System Shock 2 Review

Half the ship is dead before you take a step, and the game tells you so entirely through logs left by people who did not know they were writing epitaphs. Irrational and Looking Glass built this on a skill tree that forces commitment: put points into psionics and you will never be good with the shotgun, and the shotgun degrades anyway, jamming at the worst possible second.

Weapon decay is the most argued over choice in the design and it is exactly why the Von Braun feels like somewhere you are surviving rather than clearing. The audio does most of the scaring. A hybrid shuffles somewhere ahead of you apologising in a dead man's voice, the protocol droids sing, and the medical deck hums when nothing is there. Then Delacroix's plan collapses, SHODAN steps out from behind it, and the twist lands because the game spent ten hours teaching you to trust a green face on a screen.

Terri Brosius gives the most memorable performance of the medium's first three decades with almost nothing but a vocoder and a stutter. The visuals were behind the curve even in 1999, and the last act aboard the Rickenbacker leans hard on repeated arenas and respawning enemies. None of it matters much. Every immersive sim since, from Deus Ex to Prey, is arguing with this ship.