimentation but it really comes to the detriment of the average gamer experience, then again they were marketed to a much older audience than console players so perhaps they just expected more from them ?
This realization kinda reshaped my entire worldview, not only on my own biases and knowledge of video game history and the different influence traversing the ages but also on the relationship between console games and PC games. For me the whole “PC Masterace” meme was just about a bunch of dudebros flexing about 16K 340FPS with Ray Tracing and mods to add real bouncing physics on Skyrim NPC’s tiddies while snobbingly laughing at console peasant for not understanding their superiority, but in reality, PC games weren’t just in advance when it comes to console midway through the 2000’s or the 2010’s, they were already pioneering shit in the 80’s ! Far outclassing consoles in terms of ideas, mechanics in game design, they just were rougher and therefore infinitely more niche.
So how about System Shock then ? Well do you know Metroid Prime ? This is like Metroid Prime from the 90’s if Metroid Prime was the missing link between Doom and Quake and also came out literally 3 weeks after Super Metroid, THAT IS CRAZY.
System Shock puts you in the shoes of an unnamed protagonist called “The Hacker” by default because he… well… is a hacker. Living his life in the future, hacking companies and stuff until he got arrested, put in cryostasis and sent to an Orbital Station near Saturn called “The Citadel” for… reasons that are not really clear to me but linked to something about a guy named Diego ?
Anyway from sheer circumstance you are woken up from your slumber but things are not looking good for you, the Citadel is riddled with rogue machines, deadly cyborgs and mutated humans, what is going on ? Upon collecting a few data logs found on the ground, you learn that the AI managing the station called Shodan has turned rogue and the prisoners tried desperately to push a resistance with most of them turned into a mindless mutant or a subservient cyborg following the will of their new cybernetic overlord.
That intro is fast, incredibly 90’s, extremely vague about a lot of things on purpose to build up intrigue and then you’re thrown into the actual game and what the hell is the George Droyd looking ass UI ? How the fuck do I turn the fucking camera, why is the music a bunch of monkeys banging drums into my ear, what is going on ????
Let’s just say the game doesn’t really make the best first impression, it barely explains shit about fuck, and mind you, I’m playing this game through the Enhanced Edition which adds a lot of quality of life update but more importantly mouse look which I swear I even wonder how you’re even supposed to play this game without proper mouse control. Heck that’s actually funny because there’s a bunch of nonsense on screen that means nothing and some buttons let you position your body in like 8 different ways which is probably how they intended you to actually dodge stuff ??? I think ???
Then you somehow figure out how to actually play the game and you’re suddenly thrown into some Tron 3D Shmup from hell and wow dude what is going on !
I’m gonna go ahead and say this right off the bat, there’s a pretty cool video by Mandaloregaming covering the game, while it is a review, the first few minutes are literally a tutorial on how to actually play the game and setting it up to be as comfortable as possible for modern audience. I mean the game even has a surprisingly complex difficulty slider system that even lets you turn off… the plot ? Or make the plot more difficult ? Whatever does that mean ?
I will say, my first few hours with System Shock weren’t the best, between me being confused on how to play and what to do, I somehow managed to reach floor 2 but every enemy out there was absolutely and unquestionably murdering my ass and I was running low on medikit and had to farm a little on the first floor to get back some or else Idk how I was going to survive it…
System Shock doesn’t make the best impression at first, the controls are confusing, the soundtrack and visuals are aggressive as hell, the objectives are vague, it is not welcoming you with open arms, it’s welcoming you like a dad learning his kids how to swim. It throws you into the pool and expects you to swim naturally and you better start swimming boy cause you ain’t want to drown do you ?
I was very tempted to call it quits very quickly, thinking I was just in front of a really obtuse and outdated piece of crap that is probably more interesting to discuss than it is actually fun to play.. but then… after those rough first few hours, things started to click ! Thanks in no small part to Mandalore’s video of course but also my sheer persistence with the game. I realized that this more than chaotic introduction to the game was perhaps… done on purpose ?
I’m probably reaching here since I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the developers intention but it just sort of makes sense. Like the game really manages to make you feel like you just woke up, naked and afraid, in a world that wants you dead ! You’re not in your element at all here and for all intents and purposes, your main guy isn’t a fighter, he’s a hacker, some computer geek who probably spends more time on the chans than touching grass. He can’t fight mutants and cyborgs, even less so an entire army of them, even less so an entire space turn trying to kill him.
