If you play System Shock at its normal difficulty level it acts as a reminder of how brutally hard games habitually were in the 1990s: it offers very little by way of hand-holding, and you must treat your character’s health as a precious commodity and work hard to acquire a decent set of resources. The more of those you take out, the lower the overall security level, and in some instances, you can only reach particular areas if that security level falls below a certain threshold.

Exploration is rewarded with useful and sometimes crucial items, and each deck of the Citadel is studded with SHODAN’s cameras. There are countless cute touches, such as recycling stations that will take all the useless rubbish you pick up and turn it into money that can be used at vending machines, to buy implants which restore health and stamina or increase adrenaline – as well as ammo. You start off with a lead pipe but soon acquire an arsenal of weaponry including various guns, for which either the bullets or the energy they need are in perennially short supply. SHODAN has turned everything that moves in the Citadel into an enemy that will aggressively attack you, so you encounter mutants, cyborgs, robots, turrets, giant robotic spiders and more. The way you shut SHODAN down is pretty much up to you: System Shock’s gameplay is wonderfully free-form and, at times, emergent. A pretty timely plot, given the current spotlight on artificial intelligence. SHODAN has gone rogue, threatening to fire a devastating weapon at Earth, and it’s up to you to reach the evil AI and shut it down. Waking up six months later, after an induced coma, you find you’re the only living being left on Citadel Station. In a scene-setting intro, the character you play – an unnamed hacker living in a dystopian future city called New Atlanta – is arrested, transported to a space station called the Citadel Station and ordered to hack into SHODAN, the AI that controls the station, and remove its ethical protocols. Again, it doesn’t feel as thrillingly fresh and innovative as that of the original game, but there’s a very good reason for that: every single element of its gameplay has been copied by several other games over the last three decades. Gameplay-wise, though, System Shock is beyond criticism. There are other issues you soon encounter, such as the vaguely comical way in which the mutants you frequently have to dispatch lurch and stumble about, as well as their distinctly rudimentary character design.

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