If you're going to compile a list of games that haven't aged well, System Shock would be a good first entry. The interface is the most arcane I have ever used in a game, which on top of early 2.5D FPS technology made starting this game comparable to running into a brick wall. I could see it being too much to get over for most people, but if you can commit, you’ll be surprised at how good this game still is. The crux of its quality is its infamous AI villain, SHODAN, and how beautifully she(?) frames the entire game. With the gameplay being about exploring a space station, having the antagonist be a personification of the station’s malice keeps the narrative feeling present, and all your victories are direct shots against your enemy. Pulling apart the station for resources isn’t just something you do to increase your strength, it cripples SHODAN’s control and turns the tables in your favor. It’s beautiful ludonarrative synchronicity, a quality I feel was lost as subsequent games simply copied the format. The Bioshock games also have you repairing and reclaiming your environment, but with villains disconnected from the setting itself, it can feel like a tedious distraction before the real conflict begins. Playing System Shock will give you so many little revelations like this, and you begin to understand where so many design tropes in successful first-person shooters came from. I recommend at least trying it out, even if I fully expect a lot of people to bounce straight off of it.

Absolutely astonished how much I enjoyed this game coming to it in 2021. Took about an hour to wrap my mind around the control scheme and how it wants you to jump in and out of mouselook controls, but past that I just couldn't stop playing.

The control interface you're presented with is profoundly intimidating, which is (unfortunately) helped by the fact that you can largely ignore it and still be successful. I never felt the need to use any mods other than the headlamp, threw maybe five grenades during the game and used no patches other than for healing.

Combat is also somewhat frustrating — most projectiles are hitscan and you take quite a bit of damage, so I spent the majority of my fights leaning around a corner to shoot the edge of a hitbox on an enemy I couldn't actually see.

Despite those complaints, I found the act of exploring the station to be a thrill, and was surprised at how effectively the game communicated objectives through storytelling, something modern games can often struggle with.

Some puzzles were obtuse (one that requires you to find a particular severed head comes to mind) but largely fine.

The same cannot be said for the cyberspace sections, which are blessedly few. The controls are confusing, your objective is confusing, combat is confusing, and the graphics make it nearly impossible to navigate. A great place in which to fight the game's final boss!

Despite her lackluster final performance, malevolent station AI SHODAN is obviously the standout part of the game, and the influence on evil AI in gaming since then is immediately obvious. If only the rest of the fairly bored-sounding voice cast had put in even half the effort heard in SHODAN's performance.

Anyway, consider me fully appreciative of why this game was so influential back in 1994. Can't wait to play the sequel.

God, what an awesome game. I don't think I've ever been more pleasantly surprised by another piece of media quite like this.

First off, everything you've heard about the UI and the control scheme is probably true and it absolutely takes some getting use to. But with Night Dive's Enhanced Edition, you can now change any key bind you want, use proper mouse aiming, and set the game at any resolution your monitor can take (Although be warned this game is very finnicky on monitors that are over 60hz)

This is a tried and true classic immersive sim. It is crazy how much freedom you are given within Citadel Station. There are tons of ways you can handle pretty much any situation you come across thanks to the hefty number of tool the game provides you throughout the levels.

This is without a doubt my second favorite immersive sim and probably my personal favorite survival horror. (Yes, that's what I'm calling it and no you won't change my mind)

Rough as hell around the edges but weirdly captivating too. The game's controls (once you rebind them before playing, which you really should do) are so unintuitive that they somehow wrap right back around to become extremely intuitive. It's fucking strange.

The map design is labyrinthian at times yet often feels pretty logical as a layout of an actual building; only a couple of the later floors (namely 7 and 8) really lack that sort of feeling. Everywhere else was surprisingly easy to memorize and get used to, and by the lategame I thought it was very easy to navigate from place to place and use shortcuts I'd discovered.

I found that it was really refreshing how hands-off the game's missions and progression were, and returning to different floors throughout the story felt far less like backtracking and more like... well, actually progressing. It amazes me how little of this game's style persevered into the present day, because I found it pretty gripping to have to pretty much need to immerse myself into what was going on to understand everything and make my way around.

Enemy and weapon balance is pretty underthought which makes sense considering the whole rest of the game is so complicated and thought through. This was probably the lamest part of the game to me, as enemies tended to be some really big nuisances in the lategame without ever coming across as challenging. I just had to reload my save a couple times as needed or spam the rapier with my shields up. Definitely a snooze on that end.

One other thing that bothered me was cyberspace, which was hellish to get through every time despite being cool conceptually. It was probably the part of the game that remained the most clunky and unintuitive even as I got used to everything else. Still, it came up infrequently enough that I wasn't particularly bothered.

