Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade described System Shock 2 as "giving me nightmares, while I was awake." Is it truly that scary?

most people would agree that it can crawl under your skin.

The game has a tense atmosphere. You could be juggling your inventory and suddenly you hear a sad and hollow voice behind you saying "I'm sorry" just before you are struck in the back and half you HP is gone. The first time you get psychically contacted by a hive mind completely unnerved me ("What is a drop of rain..."). There are also a few audio logs that always makes my skin crawl (like a doctor describing a clinically dead person talking to a nurse, or the recording of a distress signal from Tau Ceti).

I think the player vulnerability to the environment and all forms of enemies, the often scarce resources and excellent sound design is why so many players remember this as a horror game. I still stand by my previous opinion that the lack of consequence free and strategically placed checkpoints is what prevents the game from becoming not scary like modern games do. Checkpoints are almost always spoilers telling you when to relax and when to get ready for a tough fight.

I bought System Shock 2 last year and I've been playing it on and off. It seems to be a great game, so far, but I guess I got a little disappointed by all the hype around it. To be honest, I don't think it is as amazing and game-changing as people usually say. Having said that, I'm having a blast, it's a pretty neat game, and more than worth its price.

I grew up watching horror movies (my parents didn't care what we watched on TV and never sent us to bed early, so I gobbled up all I could), watched pretty much everything there is to watch, in that genre, and I must say I may have gotten desensitized to horror in media. It entertains me, and I sure as hell enjoy a well-made and convincingly portrayed horror ambiance and aesthetic, but I don't get scared in the least for more than 15 years. I tend to look for disturbing media, rather than supposedly scary. Things that mess with your head. System Shock 2, so far, has been excelling at that. It's not so much scary, as it is tension-inducing. There's a constant stressful feeling of dread and loneliness, your only company being the disturbing audio-logs and the ever-present, orwellian voice of SHODAN.

In games like this one, I guess the horror depends on your play style and choices, the experience is open-ended enough for some people to just go through it as if it was a shooter, others may opt for the RPG aspect of it, and yet others will focus on the managerial/survival perspective, so, not everyone will feel the same thing while playing it. And that's its major accomplishment: it manages to provide a different experience to different types of players. That's something most games that are stuck to a genre fail to deliver. Amnesia is supposed to be a scary game, that's its redeeming quality, if it fails to connect with the players on that level -- as it sure did fail with me, I didn't find it scary in the least, just plain boring --, there's not much to it, to keep people engaged and playing. System Shock 2, on the other hand, has something for everyone, no matter what your gaming background.

I agree with this. It's more tense than scary, although parts of it are scary.

Hybrids are a good enemy, and they're scary at first, but by the time you've killed 20-30 of them, they're not scary anymore.

I just started SS2 this month and surprisingly has a lot of shock value. I didn't expect explosions. I thought all explosions on spacecraft were always fatal.

The first monster I met was suddenly in your face and gave me serious creeps.

Great to know you're enjoying it! If you're liking it so far, let's just say you're in for a hell of a ride.

Happy gaming! :)

Well, an explosion that ruptured the outer hull would cause a nasty depressurization, but a big space ship would have bulkheads like big naval ships have today. In the case of a breach you close the bulkheads and isolate the hole. That's why you have to run to get past the bulkhead before it closes. Since no one has ever yet built a space ship that big, we can't say for sure that's the way it would work, but it's a reasonable presumption.

there are also the shields that kick in if the hull is breached - weak ones that are only temporary on von Braun, and strong ones (military grade?) on Rickenbacker (remember, the Rickenbacker has a hole size of a small building in its belly, and the shield that is preventing a total decompression seems to be holding indefinitely).

Well, the key words you use here are you bought it last year. Take it in the context of when it was released; circa-1999.