Well before the immersive sim was recognised as a subgenre, System Shock was showing how to create a world in which you feel completely enveloped, where everything fits in the fiction.
I can’t remember how far I got through System Shock the first time around. It was 1995, a few months after it came out, and I was attempting to play it on my family’s 486/33 PC. But it was a full 3D game, with lighting and all kinds of amazing stuff going on, and it was far too much for our entry-level PC.
Then, superimposed in the main view, I can set up a rear-view video feed, so I’ll see if I’m being attacked by assailants from behind . There are also buttons for my various other cyber-abilities, such as the Enviro-Shields , a weird quick-but-slidey movement mode, a compass, and going full- screen. What I love is that it feels like I’m taking an active role in managing my gear. All these features are presented as plugins to my robot- head. Get a better shield and it’ll be called v2.
What’s more, the environments are pretty difficult to read. Things like buttons and levers have a real tendency to blend into walls. One particularly fun part for me is when I’m meant to get an Important Science Thing from a room doused in radiation. Thing is, it’s encased in a forcefield. I figure I’m not meant to get it yet, maybe until I have an Enviro-Shield, but in fact I’d missed a small button which blends into the blocky textures of a room that was steadily killing me.
Here, you access keycodes and unlock doors by flying into big 3D shapes in 3D space, and it’s really annoying. One crime is the fact you’re constantly moving forward, so you can’t take stock of where to go at your own pace. Another is the fact that the walls of the cyber-rooms and cyber-corridors are transparent, so you often can’t tell when you hit a wall.
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