Survival means figuring out which scarce resources you can waste, including your own health.

The rich sound design lets you hear enemies long before you see them, opening automatic doors in the distance or calling to you in tortured voices. The cargo bays are lined with dormant droids that could wake up at any minute. The hallways are full of laser turrets, deadly radiation leaks, and possessed former crewmates. Your dependable melee weapon becomes useless against a stream of kamikaze service droids.

It’s a series of corridors and shadowy cargo bays all designed to hammer every possible vulnerability. System Shock 2’s first few hours can be brutally difficult as a result, reaching their lowest point on the aforementioned engineering level. Meanwhile, the game overwhelms players with constantly deteriorating weapons and wandering enemies, wearing them down while they’re at their weakest, even as it dangles the promise of inhuman power in front of them. He’s also highly vulnerable until you build up the right set of complementary upgrades, which requires progressing the plot long enough to earn dozens of rare “cyber modules.” Your protagonist can be augmented into a super-hacker, a master of energy weapons and old-fashioned firearms, or a psychic warrior with pyrokinetic power and invisibility cloaking. System Shock 2 uses a complicated upgrade system with draconian cutoffs for equipping important items. System Shock 2 overwhelms you when you’re at your weakestīut unlike its predecessor, which let you use any equipment you picked up, accessing these weapons and powers is hard. Like its 1994 predecessor System Shock, it’s a cyberpunk game overstuffed with powers and weapons - you play as an unnamed soldier on a faster-than-light spaceship seemingly overrun by parasitic aliens. System Shock 2 has an unstoppable cyborg protagonist and a role-playing game’s love of quantification. Survival horror games often focus on vulnerable, ordinary characters and induce a sense of paranoid powerlessness, stripping down interface elements or tweaking camera movements to imitate a frail human body’s motion. And even after two decades, nothing has quite captured the same stark creepiness. But it inspired a generation of iconic survival horror games like Prey, Dead Space (conceived as a System Shock sequel), and most notably BioShock, created by System Shock 2’s designer Ken Levine. And for many years, it was almost impossible to play legally, thanks to its bizarrely tangled copyright status. It was sandwiched between Half-Life and Deus Ex, two games that redefined the sci-fi first-person shooter. System Shock 2 wasn’t a huge success at launch. The engineering deck in System Shock 2, the classic Looking Glass game released 20 years ago today, is one of the most brilliantly nerve-wracking virtual spaces ever created.

System shock 2 laser pistol