It’s the most exciting, dynamic time for immersive sims since the golden age of Looking Glass and Ion Storm. Not only are there more indie games about crawling through vents and reading email than ever before, design sensibilities and attention to emergent gameplay are starting to show up in AAAA games to a degree we haven’t seen in a long time.
With a genre with very different histories and many competing definitions, the excellent System Shock remake brings everything back to basics – offering a great opportunity to experience its core appeal and lay a solid foundation for the future.
Playing the excellent System Shock remake made me finally understand why I always prefer the original to the sequel to the acclaimed game. While System Shock 2 undoubtedly has a stronger environmental narrative and atmosphere, it also has more video games going on. It has skill points and upgrades, like a proper RPG.
Honestly, I’ve always found this grim, visible number and dice roll mechanic to be a bit against the “immersive” part of an immersive simulation. What’s your favorite part of Deus Ex? Is it looking at a digital screen and scoring points on environmental training skills? No, it’s not. Do not lie.
RPG mechanics have always been a crutch, a holdover from the days of Ultima Underworld — a necessary evil in a time when a more natural way of expressing action and reactions in virtual spaces wasn’t yet technically feasible. Of course, the nostalgia and the fact that immsim fans are usually huge nerds means that as the genre evolves and the people they grew up with start making their own games, they keep all the skill trees and experience points.
Arkane Studios’ Prey is being touted as the closest thing to a System Shock 3 game–the game is set on a sprawling space station filled with dangerous enemies, and you’ll have to tackle maintenance and use all the tools and skills at your disposal to muster to survive. This is good! very good! It has a lot of room for experimentation and the atmosphere is incredible. There is a glue gun. But it’s also full of skill trees and upgrades, damage numbers, and enemy health bars that were starting to feel redundant back in 2017.
Fortunately, there’s been a recent game that really embodies the idea of using systems and physics in an intuitive way, with little or no visible traditional RPG mechanics. It’s unthinkable when the game is about a polygonal twin working its way through a linear puzzle dungeon, but the latest mainline Zelda arguably feels more like a truly immersive sim than any Looking Glass game.
Tears of Kingdoms is a fantastic physical and tactile RPG with little of the behind-the-scenes stat-based vagaries of most genres. It has more in common with something like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic than it does with Ocarina of Time – it’s a physics-based playground for killing goblins in the most hilarious way possible, Using your various tools and environments in a variety of ways instantly makes sense and produces natural results, just like you would expect in the real world.
The kinds of spaces that video games can occur in, and the possibilities of the spaces they can fill, are exponentially more likely than in 1994, when system shocks defined entire genres—making hallways, emails, space stations, levers, and vents a few years into the future. The standard of ten years.
Playing the remake made me realize that all of these elements were never immsim’s core appeal; it was exploring a unique environment that was fully realized and made immediate physical sense, wandering into and interacting with it produced what you’d expect Results obtained from the real world, rather than the more exaggerated and abstract mechanics of traditional role-playing games.
The fact that so many immsim have stuck to sci-fi industrial or urban settings over the decades, mostly due to technical constraints or out of nostalgia, makes it all the more memorable and interesting for those who dare to try something else . A game like Arx Fatalis dares to imagine a world of caves, not metal. Some would argue that caves are just stone galleries, but they don’t realize the difference in spirit. Most notably Arx Fatalis’s recent spiritual successor, Weird Western – a western that showed that not only are immsims definitely possible in more diverse settings, they don’t even necessarily need to be first-person.
On the other end of the spectrum is the mesmerizing Shadow of Doubt, the first-person detective immsim who thinks the genre needs infinite apartments, infinite emails, and infinite vents. A truly immersive game that perfectly simulates every aspect of its randomly generated city blocks, when the first thing I do is take the elevator to the top floor of my building at 2am and knock on a random door I was literally taken aback when the door opened and the answer was a grumpy guy in his underpants who wanted to know why I was waking him up.
Whether you think of immsims as a network of corridors full of guards, or sprawling open world adventures pushing monsters off cliffs, if you’re someone who likes to build video games based on intuition, there’s never been a more exciting time than this system and Interaction, not cold mechanics. There are a lot of exciting interpretations and evolutions going on right now, from games like Void Bastards that blend the legacy of System Shock with contemporary roguelikes to brain-expanding projects like Ctrl Alt Ego, a game that casts you as one of the Robots and machinery that the invisible consciousness can possess.
There are so many places to visit, and if you’re tired of linear adventures and limited combat, any of these massive mayhem games about finding your way out might be just what you need right now. That’s what video games generally need these days.
