Episode 35: System Shock

Retro Spectives

In 1994 the immersive sim genre was born with the release of System Shock. Developed by Looking Glass Technologies, it set the standard for gameplay and story structures for future games in the genre such as Thief, Deus Ex, Bioshock or Prey.
As an unnamed hacker, you awake on a space station after a long cryosleep only to find the halls littered with bodies and the walls smeared with blood.

So begins your journey on board the Citadel Space Station, as you try to thwart the evil Shodan and piece together what exactly happened in the 6 months that you were asleep.

But for all its innovation more than 25 years ago, is System Shock still a fun game to play today? Its User Interface has more in common with a flight sim than a first person shooter. Enemy hitboxes are literal rectangular boxes that extend far beyond their model. And while the game is in first person, it requires you to constantly switch into point and click adventure mode to interact with the world.
Does System Shock do the immersive sim genre proud, or does the experience come across as outdated and clunky?

On this episode, we discuss:

• How well does System Shock handle worldbuilding? Do its terse audio logs add to the gameworld, or do they leave it feeling lifeless and gamey?
• How enjoyable are its shooting mechanics? Is it wrong to compare System Shock to a game like Doom?
• Is the user interface hot garbage that deserves to be burned to the ground, or does it secretly give the player greater control over its economy of information?

In order to answer these questions, Pat and James are joined by special guest Nick from the Salt City Gamescast who was very excited to come along to argue, discuss and complain about the game!

Has System Shock stood the test of time? Tune in to find out!

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Is System Shock your favourite game in the immersive sim genre? Do you unironically like the music? Is the UI really that bad? We’d love to hear what you think, good or bad, and maybe even get into a deeper discussion with you - let us know your thoughts on our community discord server!