SHODAN was a really cool antagonist for how little screentime they get, and while the general premise of the game wasn't exactly the most groundbreaking thing out there I do think it was handled very well. Getting to piece things together was cool despite the shoddy voice acting. I also rarely feel as 'cool' as I did while playing this; it speaks volumes for the pacing and progression when I say I constantly felt like I was getting shit done even in the slowest of sections. Well, besides floor 7. Fuck floor 7.

System Shock is archaic in a way that dazzles and amazes me rather than causing my eyes to roll, and I definitely appreciate that. That said, I wouldn't really recommend it to random people unless they already have an affinity for older games, clunk, and truly experimental titles.

"Interesting, Innovative, But Far Too Clunky"

'System Shock: Enhanced Edition' is a re-release of the original title from 1994. While the controls are cleaned up slightly and some visual enhancements were made, the game underneath feels unpolished and is very hard to recommend from a gameplay perspective. However, it is an important game that laid the framework for the Immersive Sim genre.

The gameplay is exceptionally diverse for a game that was released at such an infantile time for the video game industry. There is a variety of systems, and the story is actually told in a fairly entertaining way. There is a large selection of weapons and items to use, and the game is actually fairly scary despite being an older title. However, it is extremely clunky. The general design that is a mix of an FPS and a point-n-click game is very unintuitive, and always felt awkward during my time with it. The menu navigation is by far the worst, with lots of information being trapped behind a UI that is rough to look through. Additionally, the graphics are not very good at all, and the extremely jarring colors and textures hurt my eyes after a bit of playing.

Despite these faults, the game has the groundwork of an immensely influential title. Seeing elements of the Deus Ex and Bioshock games within this title is amazing! However, no matter how influential and important this game is, and how awesome it must have been at its release, it feels terrible to play now. I would Not Recommend checking this game out unless you are extremely patient or are familiar with unorthodox control schemes within computer games. It was super interesting to check out, but I wasn’t keen on finishing it after a few levels.

Final Verdict: 4/10 (Below Average)

This game is awesome. An easy top 5 entry for me and just so many excellent elements and forward thinking ideas despite its age. I played it all the way through after being inspired to give it a shot after mandaloregaming's review. Every now and then I try playing old cult classics and they just don't stick for me, especially early era 3d games that didn't age so well. This game has incredible art direction, great sprites, and animation; citadel station is super well designed and feels thought out - a real blast to explore.

Shodan is such an incredible villain and performance that it really lets me looks past the very poor "we let whoever was in the office that day record the audio for this log" voice acting performances (although to be fair, first game to ever have voice logs at all). You feel her presence throughout the game, and the steady learning of each area, her minions, and the tools you acquire over the journey to fight back really keeps you engaged. While the OST is all over the place, most levels have memorable tracks and great atmosphere. Goofy B horror abounds, an eerie station, freakish mutants and cyborgs roaming the halls, and you got yourself a fun adventure romp.

The game even has heavily customizable difficulty settings. Its crazy to think just how many things it got right, and just how many of those things shine through with the addition of mouse look. I'd recommend this game to everyone.

There are a few things that suck though - mainly cyberspace and pretty bad audio mixing in a few places. My ears do explode whenever there's radiation present.

Final score: Your memo/Your memo

This game gets slept on harder than a hooker at a narcoleptic whorehouse. The atmosphere is great- with some weirdness- the writing is really good, and it's a pretty well-paced game that's fun the entire way through, even though the combat's kind of weak. Main problem- it's really, really, really old, and while the enhanced edition fixed the weird controls, the game's age and first impressions turn people off. Give the game a chance, though, and it's as interesting and deep as a lot of modern games.

