You awake in a cold and sterile laboratory, your brain whirring in strange and unsettling ways. A light in the corner rhythmically flickers, the room eerily quiet. There are no medical staff to congratulate you, nor cops to arrest you. You awkwardly fumble around the room, until you find the storage closet with your belongings. Feeling uneasy, you hesitate a second before grabbing a discarded lead pipe as well - you’re probably being silly, but better to grab it, just in case. You turn on your PDA, and an email alert noise sounds almost immediately.
““Listen to me very carefully. Something has gone terribly wrong on Citadel Station…””
It's a strange thing to come face to face with one of the ancestors of gaming history. Many of my favourite games - including Deus Ex, Bioshock 2, and Prey - couldn’t have existed without System Shock. It laid the foundation for so many mechanics that have become staples of the immersive sim genre, expanding greatly on the template provided by Ultima Underworld. And it did all that less than a year after the release of Doom.
I started my play-through of System Shock, then, filled with a kind of trepidation. I always strive towards giving honest and unabashed criticism, but the legacy of this game weighed heavily upon me. And while its sequel has received the lion’s share of praise, there is a small and devoted sect of players who hold the original up as the true masterpiece.
My first impressions of the game were ones of extreme disorientation. The UI and control scheme are hard to come to terms with at first (more on this later). But as I began to poke my way around the station, the overwhelming feeling I had was one of comforting familiarity.
I scrounged through cupboards for supplies, found augmentations for my brain and body, and hit enemies with a lead pipe. There are stupid wire puzzles, ammunition is scarce and I ended up with a hundred stamina buffs that I never used. Most remarkable in its similarities to modern immersive sims is in how exactly the story unfolds. The most valuable thing you find around the station are the fragmented audio logs that detail what’s been happening in the past 6 months that you were in cryo-sleep.
As you make your way around Citadel Station you might stumble upon an account of a desperate last stand, surrounded by blood smeared walls and headless corpses. A couple of minutes later you’ll hear an engineer’s grumbling about a malfunctioning door. It's a scattered and confused puzzle, but one you gradually put together as you slowly collect it, piece by piece. Instead of having the story yelled at you through cutscenes, you dynamically uncover it, and it’s incredibly satisfying to investigate all the nooks and crannies.
For all that it brings the station to life, however, there is a sense of rawness to these logs, unlike in something like Bioshock or Prey. Where later games have taken delight in assassin mini-games and romantic subplots, System Shock is very focused on the rise of SHODAN and the gradual unravelling of the station, not the people who lived in it.
Part of the problem is the pure functionality of the logs as gameplay devices. System Shock has no quest log, and certainly doesn’t have a shiny objective marker telling you which way to go. You have to rely entirely on your emails and audio logs to direct you to your next objective. And you best be paying attention - Citadel Station is a sprawling labyrinth that stretches over 9 floors, and by the end of the game you’ll have transitioned between levels many times. This mostly leads to an incredibly immersive experience. You have to be paying attention at all times, otherwise you’ll be completely lost as to what to do next. If you’re not paying attention, you might do what I did and destroy Earth by accident.
There are times where directions feel a little vague, like the location of the tool you need to repair a broken relay. Other times, you will find ‘clues’ that are a little on the nose - At one point you find an order from SHODAN to her cyborg buddies explaining the three sequential steps that need to be taken to thwart her evil plan. Overall though, this sort of hands off approach to objectives is brilliant, and something I wish modern games would explore more.
There are many games you can play on autopilot, either mindlessly grinding away, or following the laser thin path that’s been narrowly laid out for you. Even games like Prey have helpful markers and tidily track your ‘quests’ so you don’t have to. I think there’s something to be said for having this all be messy and confused, because it forces you to pay attention. It really feels like you’re in the world when you need to figure out how to join the dots yourself.
Before you can master the world, however, you have to learn how to control the hacker. And that’s a task far more significant than you might think. There are two modes of control in System Shock. The first is a typical first person control scheme, with WASD to move and the mouse moving your camera around. The second is activated by pressing the ‘e’ key, which allows you to interact with items in the world and your inventory, with the mouse now moving a cursor around the screen. Learning how to efficiently swap between these modes is essential, as you’re often forced to do it mid-combat to reload or change weapons.
In addition to swapping control schemes, you’ve got to come to grips with the cumbersome user interface. System Shock happily contains every single piece of information you could possibly want on your viewscreen, hidden behind 14 different tabs, with further submenus and multiple info displays. In the process of trying to get your minimap up you’ll swap ammo types, accidentally activate your rear view cameras (yes, it's a real thing), and nearly activate a battery before achieving your goal.
If anything is going to turn new players away, it's this. We’ve become so accustomed to minimalist user interfaces, and naturalistic controls in first person games that it feels like a return to banging rocks together. Before you find the fullscreen button, the viewscreen only takes up half of your screen real estate - but look, here’s a corner dedicated to a heart rate monitor! You can’t even press a button to throw your grenades, you’ve got to manually prime them and awkwardly click when you want them to go.
In time, however, I grew to love the UI and control scheme both. What it came down to was a shift in perception. You’re not just controlling a person, you’re piloting a mech. The Hacker has just had incredibly sophisticated technology installed into his brain, so complicated it took 6 months to be properly integrated. Once you emerge from cryo-sleep, it’s going to take some time to adjust to the new way in which you perceive the world.
