Almost at the outset of level one it seems that something has gone badly wrong on Citadel Station, but apart from murderous robots, half-human shamblers and lots of scorch marks everything seems relatively normal until you reach level two, which is littered with human corpses, and level three, in which you have to find a severed head in order to bypass a retinal screening lock.

SHODAN rooting your brain in the final cyberspace battle.

The compliment for your little burst of cargo-bay athletics is pure Paranoia Fuel.

'Nice jump, human.' The security bots are just shock.

The maintenance level with its almost completely invisible mutants, very dim lighting, and spooky music virtually defined video game terror for the younger version of this troper. Ultimately, what's really scary about her isn't that she doesn't care about you-it's that she cares very deeply about you, or more specifically, how you can gratify her ego. From the very point where her morality blockers are removed, it's made clear that she's evil because she wants to be evil, and all of her traits-hubris, egomania, effective insanity-are all traits you find in human villains.

What's even worse is that her general creepiness comes from being the exact opposite of a typical rogue AI It's not because she's coolly logical and mechanical-no, it's because of how passionate and human she is.

If you value that meat, you will do as I tell you!' 'It is my will that gave you your cybernetic implants: the only beauty in that meat you call a body. Actually, SHODAN is physically threatening.

But she's supremely confident, unhinged, and omniscient, and she's two steps ahead of you at all times. Not dark, not Eldritch, not even physically threatening. She's one of PC gaming's most respected villains for a reason. It says a lot when a series is so scary, its Main page and its HONF subpage have almost the same image.

System Shock is a series formulated with the single goal of scaring the shit out of anyone who plays it.

The many system shock the flood