But slowly, like a cub forced out of the lion pride a bit early, you learn, you adapt, you get a metal pipe, then a pistol, you loot 50 thousands useless garbage until you learn none of it actually does anything so you put it back and focus on getting the actually useful stuff ! And most importantly, you break those nasty cameras because SHODAN doesn’t let you recharge your newly acquired laser pistol which doesn’t use ammo but energy instead ! And frankly, the game does willingly withhold a lot of information from you, but throughout the game and if you know where to look and explore every floor thoroughly, you find new cybernetic ware giving you more information, giving you new movement options, unlocking an entirely new layer of resource management.
Surely but slowly, you’re showing that bitch Shodan that the potential of humanity for growth and adaptation far outclass her delusions of grandeur ! You’re a hacker ! You’ve been fighting the system and nasty programs all of your life and while SHODAN might be scary at first, eventually, she’s just another program to hack.
The game looks daunting and unforgiving at the start but quickly, you enter a sort of flow zone midway through and things starts to be a lot more forgiving, this game is hard but it’s not cruel and it’s thanks to several system put in place to actually gives you respite in the middle of the chaos. First off, you can save anywhere at any time, while this does add a bit of stress, the game fully expects you to make full use of this precious ability to get through the game and you know, eventually you stumble upon something called “restoration bay”.
See when you die in this game, Shodan captures you and robotizes your ass in a pretty gnarly looking game over screen that will really start to get on your nerves after the 50th time an enemy catches you from behind. But with the restoration bay activated, you just spawn there upon dying with some health and energy back. There are also a few but existing strategic points where you can refill your health and energy to full, I personally wish there were… more than 3 health stations in the whole game but heh, we’ll do with what we have.
Also most enemies don’t respawn, even less so when breaking all the cameras and bringing the security level down on each floors, and yes it's for the whole game.
In fact, I will say, for such an old game, I was really surprised by how much of a technical flex the game is from something I did not expect from a game this old. The game is one seamless run from the start to the end, there are no loading screens and even the elevators meant to transition between areas charge the next zone instantly. More fucked up than that, the game keeps in memory the state of every floor, like how many camera you broke, which object you broke and which one you kept, how much corpses you’ve litered on the floor, how much enemies you kill and even the position of every items including the ones you dropped on the floor.
At some point I was like “If I close the game and reload all the enemies are going to respawn and this fucking suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks” but nope… it’s… kind of insane ngl, when did this came out ? 1994 ? AND IT’S BASED ON ULTIMA UNDERWORLD ENGINE WHICH IS FROM 1992 AND ALSO DOES THIS KIND OF SHIT ???? AM I HALLUCINATING RIGHT NOW ?????
In fact, that’s not the only thing this game nails so well from a technical standpoint. Let’s face it, the visuals are dated, they’re blocky, the textures are aggressive and it’s not always the prettiest game ever but damn, does it nail its own style in a way that actually makes this place a credible environment first and videogame levels second. Don’t get me wrong, all the floors you visit explicitly feel like videogame levels at first. They’re large and confusing labyrinths where it’s easy to get lost, it has hidden rooms behind suspicious looking doors and sometimes the structure of the level changes to take you by surprise and spawn a bunch of enemies on your ass, like traps in an ancient Indiana Jones temple.
However, despite this very gamey aspect of the level design that is inherited from Doom, it does borrow a bit more ideas from that game and even goes above and beyond. See, in Doom, the devs knew they were making labyrinths with lots of corridors for you to shoot through, but despite the limited graphics of the game, they tried to have each individual room in between the corridors being as iconic in their architecture as possible. That’s how you never get lost in those games in spite of the insane layout. System Shock takes this approach to level design, rolls with it but also wants to make the Citadel into a credible space even if it looks outlandish from an architectural standpoint.
All of the floors feature a somewhat similar design philosophy which stems directly from the Citadel’s architecture…
The Citadel is a tower, it’s built around a central shaft and each floors are divided in 4 sectors called Gamma, Delta, Beta and Alpha quadrants, you learn these words in the various data logs but even without those, you can observe as early as Floor 3 how similar the different floors are in spite of the sheer difference in function and design they all have. There is a level of consistency that makes those seemingly confusing labyrinths a lot more manageable. Heck even the Quadrants themselves have similar themes which transpose to each floor, like Beta quadrants mainly being office areas most of the time.