In the exact same way I had to learn how to control my submarine in Archimedean Dynasty, relying on various sensors to navigate the environment, I had to learn how to control the hacker. It's a frustrating process at first, but eventually it becomes second nature. The trick is that all the information you need is there, waiting at your fingertips - you just need to know where to look.
There aren’t 10 different menu ‘pause’ screens segmenting your inventory, your PDA and your map - it's all there, on one screen. There is an economy of information here, with most of what you need being one click away. The two multi-functional displays in the bottom corners let you contextually determine what’s most important at a given time - although I had them on my weapon’s ammo count and the minimap most of the time.
The swapping between first person and cursor mode has a very tactile feel to it. You physically drop items into your inventory, press switches and generally manage your resources in cursor mode. You’re not a vacuum cleaner, hoovering everything up - you take these actions with care and precision. You can’t sprint around System Shock, slamming hotkeys and taking names - it's a quieter, more deliberate experience.
Unfortunately, at some stage you’ve got to fight the bad guys. And this is where the game takes a turn for the worse. Citadel Station is crawling with mutants and cyborgs, both of which promise a quick and painful death if you let them get the drop on you. The most dangerous ones hitscan you, and even those with projectiles are tough to dodge in the narrow corridors with the roller skates that the Hack uses instead of shoes.
There are few immersive sims with good combat - it's almost an unfortunate staple of the genre at this point. But System Shock is certainly the worst implementation of it I’ve ever seen. While the level design does well to facilitate exploration, it turns combat into a series of death traps that you avoid with janky strategies rather than anything approaching fun.
With no way to dodge enemy hitscan attacks, I ended up doing this constant dance of leaning and edging around corners, shooting the corners of enemy’s hitboxes. Those hitboxes are literal rectangles, extending far beyond their models. The cyborgs slowly shamble towards you, as you backup a centimetre at a time, taking potshots the whole way. The alternative is to stand in the open and die.
The enemies give you something to do with your resources, at least. The real ‘combat’ challenge in System Shock is managing what weapon, and what ammunition type, to use against each enemy. It generally boils down to different weapons being good against either biological mutants or robots, and then using whichever weapon you’ve got excessive ammo for. If things are getting grim you can always fall back on using an energy weapon and making round trips to the recharge station on a given floor.
When I first started playing I was extremely worried about getting through the game, so tough was the combat. You’re given basically nothing to work with early on, but eventually gun types become plentiful enough that you can usually find one with ammunition. The real saving grace is the laser rapier though, a melee weapon that makes a lot of the rest of your arsenal redundant. It also neatly deals with your ammunition issues, only chipping into your energy reserves.
Once you’ve solved the minor puzzle that the resource management poses, you're only left with the plodding and repetitive gunplay. The real catch is that there’s no alternative to getting through the station except to carefully kill everything in your way. There’s no stealth, or hacking, or alternate routes, or levelling up powers to engage with these situations in diverse and interesting ways. It boils down to shooting or stabbing the hordes in front of you, one at a time. You deal with every single enemy in exactly the same way - and no, swapping to armour piercing rounds every now and then doesn’t do much to liven up the experience.
Combat encounters in these kind of games should be about applying the right tool for the job. In System Shock that tool is always a gun and the job is always shooting monsters and cyborgs at the corner of their hitbox. There’s no creativity and no momentum, just an endless grind.
It's a pity, because System Shock goes a long way to signifying a survival horror atmosphere through its graphics. The dimly lit maintenance section and the reactor core are claustrophobic nightmares, as you listen to the beeps and groans of enemies all around you. The cramped corridors feel apt for the industrial sections of the station, not meant to be comfortably lived in.
The more plush areas come across as a little fake in comparison. The medical area and executive suite should feel decadent and comfortable, but the same old level design re-textured isn’t enough to sell that illusion. While I can believe that these are different areas of the station, the overall architecture remains uniform except for when it opens up in the flight deck.
The music of System Shock felt completely out of place. I was hoping for a soundtrack akin to Quake or Thief’s, something subtle and atmospheric to underline the terror the hacker must be feeling as he creeps around the haunted ruins of the station. Instead we get MIDI electronic garbage, which I immediately muted every single time I had to load a quick save. I think I could tolerate this music in a racing game, but here it actively detracts from the atmosphere. About the only track that fit was the upbeat elevator music, which acted as a dark joke when you opened the door to 15 mutants trying to kill you on level 2.
I really enjoyed my time playing System Shock. I appreciated learning about it from a historical standpoint, but it was more than something so academic. Citadel Station is a wonderful place to explore, and uncovering the story is nearly as enjoyable as in modern immersive sims. I think the emphasis on limited hand holding is something sorely missing from modern titles, and probably one of the reasons why Dark Souls made such a dramatic impact on the gaming scene when it released.
It stands as a very difficult title to recommend to others though. Not only do you have to deal with the intensive learning experience of just controlling your character, but you also have to slog through the awful combat. And while I think it's worth persevering through the bad parts to experience its world, the same isn’t true of everyone. The problem ultimately isn’t the world, or how you interact with it, but the obstacles the game places in your path.
If you’ve never played an immersive sim before, System Shock does not make a good starting point. It's too obtuse and strange, with no soft edges to help lead you in. But for veterans it offers a world well worth exploring, and a story that’s just as captivating as it was back in 1994.
For a more…diverse range of opinions on whether System Shock has truly stood the test of time, listen to our in depth podcast episode on it!
