System Shocked

I’ll be first to say I’m a “shock” game newbie.  I had to be told by friends that Bioshock is under the umbrella of these titles so I’ve got at least one under my belt, but I haven’t played either of the System Shocks or other titles adjacent to it.  So booting up Raphael Bossniak’s Soviet rendition of the titular genre of titles was an escapade into a world of games I have not stepped foot in, with my mind about as empty on useful information as our main character’s.

Slightly amnesiac and stuffed into the corner of a room covered in pipes and boxes, you’re aboard one of the USSR’s premium submarines: four levels crammed to the brim with iconic museums, recreational parks, and much much more.  This submarine is home to hundreds of staff, wildlife, and plantlife to allow for extended trips away from the world and show the jeweled standard of Russian futuristic technology and “ologistic” advances.  But a lurking evil unknown to many on the ship has caused a civil war amongst its inhabitants, and you must navigate through a supernatural explosion of beasts and carnage ripping through each floor to save the remaining staff members and yourself.

First, let’s learn a little bit about you.  Sonar Shock provides a simplistic character builder of 12 preset choices where the three you pick determine your method of playing the game.  Choices provide statistical boosts or allow certain perks in the game that cannot be used otherwise, such as praying to alters to refill sanity points or cannibalizing freshly killed enemies for a dice-roll of HP.  What you take can change how the game plays entirely as certain choices can also increase several of your 10 upgradable stats and start you off as a beefy melee wielding machine, a hacking Man of God, or a heavy arms specialist who can read enemy HP.

Controls stay in tune with the genre and decade Sonar Shock is emulating.  No strafing, tank-ish controls, no vertical camera movement, and mouse usage specifically dedicated for aiming: precise positioning is an absolute must when approaching any combat scenario and being able to find that better positioning is worth a couple points in Agility.  Your HUD is broken down into 5 distinct parts: your map and quests, item management, level screen and stat breakdown, a dedicated pause menu, and your current weaponry.  The weaponry tab is most important as these tabs must be interacted with in real time and if you’re firing a gun, you’ll need to manually reload your gun in real time as well.

Each level of the submarine provides a different aesthetic to breathe in, starting with claustrophobic corridors, spreading into sprawling forested areas, and eventually venturing through a man-made frozen tundra.  Sonar Shock features very little music and lets the derelict ambiance of the multi-layered areas bleed into your ears, providing a seriously tense environment around every turn.  The 16-bit stylization of the submarine and its inhabitants are counterbalanced by Lovecraftian creatures with Hylics-like claymation, either chomping at your knees or firing mental-damaging projectiles and crushing your body in one fell swoop.  There’s a lot of enemy variety and all are a marvel to look at, even for only a moment as you turn around and run away.

The lack of enemy noise, many only providing notice through a grunt when spotted and making little sound when walking, combined with the game’s low FOV, had me constantly doing circles to check if anyone was following me or lurking nearby.  This is best used by one particular enemy; if you’ve ever wondered how Weeping Angels would be without footsteps, get ready to jump out of your skin when you turn around and they cover your entire screen.  I haven’t been this jumpy playing a game in years and I have to commend it in the same breath as ruing it.

Combat takes the intricacies of the control scheme and the forced passivity of the tense ambience, then uses it to create a panic-inducing setup for enemies that are quick to identify you and close the distance.  Playing footsies with enemies as a melee fighter or having to feed magazines into your gun mid-fight will test your fortitude within pressure-filled scenarios, as well as make for tough decisions on when to use any of your sparsely provided items.  Every attack requires your reticle to be on your enemy so being in the correct range as well as aiming can be a treacherous dance that at times can be a little head-scratching when an attack misses and you were sure you had your reticle on them.  Sonar Shock does a great job at pacing the variety of enemies and their additional attacks to your current repertoire. As soon as you start getting comfortable with one style of enemy, the game will always have a new one right around the corner to ruin your HP.

You also can gain access to Psi Powers. These are useful abilities for many situations, ranging from healing your wounds, to setting traps, to creating teleportation areas, to lighting your enemies on fire.  To make sure this isn’t abused Psi powers cost bits of your own Sanity, which can be dropped further by certain enemies and can only be replenished with a small assortment of items and environmental features.  This gives these powerful tools a high risk and reward, toeing the line of maintaining a high Sanity number or enduring Eternal Darkness-like happenings due to your uncared mental state.  I won’t spoil what you might see, but it’s worth the smokes to keep yourself sane.

One thing you’ll notice very quickly is that Sonar Shock is hard.  Enemies hit hard, ammo is scarce, healing and sanity items are rare, and each battle must be handled with the utmost care as saves are limited to consumable Save Disks found throughout the ship.  If you die and haven’t saved in awhile, it’s back as far as your last disc spent. I learned the hard way by getting confident and then dying, losing 90 minutes of progress in the process.  It makes battles evoke sighs of relief, followed by checking your inventory evoking sighs of concern as you scavenge to make sure you can handle the next one.  This distillation of fear and stress combined with the overall dread of the ship and its mysteries conveys a bleak, terrifying cocktail of syrupy-thick tension and 5th gear shifting fear.  The urge to tread deeper to uncover the truth is intensified by being too scared to face it, and it’s such an enveloping feeling when a developer hits it just right. Bossniak hits it out of the park.

There were a few problems I did encounter while playing.  There are multiple instances of typos within the UI and text from NPCs that at best are funny happenstances and at worst incorrectly stated what minimum level was needed for certain Psi powers. This caused some confusion on my end not knowing when I really could use the spell or not.  The maps that are found throughout each floor are minimized in your HUD to an eye-squinting degree and make the map unnecessarily hard to read.  Sonar Shock doesn’t provide a backlog of conversations and offers very minute updates to quests, so if you leave something behind for a while, be ready to backtrack and guess at how to resume that area.

I did have to shut down the game once or twice due to a memory leak that happens when you play for longer than a few hours at a time, which crushes your FPS to single digits until you reload your game.  And I won’t mark this against Sonar Shock since it will slide in with the difficulty of the game, but there are far too many enemies that can one-shot kill you in a game that only provides a small amount of saves.  Just be very careful when and where you save as there are some major speedbumps from these enemies that may cause lost progress.

Sonar Shock has provided me with a gaming experience in a genre I seldom play at a level of quality I seldom get.  It shows a masterful guidance of dread-filled ambience with a stressful but fair combat system that provides enough rewards to handle the risks.  I found myself second guessing every turn, jumping at every unexpected noise, and eating up every square foot this submarine and its angry, angry inhabitants provided me.  I’ve already started my second run and will be getting another one done shortly after that one is done.  Sonar Shock is a stomach-churning treat of a title and is worth facing the fears in front of you for a fascinatingly fun time.

8/10