The studio behind the remake, Nightdive Studios, can never rebottle this lightening: that (space)ship has sailed. Player choice, enemy efficacy, powers, weapons, and systems all danced around each other – this ballet of tiny moving parts – to create a piece of interactive genius that was greater than the sum of its parts. Unlike those games, though, Looking Glass pumped all of its research and development budget into emergent systems an intricate web of complementary mechanics that played into the game’s open-ended level design. Have you ever been in a more deadly greenhouse?įrom here, you’re pushed like a rat in a science experiment into the maze-like, claustrophobic spaceship that was – once upon a time – inspired by iD games like Doom or Wolfenstein. Giger, and you’ll have a taste of what to expect. Think of the start of The Matrix if it was directed by David Cronenberg, or Alice in Wonderland via H.R. Each of these games toyed with genre convention to deliver something markedly different from System Shock… yet neither of them would exist without Looking Glass Studios’ masterful debut.Īs a remake, the 2022 version of the game fires on all the same cylinders that made the original so special: the game kicks off with a bang, with you – as an unnamed hacker – immidiately biting off more than you can chew and being forced into a dangerous world of rebellious AI, murderous mutants, and science gone mad. Glen Schofield gleefully watching on as one million Isaac Clarkes shot off countless alien limbs, Ken Levine purred as one million Booker DeWitts found one million lighthouses and predicted one million plot twists. Both helped usher the genre away from survival horror, and more towards action horror. Visceral and Dead Space shunted the genre into the hands of Call of Duty players. Ken Levine and his action/horror splice of genres in BioShock stole System Shock’s thunder, and morphed the entire genre into its own image. Games that came along later, were available on more platforms, and appealed more to a generation of game-players on Twitter and social media platforms, redefined survival horror. Hello, inventory Tetris!īut it’s likely a part of games history that’s lost on a lot of people. System Shock, and its direct sequel, defined the horror genre and – to a degree – how we tell stories in games.

We wouldn’t have Dead Space – and, in fact, it’s Dead Space that’s the most notable in this list, because Visceral’s body-horror masterpiece was initially conceived as a System Shock sequel. Without System Shock, we wouldn’t have Prey.

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