System Shock: Enhanced Edition

If you stopped by and thought "Ah theses screenshots look like DOOM !", you would be wrong, this game is the opposite of Doom and Quake, you don't run everywhere, dashing, shooting every monster no. This is a psychological dungeon crawler, you walk along corridors, praying for a safe encounter, this is a game where you have to think before heading toward the danger. I am currently playing it, didn't finished the story yet but it's already my favorite Narrative shooter if I can call it like that. System Shock built all the basics every First Person RPG's successors followed after it: Narration by logs, ambience, mapping, competences and inventory. Everything is here long before Half-Life, Bioshock, Prey, Dishonored. My only regret with this game is that I didn't discovered it 31 years ago... But it's never too late to dive into this Enhanced Edition. I still have to warn you, you will feel different after this experience. 5/5 - Review 16 of July 2025

This was my first time playing this game, and I went in completely blind. It also happens to be the oldest game I've ever played, so I was apprehensive going in after seeing some reviews talk about how much the game has aged.

Mandalore was right

... because the infamous 50% screen radius only serves its purpose with the pipe and the rapier, and if you press 2 and you see the whole screen before you, at least from the moment you reach Maintenance, if you did not drop the stungun you set it to max and stun the three or four rays you will see yourself saying hello to them while you come and go through the game, after that, choosing how to kill every single enemy seems to be... an interesting experience, and not only because of the 100% screen. Nothing more to say, but this: the game is supposedly not an imm-sim, but it has not also its elements (with an awful leaning physics that forces you to play slow), and behind a lot of the graphics and pixels, it is an experiment on an imm-sim, and if you are sometimes in the mood, the fact that the press buttons are very easy to miss should make you kind of smile, and you will learn that this game has a lot of magic that the remake does not. My keybinds: WASD. Q and E for leaning, X for negate leaning, Ctrl for crouch, V for lie down (jump and you will stand up) and Shift for run. R for reload. F for mouse freelook / screen movement, useful also for cyberspace (drill / pulser). Tab for fast pick up. Thank god for this option. G grenades list and H for attack with the one you choose. Y for patch list and U for apply patch. B for boots. My cyberspace keys are SZXC, A and D. You can cheat if you do not know how to do the wire puzzles, save, apply a logic probe, see the result, then reload.

1. Best Game Story EVER... The intro cutscene is SHOCKingly enthralling, even now - never mind for 1994. As a superfan once said... "You do a cut-and-paste job on the AI and everything goes pear-shaped... Shodan has gone completely insane making HAL look like a grumpy lollypop lady." That's the thing - hundreds of people have died in the most horrible manner - and it's YOUR fault. Humanity is about to become extinct - and it's YOUR fault. 2. Best Baddie EVER... Shodan taunts you, Shodan threatens you, Shodan tells you she knows what you're up to... hell, She even invites you to a party if you inadvertently destroy the Earth! No other endgame boss has ever been like this, and it's still rare to find any of these tension-raising devices these days. 3. Best Tech Advance EVER... This was the first six degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) first person shooter ever made. Commonly perceived reality has three rotational components (look up/down, look left/right, and roll left/right) and three translational components (x and y positions on a 2D map, and a z position for the vertical position of your head). By being the first to add a Lean Left/Right and Prone/Crouch/Stand commands Looking Glass gave us the first true 6DOF FPS. 4. Best Exposition EVER... The audio logs are a stroke of pure utter genius. To listen to the pain & suffering of people who've just seen their best friend killed or transformed into some kind of monster (all while you're are exploring or fighting) is possibly System Shock's greatest gift to posterity. 5. Most Squeamish Moment EVER... I don't want to post any serious spoilers, but at one point you have to go searching for someone's severed head - on a space station composed of nine levels full of body parts!!! I had five more but I ran out of space :)