can you play system shock 2 without playing 1

It's basic design that holds up thirty years and a hefty visual update later, giving you a space to delve out that's hard to navigate by its nature and providing a very satisfying challenge to learn your way around. System Shock is old school in the oldest-school way, with levels that are deliberately-designed mazes of interconnecting corridors, rooms, and locked gates.

Figuring out the extent of her plans and then foiling them is what you do. If SHODAN's body is the giant Citadel space station, then you are a horrible little parasite killing her from the inside out. SHODAN is completely, transparently bonkers, inflicted with the delusion that she is a god and delightfully obsessed with both herself and her often extremely bad plans. Evil artificial intelligences can often be depicted as cold, calculating super geniuses – SHODAN isn't that. We love SHODAN for this, because she's just so delightfully unnerving while she does it. So, naturally, SHODAN has chopped everyone into bits and stitched them back together as horrible cyborgs, made her own strain of a world-ending mutagenic virus complete with freaky mutants, and now wants to export her godlike divinity to Earth proper. Your Hacker and their military-grade neural implant are responsible for the significantly degraded situation here, having disabled the AI SHODAN's ethical limitations.

Nominally a shooter, System Shock is more about exploring the labyrinth that is the TriOptimum corporation's Citadel space station than any combat that takes place within it. Nightdive Studios has done masterful work with this 2023 remake, taking a fantastic game that the years have made hard to play and updating it with modern conveniences that will let it be enjoyed for decades to come. System Shock pioneered so many first-person shooter concepts back in 1994 that now feel fundamental, simultaneously paving the way for the entire immersive sim genre. Trapped in a hell he helped make, a lone hacker aboard a space station far from home sneaks and fights his way through horrible mutants and killer robots in order to take down the monstrous artificial intelligence behind it all: SHODAN, one of the all-time great gaming villains.

Can you play system shock 2 without playing 1