Easily one of the most innovative and unique games I have ever played, System Shock proves that even 28 years later it remains a highly immersive and enjoyable experience. Despite hearing numerous statements that the game was like "playing an operating system", I was surprised by how intuitive the game's mechanics and user interface were. There certainly is a learning curve, but I got used to it after about fifteen minutes, and I found the game to be a remarkably rewarding experience. Despite having many elements in common with shooters of the era, the game is endlessly dedicated to immersing you as much as it can via its mechanics. A big part of this is the weaponry, and how different enemies react to other weapons and ammo types. Cyborgs and robots will go down easier with armor-piercing rounds, though traditional ammunition is best used on the mutants. The labyrinthine and nonlinear level design is also fantastic, allowing the player to return to every floor at any time and even requiring backtracking to complete missions, requiring memorization of each of the floors' different rooms to best optimize paths and shortcuts. This gives the player a strong Metroidvania-esque feeling of returning to previously challenging locations with upgraded abilities, giving you a brief power trip in a game otherwise set out to crush you at every turn. While I don't see System Shock as an unfair game by any means, it is certainly outwardly hostile to you at every turn. Everything in this game, from the enemies, the environments, and even your weaponry can turn you into red paste, necessitating a careful approach to every step you take. This is echoed in the game's storytelling, isolated to audio logs (one of the first games to use them!) detailing what exactly happened on Citadel Station before you awoke, and spelling impending doom for those recording. You never meet another human being in this game due to the limitations of the time, so your interactions are solely limited to logs or calls. This lends a tone of utter isolation and dread to the game, and while I wouldn't call it a horror game by any means, System Shock definitely could have been one under a different context. Shodan's mocking speeches to the player are not only eloquent but also performed wonderfully by Terri Brosius, who feels incredibly convincing in her spiteful hatred of humanity and delusions of godhood. The game does a wonderful job of conveying not only its scenario but also smaller details about the world via these logs and it's easy to see why it became a mainstay of the genre. The game's visuals are no slouch either. While they may be seen as incredibly dated nowadays, there simply wasn't a 3D PC game at the time that looked better than System Shock. For example, Doom 2 came out the same year, and while not a bad-looking game by any means, doesn't render environments in nearly the same detail as System Shock. The environments are surprisingly detailed and every tile which makes up the game world even has a name. You'll even find proper 3D objects such as cabinets and test tubes adorning the space. This is paired with a varied, atmospheric, and inventive soundtrack that features futuristic electronic sounds, epic guitar solos, pan flutes, and even good old Nine Inch Nails-inspired grinding industrial. It all adds to an atmosphere that is not only immersive but unique as well and serves the purposes of the game perfectly.

System Shock to this day is a phenomenal game, almost perfectly weaving RPG and adventure game elements into a shooter package and inspiring so many games afterward. Through a combination of immersive gameplay, strong worldbuilding, and a fantastic atmosphere, it still makes for a highly entertaining time even nowadays. Sure, there may be minor flaws, level 3 is brief but hellishly unfun, and cyberspace is a gimmicky mechanic, but these feel so minor in contrast to the game's qualities. Highly recommended.

Its environments feel like an in-between of organic and chaotic/labyrinthine as all the places you visit on each floor feel like a place people used for a reason (research labs, congress rooms, bedrooms, nuclear waste rooms, etc.), also each floor and, in a less pronounced way, each stay delivers its own particular visual design, from the props to the color palette. But they end up feeling repetitive and therefore disorientating. The map adds to this feeling as it is labyrinthine (as any pragmatic building would feel on a map) but helps with some distinctive locations you can use as a reference.
Revival stations take away part of the tension as you can abuse them, also you can save the game at any point. Therefore causing some enemies to feel like no threat, also, the tension fades away when you get to the station all levels have.
Enigmas surrounding your mission, Shodan, the station, etc. solved via text and voice logs, which contributes to the sense of a real place, more specifically a scientific station with a rogue IA, you can perceive the despair of the people talking through those notes and the hate and revenge hunger they have for Shodan. When you visit every level, you can feel its story. After the first one, you already grasp what's going on, but the places you visit tell their story that's deepened by those logs.
Stamina or energy is used in a very clever way. As you need it to run and shoot energy weapons, you run very fast but stamina is a valuable resource you have to manage it properly. As a downside, it's easy to find energy suppliers.
We can see in this game some mechanics that constitute fetishes in nowadays games. Breaking everything for no reason is one of them (logs I talked about before are another one). In this game you can break some things, mainly screens, Shodan face appears in them sometimes, so breaking them works as a catharsis for the hate you feel for Shodan.
Your mission makes you go forth and back, look for specific items or clues to get to a place, or have the ability to do something you couldn't before. You have to revisit some places, understand what a place was used for to get the idea. You feel like Shodan is watching every step you make, being her will what makes you go one or another place.

an insane psychotic trip through retrofuturistic hackerman renditions of cyberhell mixed with absolutely bonkers SFX and music… and a goddess-empress trans (?) AI antagonist. the gameplay is surprisingly solid by contemporary standards for something which appears superficially to be as outdated as a game can get. but it’s just an FPS metroidvania, in essence. combat can be obnoxious and movement can be weird but it's fine the overwhelming majority of the time.

if i hear one more person say "it's like an OS" or "it's like controlling a tank" im going to stab myself with a Laser Rapier™.

The highly influential, but commercially unsuccessful inspiration for some of the best video game franchises of all time. Now with mouse look, making it almost as easy to pick up and play as the sequel. It takes less than a minute to beat a mutant to death with a lead pipe, what's not to like?
In all seriousness, this game is pretty good. It probably has the highest enemy and weapon variety out of every game that ends in -shock. The levels are also a thing of beauty, clearly designed more like a realistic living space than a video game level. I'm also a fan of the music, which is simply excellent and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that industrial is the definitive music genre for cyberpunk settings.
The difficulty is also highly customizable, as an example, you can set story to 0 and never have to listen to an audiolog or find a password ever again. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's convenient.
My closing thought is that I suggest people try it, it's really not as hard to play as it looks.