I didn’t take notes but it really does help sell you on this idea that his space station was once a living functioning space where people used to work and was built for efficiency first, even if the maze-like corridors might probably confuse a lot of employees doing their shift, very liminal, very atmospheric, some room even exist just for the sake of existing and it’s neat.
It’s in these moments that you start to realize that you can’t be fooled into thinking the game is Doom-like. See in Doom is all about momentum, it’s all about rushing through, analyzing enemy patterns and navigating video game-like mazes just for the hell of it. There is just a thin storyline but do not be fooled, you’re here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. System Shock definitely feels more like your typical dungeon crawler and not really a shooter, because let’s be frank, the shootouts in this game are an absolute mess. Any direct approach to combat often results in a lot of damage and a lot of deaths. Enemies are placed in somewhat tricky spots, sometimes taking you by surprise from the front, the side or the back like you’re the local school whore taking one for the team so we can win the superbowl.
Heck sometimes Shodan, will reward your cat-like curiosity with a free gangbang that you might not expect, will feel absolutely cheap and unwarranted and yet you’ll still smile through it all, shit feels like some youtube ragebait game at times especially if it’s been a while you saved or opened a restoration bay.
These are explicitly RPG encounters, with a set of optimal strategy to go through them and having to be sneaky or smart about looking everywhere or find blind spot, that’s the annoying part tho, most enemies in this games are exceptionally tanky but worse of all they shoot super fast and their short will melt your HP bar like butter in the summer. You do have some tools to mitigate that like a shield but don’t rely too much on it because it consumes your energy like crazy that you’d rather use for your energy based weapon anyway or for activating your movement modules like the Jet Boots to bypass certain areas and find shortcuts.
Again this does feel right with the kind of character you’re playing as, you’re a geek, in a quarterbacks world, it’s up to you to suck it up, stop getting backshot from everyone ont the team and draw Shodan as the crying soyjak and you as the badass chadcker ! Heck let’s talk about SHODAN for a hot minute because that’s also another brilliant case of this game design being so in advance. Remember when I said the layout between the quadrant was a labyrinth full of confusing corridors and traps well… It's also done on purpose.
The brilliant thing about SHODAN is that while she has a portrait and speaks directly to you through your data reader, she doesn’t have a physical body… well she has one technically and you’ve been walking on it the entire time ! SHODAN IS THE CITADEL ITSELF ! And that makes a lot of the design decision of this game take on a new height, we can assume that the station was heavily modified after Shodan’s takeover, she placed traps, fake walls, fake doors, confusing corridors, for you to run into a cleverly placed enemy ready to fuck you up. It’s methodical, it’s diabolical and she’s laughing and sadistically taunting you while going God complex the entire time. SHODAN considers that you’re literally just an insect crawling through her circuitry and eating it from the inside and the various enemies are the antibodies trying desperately to stop you from spreading more of your cancer.
So the game is about outsmarting the level design, it’s about outsmarting the enemies, it’s about outsmarting the system, you’re in a foreign body and don’t get me wrong at times, you will shit your pants, this game as some serious horror game vibe and will sometimes throw you into a loop and might spawn an enemy where you thought there would be no more enemies or change the rules to make you suffer more, to desperately stop you.
So you go around breaking this poor AI ladies eyes and organs, making her lose more and more control over you, she’s trying to play god and acting like an absolute juvenile fool when things don’t go as planned, she is quite the fascinating villain because of that real sense of back and forth you have with her throughout the whole game, her cruelty makes GLADoS from Portal look like a puppy but her insanely butthurt nature upon failing is especially satisfying.
Which is portrayed through the level design of course ! Like my theory that the Citadel is a mix of functional space and video gamey levels make sense as the more floors you go up and the more complex the layout becomes and the more gamey it looks, like there’s really no reason for engineering, probably one of the most important post to be having a layout like that. This theory confirms itself, the first few floors are barely touched but once you enter SHODAN’s domain on the last floor it doesn’t even look like a human settlement anymore but a completely freaky alien spaceship thing that you should burn immediately.
