i just died for the first time, and after watching a very cool and very ominous death cut scene, which i wasn't expecting, i learned a crushing lesson. save often. i just lost probably two to three hours of progress, and it's kind of depressing. depressing enough to end my session.
so far my first impressions of the game are... i like it. kinda. it's fun. i definitely want to see more. i do like getting a bit lost and finding audio logs and hearing stuff that happen to people and being guided by the audio logs. that's nice. i really like that. but the question i'm asking myself is how much do i actually like that?
because something that i noticed with the level design is that it feels like it's been made like a bunch of blocks that were assembled together to form places. as if they were playing around in a level editor with a bunch of modules they could snap together to form rooms (kind of like what i did with the paragraphs of this post). i don't know how to explain it it reminds me of the way like skyrim dungeons are built so you have like a bunch of blocks and you assemble them together in the level editor it's kind of like that. that's how it feels to me. which is not to say it's bad. it's just it's kind of worrying. i hope not all levels are so similar looking because the game is gonna get visually tiring really quickly.
like, don't get me wrong, it's fun, but then i see how many levels there are to the station and i'm like, "do i really wanna do all that i just did but that many times in probably much larger places?" i'm not sure, honestly.
and looking at the achievements i obtained on gog, the fact that leaving the first area is already marked as "uncommon" and that only 27.03% of players got it is not really encouraging. i guess the game just... makes a poor impression at first? we'll have to see.
i've been kind of like scouring every place i could, finding a lot of stuff, which is why i spent so much time in the same area, and it is really crushing to think that i have to redo that all over again because now it's just a bunch of busy work. i'm really not excited to have to redo all of that.
i knew that there was a quick save system in the game and i have purposefully chosen to not use it for a very simple reason is i like to trust games with their checkpoint system and i guess i was wrong this time around. it avoids me falling in the traps of like saves coming and all that.
also combat so far feels meh. it doesn't really have a lot of impact, it feels kind of like floaty, it doesn't really feel satisfying. using the melee weapons, for example, it feels like using a sword in skyrim. and that's not a compliment :n at one point, a mutant punched eohunanother while trying to punch me and send it flying throughout the room, and that was kind of funny. i did like that, but i think it was more of a bug than anything else. but i'll take it!
on a similar subject, i already have a bunch of temporary power offs in my inventory, like some stims, berserk stuff and so on and i'm not really excited about that because that is the kind of shit i am going to drag until the very end of the game without ever using it. especially because the side effect sounds really scary. like, oh yeah, you can become super powerful. also, after that, you will develop psychosis (not a joke) and it's like... yeah, if i were to read that as a side effect of my medication, i wouldn't take it, you know? it's not something i'm gonna hold against the game. that is very much a me problem. but it's cluttering my inventory already, and i guess i should get rid of them. i don't know. i feel like if i get rid of them, i'm gonna regret it at some point.
graphically, i see what they were going for but i don't think it works. like i'm guessing it's supposed to be a blend of the old and the new but the end result is that it led me to look up pretty quickly in the game if my texture setting was broken. thinking: "why is everything so low res even though i'm on ultra settings?" and no, that's how the game is supposed to look and that is not a good sign for me. everything looks pixelated but it doesn't look like it's been made pixelated. it looks like there is a filter that's been applied over all of the textures after they've been done to pixelate them and it just ends up looking a bit cheap especially when the rest of the game is a bit like bloomy and very... unreal engine 4 looking, is the best way i can describe it.
oh, you know what i would want to see? a codex. i would love to have flavor text entries about the enemies and so on and how they function. that is just my kind of shit. i love lore stuff like that. for example, i've collected and read every doom 2016 and doom eternal entries about these things. and i loved them all. but that's just my type of shit. i honestly kind of want to know more about this universe, about what's going on and so on.
i also regret to see the absence of some accessibility features. i think some of the text is a bit small, and it's kind of annoying because if i want to play down on my steam deck, which i may like to, i think that's going to be a problem pretty quickly.
anyway.
it's definitely too early for me to get any concrete impression on the game and i'm gonna play more of it for sure. hopefully it will get better for me. i hope. because it looks like a really cool game and it's kinda legendary. and the remake is apparently really good and from what little i've seen of the original it looks like a faithful remake. also, it looks like a well-needed remake because, my god, the original one looks dreadful to play.
overall, as you can probably tell, i am pretty miffed about it. but i said it's too early to tell, and i wanna see more of it. i'm curious to learn more about shodan and what's its deal. and the people on board, are there any survivors? probably not, but i still want to find out. so i'll go back to it. to see more. and hopefully i'll finish it. we'll see.
i know i sound very negative, but believe it or not, i am pretty excited to see more of it, so there's that. also, i really loved the cyberspace thing and it has made me want to play a game like forsaken again. kind of more than system shock itself. but still, i'm gonna play more of it and i'm interested to see more.
#systemshock #videogames #gaming