With all of the station’s workers either being killed or succumbing to the virus on board, much of the game’s story is doled out through audio logs left behind by the hopeless or resolute hopeful as the station falls to the rule of SHODAN, the megalomaniac artificial intelligence that your character is coerced into unshackling from its ethical restraints in the game’s opening scene. Like so many of the immersive sim worlds that have drawn inspiration from System Shock’s setting, it’s a tremendously realised backdrop for what is a rich sci-fi thriller.
The entirety of the game takes place aboard nine levels of The Citadel, a lighthouse-class space station. While their work on System Shock is admirable, it’s the game’s genre-kickstarting systems and atmosphere that do the heavy lifting here. Nightdive Studios has long had their nose to the grindstone doing God’s work, putting their everything into preserving and recreating the essence of classic games that might, without a compatibility bump for modern platforms, be lost to time before long. Were it not for System Shock, the existence of classics like BioShock, Half-Life and Prey would all be in doubt. Not only did it spawn a masterful sequel, it’s the grandfather of intelligent design and emergent gameplay in shooters. It wasn’t quite the mainstream draw that Doom was to my violence-addled five year-old mind and, as such, it never became a touchstone for me.
It introduced features that would instantly become de rigueur, changing the shooter landscape forever after its inception. System Shock might arguably earn its place on a hypothetical Mt.
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