The ONLY reason I survived is because while cowering behind some physics effected boxes I attempted to climb onto one thus causing the engine to glitch and phase everything in the area except me through the metal grated floor and into the area below, allowing me to move on safely until I had the stones to actually go down the ladder in my own time. When I entered the area just before the fleshy hellscape that was soon to come, I found myself facing off against TWO of those giant quake enemies (with the zappy hands, you know the ones) and a big spider, with like a half loaded pistol and a single grenade round. My character build, I have to assume, was substandard for this far into the game, because I was having a lot of difficulty actually maintaining enough ammo to kill enemies. I'd been playing for four hours, driving myself off the high that I had to be near the end of the game. System Shock 2, I had already guessed, would be similar to Shock 1 and Bioshock, and it was in some ways, but in other ways it was more different than I could possibly imagine. B)Īnd Bioshock's end cutscene is similarly intensely sentimental and strange and far too short to really give the player any closure, but Bioshock 2's end cutscene is more grounded (although unfortunately grounded in a pretty poor final encounter imo), and Infinite seems deliberately designed for the ending to be impactful so it gets a bit better there. System Shock ends with a silly, overly quick end cutscene which reveals that hacker is still hacking away to this day, cuz some habits die hard. This usually manifests in absurd sentimentality which comes out of nowhere. One thing I've been making fun of since the start of the series was the often inexplicable, underwhelming end cutscenes. Uh, I played all of them but in reverse order from that list, so I started with system shock, played all of bioshock out of order, and finally finished just a few days ago with system shock 2. If somebody asked you what order you should play it in, ranked so that the 'Best' games come first and the 'Worst' games come later, and so that you can gain an appreciation for the genre, I'd say So, I played the shock series in what most people would probably agree is the worst conceivable order.

System shock 2 - xerxes