System Shock

The Good
The feeling of loneliness. "System Shock" captured this feeling like no other game I know of. You, as player, really get to feel the desperate situation of the Hacker, all alone in a gigantic space station, facing an omnipresent and omniscient enemy he can't even hope to defeat; feeling small, insignificant, powerless, scared. This is helped tremendously by the audio logs you keep finding, recordings of people who died on the station, and by e-mails from Shodan, the crazed computer who is easily the best-written adversary I have ever seen in a game (get the CD version with perfect full voice-acting, if you can). What is also brilliant is the way the game motivates your progress by frustrating you repeatedly. The feeling after you finish a particularly difficult task, flip the long-sought lever just to see that nothing happened and receive a mocking e-mail from Shodan is priceless. Add a huge arsenal of weapons with different ammunition against different kinds of opponents, bio-modifications, innovative and fun cyberspace, quite advanced in-game physics engine and a true 3D environment (unlike Doom from the same year that's actually cleverly masked 2D) - and you're looking at a true classic, a game that was way ahead of its time and hasn't lost any of its charm.

The Bad
From today's perspective, the interface is very clumsy, the graphics, while state-of-the-art back then (the CD version supports 640x480 resolution, even though no commercially available computer of the time could actually run the game on it!), are dated, and the sound is quite unpleasant. But the overall atmosphere is so powerful and gripping you won't really mind any of that.

The Bottom Line
A unique game back then and still unique today, "System Shock" is a perfect blend of action, exploration and puzzle-solving with an extraordinarily powerful atmosphere. The game will absorb you in a way you are not likely to forget. An absolute masterpiece.