Everything looks either harsh or bland, and you can’t blame that on age. While the visual fidelity is pretty great compared to other first person games at the time, the color palette and backgrounds are just hard to look at. That’s the only part of the reason why the game has aged like milk.įirstly, this game looks pretty rough.

From Amnesia, Dead Space, Deus Ex, Portal, Alien: Isolation, Bioshock(duh) to even Doom 3 and Gears of War, all of these games and many more have been significantly influenced by System Shock. Spooky atmosphere and horror elements in an FPS go back as far as Doom, but System Shock mastered the concepts, proving that a game can give you a gun and the heebejeebies without playing jump scares like a broken, screechy record. Ever play an atmospheric shooter that told it’s story through environment and audio logs? That sounds like every shooter made after Bioshock(which is a spiritual sequel to System Shock), but the practice started started here.

It’s difficult to overstate how historically important System Shock is.

System shock enhanced edition