GWJ Action Game Club 24Q4: System Shock

Thanks to everyone who participated in the 24Q4 voting session of the GWJ Action Game Club. A winner has been declared, and it's an apt choice for the upcoming spooky season:

System Shock

We'll be allowing either the modern 2023 remake of System Shock, or the original 1994 release. HowLongToBeat says the remake should take about 16 hours to beat, and 31 hours for a 100% completion.

IsThereAnyDeal shows it currently on sale for $18 from Fanatical (Steam key) for the next 2 days.

Finished:
gewy
kstress71

Playing:
merphle
AUs_TBirD
Sundown
iaintgotnopants

I'm definitely in on this one! Having played through the "Enhanced Edition" for the original last year, I can't wait to see how they reimplemented these environments and enemies.

kstress71 wrote:

I'm definitely in on this one! Having played through the "Enhanced Edition" for the original last year, I can't wait to see how they reimplemented these environments and enemies.

Excellent! I'm also hoping to get through this one - I just bought & installed the remake, so no excuses! I played maybe an hour of the original way-back-when before chickening out.

kstress71 wrote:

I'm definitely in on this one! Having played through the "Enhanced Edition" for the original last year, I can't wait to see how they reimplemented these environments and enemies.

It is such a trip going through the environments in the remake if you're familiar with them in the original. System Shock games have some of the best "this feels like a place, not a game level" in all of gaming. Being in those places in the remake is like returning to a city you know well but haven't been to in 20 years, where all the stores have changed and stuff has been torn down and rebuilt, but you still get the strong "I know where I am" feeling and navigate by memory.

I'm not even playing in your club, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna miss out on people talking System Shock on this board. I made a System Shock games catch-all last year and HOPEFULLY sometime soon there'll be System Shock 2 Enhanced news to talk about...

You're certainly welcome to join us if you'd like to play through it again. I'll even make sure to include your asterisks in the club member list.

Obviously I'm in.
Played about 2 hours of the remake upon release and really liked it, but.....everything else happened! I've been intending to return and dive in deep ever since.

Only ever played less than an hour of the original about 2 decades after release. I think the archaic interface was the main reason I never continued.

I might be in, but I want to finish CrossCode first (which I'll get back to once I'm done with Octopath Traveler 2). I'll be keeping an eye on sales. I'm also someone who's never played any system shock game (although I played a couple of the bioshock games). I have the original game and the enhanced version already in my steam library for some reason, but the complaints I see around the original game were around the UI, so the remake might be the better move here for a first time play.

Definitely in for this, but I'll probably wait until it's on sale. Gotta clear a few things off my pile first.

I have a history with the original System Shock. For a while, I considered it part of my Holy Trinity of favorite games of all time along with Star Control 2 and Planescape: Torment. I've since given up ranking my all time favorite games since it's just too hard to compare across different technological eras and stages in my life. Certainly if I played the original version now, I'd struggle with the UI.

I must have gone through it 2-3 times during my freshman year of college. Like Legion, the OG Citadel Station (not the Mass Effect wannabe) felt real to me. There was a period, possibly lasting into the early 2000's, where if you had dropped me into a real life version, I'm convinced I could have easily found my way around from top to bottom.

My memory has faded a bit now, for sure. But I look forward to seeing how much of it comes back to me.

Should it hit a sale or the PS Plus catalog, I'll dip a toe in out of respect to the greater genre of Immersive Sims, but otherwise I'll just be keeping an eye on the thread.

gewy wrote:

Definitely in for this, but I'll probably wait until it's on sale. Gotta clear a few things off my pile first.

If you intend to play on PC, Fanatical has it on sale for $18 for the next ~20 hours.

merphle wrote:
gewy wrote:

Definitely in for this, but I'll probably wait until it's on sale. Gotta clear a few things off my pile first.

If you intend to play on PC, Fanatical has it on sale for $18 for the next ~20 hours.

Thanks!

I was having trouble deciding on a game to play next. I guess I'll take this thread as a sign and play System Shock.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

I was having trouble deciding on a game to play next. I guess I'll take this thread as a sign and play System Shock.

System Shock is better than whatever other game you might have considered.

Spoiler:

Unless it was Kenshi.

*Legion* wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:

I was having trouble deciding on a game to play next. I guess I'll take this thread as a sign and play System Shock.

System Shock is better than whatever other game you might have considered.

Spoiler:

Unless it was Kenshi.

I don't know. One of the candidates was SpongeBob.

I started last night. Seemed to have gotten carried away and already finished the medical and research levels. The graphics are instantly recognizable as updated versions of the original and I was hit by some weird deja vu several times as my brain remembered snippets of the levels from years ago.

Pretty sure this would be enjoyable to someone even without nostalgia factoring in. I've already encountered several classic survivor horror scenarios like:
Running low on ammo
Running low on health kits
Tension building up since I haven't seen enemies for a while
Hearing enemies in the distance, hoping they can't see me
Startled by someone attacking me while I was looking at my map
Startled by someone jumping me from behind when I engaged enemies in front of me

The only real weakness is that the overall graphics aren't as effective at creating an atmosphere of dread as some of the newer games I've played in the genre: Dead Space, RE2 remake, Alien Isolation.

