Here and there, I come across a game on this 1001 list that I know is important in some fashion but don't know why. System Shock 2 is the next example of such a game. A first-person sci-fi horror RPG of some sort, we are a soldier aboard a spaceship with a few problems in the crew department - namely that the crew aren't exactly all here anymore...
Let's see how much of this mystery we can uncover.
Fun Times
After some blurry shaky-cam newsreel footage to set the scene (this is the future, spaceships are great), we're brought to a city street in front of the UNN recruitment centre, where we'll go through a bit of training and character creation.
There are a whole load of choices between three things here - three branches of the UNN to decide whether you are a soldier, a hacker or a psionic special agent, each of those leading to three sub-decisions where you learn how you trained to be where you are today.
The idea of deciding upon your life choices by walking through one of three identical doors down one of three identical corridors three or more times is a little silly, but hey, you can practice the movement controls, I guess. I hear they weren't the standard WASD when System Shock 2 launched, but this version I'm playing through Steam was ready to go with controls that make sense. Also comes with ultrawide monitor support. Fine by me.
Luckily for us, we were in hibernation while the shit hit the fan on our ship, but we do reawaken with no memory, as is typical it seems. But here we are, in System Shock 2 proper, in all it's blocky, first-person glory. The character models are rather sparse, aren't they? Good job we're not looking at ourselves very often.
What you will be looking at are a few inventory screens and additional pop-up windows. Bodies and boxes are both containers to hold items in this game, and searching, stealing and using all manner of objects will become second nature to you through your travels.
Weapons, healing items, stat boosts and more will be hoovered up with a right-click. In fact, that right mouse button does a fair bit of work. Think of it as the hit things gently button, compared to the left mouse button just hitting things.
The ship is falling apart to some extent in this introduction. A fellow survivor, we assume, is shouting orders at us so that we can meet up and deal with the problems at hand, but I have to get there first, and there's a locked door in the way.
With a brainy enough character, or with the right tools, you can hack your way through door locks like this one, but often there are environmental clues to help spell it out for you, in the form of audio recordings or text messages.
It's very reminiscent of the Deus Ex titles, and games where multiple solutions to the same problem can be found. With three different character types going through the game, you'd need to make sure they all had a chance of making it past each obstacle.
A brief glimpse of things to come - some kind of zombie infestation, perhaps - before we're presented with another locked door, this time with a different environmental puzzle. It's batteries are drained, and there just so happens to be a charger on the other side of the room. Juice it up - along with everything else that needs energy in your inventory, like laser weapons - and you're good to go.
The ship opens up from here. There is still a small hub for last minute stat alterations, providing you can afford them, but you can think of this point as the start of your mission, so to speak. You're out of the immediate danger of the ship exploding in your face, but you've yet to face the horrors that have already introduced themselves to the crew.
Frustrations
I don't know what the biggest problem I was faced with actually was here. Was the game or my gameplaying environment too dark for me to see what was going on? Were the animations so weird looking in first-person that I couldn't accurately determine who was being hit or not? Was the fact that I was taking screenshots at the same time distracting me from my performance, having to cover the entire keyboard with a single hand while trying to fend off monsters?
I don't know, but I knew that my trips through the training options would serve me well - should I find something to restore health, put it in my inventory, use it from the inventory... all while avoiding any nasty surprises.
Corridors looked menacing in the contrasting light and I was being bombarded by audio cues. Music was thumping, my radio advisor was yelling at me, monsters were groaning and alarms were blaring. The last one I could have dealt with had I been quicker - a security camera spotted me and raised the alarm, but I had a small window to destroy it before it did. A jump and a swing of my wrench did the trick, but too late to help me out.
One by one, zombies descended on my position, huddled in the corner of the corridor until the timer ran out. Sometimes they got stuck on the scenery but usually they arrived, weapon in hand and violence on the mind.
I did not survive.
Final Word
And so my time with System Shock 2 was pretty brief. I was playing as a nerdy engineery-hackery type character, with a background in scuffles, rather than shooting, but I was also playing on the easiest difficulty and got my skulled bashed in all the same.
The controls weren't entirely to blame. Tabbing into and out of an inventory window isn't a major problem, because you can still interact with the environment to some degree when in that view mode. The major problem was swinging and missing my target on account of awkward first-person animations. Putting myself right in front of a security camera in a well-lit corridor wasn't too smart either.
System Shock 2 is a game where exploration is as important as extermination, maybe even more so. Wandering around the ship picking up everything that isn't bolted to the bulkheads will serve you as well, if not much better than well-placed shots to the face of any opposition, but I never got the chance to really do that.
While writing this up, I've had a YouTube video playing that presents the game as a three-hour movie. All I've seen is darkness, and all I've heard is monkeys, and I can't tell you why either of those is the case.
I've intrigued myself by noticing that right now, so I'll probably go back and watch it properly, because it'll be easier than the easy difficulty, apparently.
It's a shame, in a way, because I would like to have explored this game more. It looks great (cutscenes aside), and while it tells its story through audio logs and what I can only assume are post-hibernation hallucinations, it feels like it has a deep story that you need to unravel over time.
My first run was disastrous then. I might give it a second, obviously hoping to get further. After that, I'll leave it to the experts and watch them instead.
If you like this genre or similar games, System Shock 2 can still offer something worth looking into. It seems quite a few titles down the line were inspired by it, so you might as well have a look at what planted ideas into various developers' heads.
Fun Facts
Pencil and paper RPGs are no strangers to video game developers looking for inspiration, and this time it was the Traveller system that caught their eye, influencing the character background decisions at the very start of the game.
System Shock 2, developed by Irrational Games, Looking Glass Studios, first released in 1999.
Version played: PC, 2013.