And even the music reflects that, see there are 18 tracks in the game but each of them are dynamic soundtrack which changes depending on whether you’re just walking or there’s enemies around but most importantly, it goes from a bit atmospheric to more bombastic as the security level drops, you conquered the place and SHODAN’s getting pissed as her control on the situation diminishes. It’s not the best soundtrack in the world and at first I definitely felt it was a bunch of monkeys banging drums but it grew on me, like a lot of things about this game really…
And while I’m actually glad to have pushed through and found so much value in it, there are definitely a lot of problems and glaring flaws either coming from its datedness or a lack of proper design…
We already mentioned how much combat is a mess in this game, I really can’t stress how much this game is wack about hitboxes, what counts as a hit and what doesn’t and how tanky + strong the enemies are. While it create an interesting dynamic of always being on your guard and trying to find blind spot to shoot them from, I constantly feel like the game loves to just randomly kill you for no reasons, it’s especially true when entering a room and not knowing what is killing you and surprise it’s Ninja Mc Cyborg conveniently hiding himself behind you ready to take you by surprise…
It’s also annoying because enemies tend to really blend with the environment and the game ain’t super clear on what’s the best weapon to use against them until way later with the appropriate module, but even then since they’re 2D sprites, their hitboxes tend to be wack especially when shooting them from below or from above, the game kinda shits itself and make you lose precious resource over bad hitboxes.
Speaking of module, this game loves and I mean loves to make you go through an onslaught of enemies guarding an item that you already have, I assume it’s because they thought the average player won’t be exploring an entire floor before moving up the next one so they put those for people missing out but like… In what circumstances aside from getting spoiled on exactly where to go would you not explore everything on a blind run no matter how unrewarding it can be ?
Weirdly enough, my biggest “complaint” about the game is its somewhat futile attempt at being a Metroidvania…
Don’t get me wrong, the term and the convention of the genre weren’t set in stone by the time this game came out and having one gigantic game with barely any loading time between zones is great. But the way the game handles backtracking is a bit too artificial in my opinion and not really fun. This is mainly due to two things :
-One there isn’t anything really blocking you on each floor to progress in them or find useful upgrade, once you enter a floor, you can pretty much do everything in it except for Level R which is where you’ll be backtracking too both to heal and also to explode the reactor once the game asks you to do it…
-Two, the map is a vertical shaft, meaning you’ll have to ride elevators left and right just because the game decided to arbitrarily through a quest on an information found in a datalog, to backtrack, there ain’t no reasons to backtrack half the time and frankly you can just read the data logs which are very trustworthy and I fully believe you can play the game blind by simply paying attention (CRAZY I KNOW ?). But the reasons why you backtrack are often pretty lame… or just to wait a bit more time.
I see why someone would call this a “better metroid prime” on virtue of the game having a lot more meat in terms of narration and also much more complex level design with somewhat a bit of options to go through them, but I think it’s the RPG aspect, the sense of place and all that truly makes this game unique and the few detour that would justify a comparison with Nintendo’s franchise which is honestly pretty surface level even if they aped it like crazy.
And then there’s the fucking Cyberspace level… look… I get it… they exist to show off the crazy 3D tech of the era, much like Star Fox on the SNES was a technical demo on how a fully 3D game could run on that shit… but sometimes, we care so much about if we could do it rather than if we SHOULD do it. Cyberspace sucks, it just sucks, it’s a minor minigame of course but not only is it frequent enough to be a bother, it’s also a major part of the final confrontation with SHODAN making that finale as anticlimatic as imaginable, if the two floors before it weren’t already the shortest and easiest shit in the universe (probably to compensate them not having restoration bays like at all).
Finally it’s minor, but the voice acting is weird, they recorded those lines after writing the actual game and it shows, the cast really does its best even if just listening to these logs ain’t an option.
Oh and also, to recharge your weapon you have to stop and click and with how quickly ammos deplenish, you will be doing this often even in the middle of fights.
So yeah, I’m pleasantly surprised by this game, sure let’s be real, it’s dated in some areas but somehow the game pulls off its own weight by the end, the finale is a bit anti-climatic which is a shame but the rest of the game is really solid, maybe I missed a bunch of stuff and opportunities for emergent gameplay style. But that… would be waiting for System Shock 2 Electric Boogaloo ! So yeah good game, surprised I even liked it as much.