I'm probably about 2/3 done with the game now. There was a pretty clear difficulty spike on the 3rd level where it felt like I was about to enter a survival horror death spiral- low health, almost out of ammo and medkits, tough areas ahead, didn't want to backtrack. Then I stumbled onto a medical area with lots of medkits, which saved me. Since then I've been doing generally OK except for a couple of boss battles and one particularly stressful area.

Spoiler:

Beta Grove, ugh.

There's a respawn mechanic, but I've just been liberally quick saving/loading to avoid the deaths getting too tedious. This isn't Dark Souls.

One thing I've noticed is that enemies respawn in the main corridors, but at some point, they seem to stop. There's a lot of discussion online about what the specific triggers are, but there are multiple levels now where I can stroll around pretty safely. I like that.

Some tips that took me too long to figure out:
Like the original, you can lean around corners- Q and E by default. Critical for minimizing damage from ranged enemies.

There's a cargo lift that seems to be an interlevel storage space.

It's tedious, but collecting and vaporizing all the junk and selling the scrap helps a lot for buying medkits and ammo. You'll need them.

gewy wrote:

It's tedious, but collecting and vaporizing all the junk and selling the scrap helps a lot for buying medkits and ammo. You'll need them.

It was more tedious at release, when the recycler inventory space was 3x3 instead of 4x3. A couple items were also shrunk in terms of how many inventory squares they occupy, which I imagine helped a good bit too (haven't played it since the major updates dropped).

There's also now a mod to make the cargo lift larger.

I finished. Shodan is dead... er, defeated. Not sure about that final boss battle. Either they completely changed it from the original or I repressed it from my memory.

Great game overall, but immersive sims are my favorite genre, so I'm definitely in the target audience. Plus the nostalgia factor.

One final piece of advice:
If you see or hear any random numbers, in the audio logs, written on the walls, anything... write it down. You'll probably need it later. Oh, you think can just look them up online? Nope. They're randomly generated each playthrough.

Wow, quick playthrough, gewy! Congratulations to our first 2024Q4 victor!

I'll be starting this week. Thank you for the tip - I definitely would not have thought to do that.

So I've made it through Medical, just getting my bearings and into some muscle memory. Nostalgia plays a big role in my enjoyment, although I only experienced the Enhanced Edition of the original a couple of years ago. I love the realization of these environments with semi-modern graphics, although it remains frustrating to have no idea what is and isn't interactive on the walls and desks, tapping F everywhere I go. Impressed with the voice work for Shodan so far.

The cyberspace sequences.... yuck. They are far too much like physical spaces. My brain just thinks, "oh, okay, time for a Descent mini-game".

I started my game late last week and made it through Medical. I thought I had fully cleared it, judging by the map, but the Shodan percentage only got down to 16%. I assumed that should get to 0% once everything is done. Anyway, I moved on to the next floor and finally had my first death/respawn, which wasn't too far away. Also I'm playing this game like I would Viscera Cleanup Detail - everything not nailed down gets recycled.

Piggybacking on Gewy's "random numbers" advice - if you have a strong suspicion where those numbers are supposed to be used when you find them, you can click a button on the map screen to drop a pin near that point, and type the numbers in as the pin title.

merphle wrote:

I started my game late last week and made it through Medical. I thought I had fully cleared it, judging by the map, but the Shodan percentage only got down to 16%.

Yeah, you are probably missing some cameras that might be unreachable so far. I recycled everything too, until it just became too annoying to play stash-Tetris all the time. The stash size is stupidly small and I'm not aware of any upgrades to enlarge it.

For anyone needing help with maps, I used this site like crazy. Don't access and zoom into maps if you don't want some minor spoilers though: https://www.gamepressure.com/system-...

Be advised that you can't change any of the difficulty settings mid-game.

I thought I had the remake but it looks like I only have the original. So, I guess I'm waiting for a sale. I'm a little surprised there isn't a Steam Halloween sale yet.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

I'm a little surprised there isn't a Steam Halloween sale yet.

“Steam Scream Fest” starts in a couple days.

*Legion* wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:

I'm a little surprised there isn't a Steam Halloween sale yet.

“Steam Scream Fest” starts in a couple days.

It's half-ish off ($16).

I will say, just booting up the original made me realize that I'm too old to play actual old games. Just thinking about trying to fight wonky controls made me tired.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

It's half-ish off ($16).

I will say, just booting up the original made me realize that I'm too old to play actual old games. Just thinking about trying to fight wonky controls made me tired.

I finally buckled down before the remake's release last year and got over the hump with the Enhanced Edition's controls.

Honestly, it only took me about an hour to get in the groove, despite how hard I'd bounced off before. The game-changer that helped me get comfortable was binding a side thumb button on the mouse to the toggle between mouselook mode and "cursor" mode. By default it's the "E" key, which isn't hard to press, but putting it on the mouse where my otherwise-unused thumb rested made it SO much more natural.

The non-EE classic controls are a different story. I think now that I'm comfortable with all the game mechanics and such, I'd probably be able to do a classic controls run, but that is a MUCH steeper mountain to climb than the EE mouselook-capable controls.

So, if you have the combat difficulty set to hard do you just get one-shot? I put it on easy and you still get chunked pretty good when you take a hit.

Hard is for when you know all the mechanics and know where you're going. It's very much a "New Game Plus" kind of deal.

System Shock is a game (and series) where enemies are serious threats and must be treated as such. You do not want to stand around in the open and tank damage. The leaning mechanics were a big part of the original.