System Shock 2, for all intents and purposes, feels like a remake of the original game. And I can sum up my experience in a very short review: Wow… And several years since I had a chance to replay all the Thief titles and a year and a half since I’ve first experienced the innovative undying beauty of the original System Shock, I finally had the chance to finish System Shock 2. Ever since then, all 3 games on the Dark Engine have been receiving updates and fixes making games not just playable again, but often better than they were originally. Until one day a mysterious person (often believed to be one of the ex-Looking Glass employees), released an updated version of the source code of the engine, which made things work again. After that for the longest all games on this in-house game engine made by Looking Glass Studios, along with the Thief 1 and 2, were borderline unplayable on most PCs.

And even back then, just few years after the game release, it already worked with issues. I’ve attempted to play System Shock 2 ever since 2001, when I first got my own modern (for the time) PC.

O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.

System shock 2 xerxes voice lines