Cyber Punk + Space Horror + IA gostosa

Imprevisível e desconcertante ao extremo. Da tensão pelos menus e cenários claustrofóbicos, até o terror por uma ameaça inisível que sempre está presente do início ao final, System Shock é um jogo sobre como o quão conturbada e conflituosa é a nossa relação com o plástico e o metal.

Ao mesmo tempo há esse charme nostálgico em System Shock que o torna tão singular e gostoso de se jogar. Mesmo que estejamos falando da versão remasterizada na qual os controles são (absurdamente) melhorados, ainda há esse clunky do original prazeroso de se interagir, e que consegue tornar System Shock uma delícia de se jogar.

System Shock é similar ao que um vinho é, na medida em que é um excelente Survival Horror.

Além disso: se não tem como empilhar caixas, então não é Immersive sim

Visualshock! Soundshock! System Shock! Wait... Wait no, that doesn't sound quite right...

I have no idea why I like System Shock. It's so unflatteringly of its time, so oppressively obtuse, so nakedly cruel that I should have been repulsed as soon as I awoke on Citadel Station. Instead, I was hooked from the moment I finished watching the intro sequence, which is quite possibly one of my favorite opening cinematics in gaming. Easily in the top ten.

Before I get too deep into my review, I'm going to suggest you ditch it entirely and instead watch MandaloreGaming's excellent dive into System Shock: Enhanced Edition. I share a lot of the same opinions on the game but couldn't possibly express them as eloquently as he does. One point of his that I keep coming back to is how the original System Shock controls like it's played on a graphing calculator, and I will admit that if I had to navigate the game using whatever weird pully and lever system it had in place, I probably would have bounced off it pretty quickly. Thankfully, the Enhanced Edition lets you play System Shock like a proper video game, and that makes fighting through SHODAN's bowels more manageable, but no less dangerous than it was in 1994. In fact, the Enhanced Edition of the game provides a ton of options to tweak System Shock to your liking. You can shut a ton of pointless HUD elements off if you want, though I couldn't bring myself to do that. Chi Waves don't really mean anything mechanically, but it's dumb and weird and perfectly suits the whole hackerman aesthetic the game embodies. I couldn't bring myself to mutilate the HUD despite compromising on how the game controls, nor could I scale back on the story, or difficulty. This is all to say that I feel I still had a pretty authentic experience with the game despite the more modern control scheme.

When not being aggressively archaic, System Shock is aggressively... aggressive. Citadel Station is an incredibly hostile environment, as it should be since you're essentially running through the physical form of the game's villain, SHODAN. Originally the station's AI, SHODAN had her ethical constraints removed and is now trying to become a God, one who happens to enjoy dabbling in unethical science experiments and who would like to drill a hole in the Earth. She might even get a little help with that if you're not being careful. You pose the only threat to SHODAN and her plans, and in response she's turned all of Citadel Station against you. Its security systems, its mutated inhabitants, even its network... There is no single part of the station that isn't hostile towards you. System Shock can be downright mean, it's almost like the game doesn't want you to beat it, and SHODAN's constant mocking of your efforts really helps sell you on the sense that it's you versus the game. I shouldn't love something so hellbent on making me have a bad time, but the oppressive difficulty of System Shock also comes with a profound sense of gratification when you overcome it, even if many of these victories are minor and far between. Maybe it also helps that I like when SHODAN calls me an insect, but I'm a sad loser and you all knew that about me already.

I also adore the audio logs in this game. The acting is not great, but that makes for a fun contrast with Terri Brosius' performance as SHODAN. There's also a lot of inconsistencies with what is being spoken and what appears in text, which helps create this sense of creeping madness as you can't fully trust what you hear and what you see. Of course it's also (extremely) possible this is just the result of some miscommunication during development, or there being different scripts that went out to programmers and voice talent. It's all part of the charm regardless.

Every single part of System Shock is weird, pointless, clumsy, obtuse, or downright unfair. It probably shouldn't all come together as well as it does, and it definitely shouldn't appeal to me. I'm sure I have a few dozen reviews out there complaining about mechanics or design flaws that are present here, and yet... I kinda love System Shock. I love how it beats me down, how it puts its heel on my neck, calls me a worm, and deafens me with its "music". Maybe I'm just a sucker for abuse, because the only reason this isn't a perfect 5/5 is because it didn't hurt me enough. SHODAN should've bricked my hard drive after sending my browser history to my friends and family, only then would System Shock be considered a true masterpiece, but I still think it's an incredible game regardless. It is also hard for me to recommend playing it, but if you're half the masochist I am, you should definitely stick to the Enhanced Edition or wait for Nightdive's remake to drop, assuming that's still happening.