Recommended by Lead as part of this list.

Gaming, like any other artistic medium, has its fair share of touchstone titles, its genre-defining Rosetta Stones that future games in the medium would pull their inspiration and influence from. While there's the obvious ones like Super Mario 64 for the 3D Platformer, or Devil May Cry for the Character Action Game, there's a good chance that if you've played any sci-fi horror game in the past 20 years, you can probably thank System Shock 2 for it's existence in some way. From the immersive sci-fi body horror of Dead Space, to the antagonistic GLaDOS from Portal, to the... Everything of Bioshock, there's a veritable web of connective threads and inspiration that can be weaved from near everything that this initial commercial flop of an immersive sim was pushing back in '99, and having finally played this game hot ("lukewarm" at best) off the heels of a Dead Space playthrough is a piece of serendipity that really helped put System Shock 2's massive influence into perspective as I journeyed through the halls of the Von Braun.

In a word, System Shock 2 is "tense." The Von Braun is this utterly immense location that's filled to the brim with murderous body horror alien beasts and not much else, where everything is an eternal postmortem that's told through the environment and the audio logs you find scattered amongst corpses. The dynamic stereo sound of The Many's minions growing in volume in your left earbud is the only warning you're going to get before a Hybrid with a shotgun runs down the hall to blast your face clean off, and never once over my entire playthrough did it fail to make me clam up with paranoia. The RPG elements and the relative stinginess of experience points mean that every point spent on a stat feels like a tradeoff of some kind, and you always feel lacking in some area even in the end-game (that damn hacking mini-game was going to be the end of me!) Even when I was armed to the teeth with a small armory in my back pocket; and the existence of a currency system alongside generous item vendors around every corner, System Shock 2 still makes you feel like every item counts when your gun jams during a vital encounter, or when you only ever find maybe 6 handgun bullets at a time on every 3rd corpse you stumble upon and scoring a single Medical Hypo is like hitting the jackpot.

While the pseudo-survival horror elements at play give System Shock 2 a lot of tension, it's also nicely counterbalanced by its presentation. Much like Dead Space would imitate years later, a lot of System Shock 2's gameplay elements are made to be diegetic, with level up stations being actual technology in the year 2114, alongside things like the currency being nanomachines that create the items you buy, or your first-person UI being a part of the cybernetic enhancements you've been augmented with. The cold, sleek sci-fi look of everything and the sharp, low-poly corners of the Von Braun make the ship feel unwelcoming and isolating in that sort of uncanny way, and getting jumpscared by 90s Breakcore while I was wandering the halls of MedSci and bashing a Hybrid over the head with a wrench was definitely a trip to say the least. Much has been said about gaming's premier cyber-MILF SHODAN, but it can't be understated how much charm the shaky, antagonistic dynamic between her and the player really adds to the experience. Having the main villain of the first game fall from grace and get betrayed by her own creations in a case of dramatic irony and getting forced into teeth-clenched teamwork with the human protagonist is an honestly genius maneuver, and the inherent humor of completing a mission only to get called a "pathetic insect" by the sentient Speak-N-Spell with a dominatrix streak never got old, and it's part in parcel of what gives System Shock 2 its unique, somewhat pulp-y identity that still stands out today.

Considering that much like our main character, I'm way late to the party in terms of playing System Shock 2 so many years after its ground-breaking release, I'm not really saying anything you haven't heard before, and that's always that case when you go through a game that frequently populates many "Greatest of All Time" lists. What I can at least say is that it is indeed, Pretty Good, and even if that's not exactly a ground-breaking revelation, I firmly believe that there's always value in rounding out your gaming experience with these sort of hallmark cultural touchstones. Happy holidays everyone!