System Shock 2 was the first game to scare me.
May have been the first and best game to use audio logs to develop the plot & build the world. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf92cXs6fvg
Some other mechanics that helped the atmosphere and kept you on edge were that you could never permanently clear an area of monsters. Some new critters would respawn and prowl through decks you had cleared. You could usually hear them well before you saw them. Resources were also scarce, so wasting ammunition on enemies or subjecting your ranged weapons to unnecessary wear and tear was often a worse choice than avoiding them, or trying to sneak up behind them to bash them to death. The game was built atop the dark engine (Thief) so it had a surprisingly good model of enemy line of sight, sneaking was often viable to close distance or evade.
To progress up the research tree required particular elements as inputs to complete research assignments, and the game would use this to send you on fetch quests to gather a jar full of rare elements from a chemical storage locker deep in a deck of the ship you'd hoped to never visit again.
Late 90s australian game journalism - "after playing system shock 2, somehow the world will never look quite the same again": https://archive.org/details/PCPowerplay-042-1999-11/page/n12...
(after all these years, when i self-checkout groceries at the supermarket, in my head i hear the words "thank you for choosing valuerep")
All these lifes.. a audiobook on its own - and they should have turned it into one.
Warning. Spoilers ahead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIqqQEFOO3s
Tribe's music video for Supercollider[1] was filmed at the Superconducting Super Collider before Congress cut funding. It might be the most expensive music video set ever.
Neato! I've got the GoG version installed on a PC on my network here. I just discovered that the ".CRF" files that contain the game resources are all ZIP files. Now I'm awash in System Shock 2 sounds.