A Shock to the System
is a now-defunct Forum Quest on the TV Tropes Forum Games. It is based partly on System Shock.
Not to be confused with the film of the same name.
A Shock to the System contains examples of:
- 11th-Hour Superpower: "Ogre-Class Powered Armor" for the cargo bay level.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Clear out parasites and spiders inside Life Support - complete. Purge the reactor of radioactive gas - complete. Obtain cookie - complete.
- The Artifact: The Smartphone was only ever used to analyze new equipment.
- Attack Backfire: Using the Incendiary blaster too much results in it overheating and burning Rob's hand.
- Bland-Name Product: A "Noikus" smartphone; Mrs. Buttersworth, however, remains unchanged (although in this universe, they make cookies instead of pancake syrup).
- Body Horror:
- Regular zombies have a huge chest wound with a visibly squirming parasite lodged in them.
- In the Cargo Bay, hapless stevedores glued to the wall with Meat Moss appear.
- Cryo Sickness: Robert comes out of cryo heavily confused and amnesiac. However much this is cryo sickness and how much is from concussing himself on the pod's door waking up is unclear, but it took half the game for him to come back to baseline.
- Degraded Boss: Bear zombies started out as a boss fight at the end of the Life Support level, but later on act as Elite Mooks in the cargo bay.
- Distracted by the Sexy: The "Hallucination" psi-power involves "Cramming an image of a pretty fem performing an act of depravity up [an enemy's] temporal lobe".
- Dying as Yourself: Killing the parasite without removing the crewman's head results in them thanking Rob for freeing them-and then dying from massive internal damage.
- Easy Amnesia: Rob wakes up with no memories.
- Elite Zombie: Some can use guns (Smart Zombies); although most of them prefer a melee attack. Some have metal plates bolted directly to their chests to prevent being killed in one shot (Armored Zombies). Bear Zombies are hulking abominations used as boss fights and Elite Mooks (Brute Zombie). Infiltrators are, as the name suggests, infectees without the huge, gaping chest wounds and murderous temperament. ("Help me!" style Trap Zombies).
- Equipment Upgrade: Weapon mods; including an incendiary module for the blaster (and a power doubler to offset it's power requirements), and tactical kits for the shotgun and pulse rifle.
- Everything's Worse with Bears: Bear Zombies, which are hulking mutants with huge claws.
- Faster-Than-Light Travel: Jump drive style. The ship has to be in perfect zero gravity, so they start and end outside the solar system.
- Future Slang: "Fem" for woman, "Juvenile" for kid.
- Hollywood Acid: Downplayed; Rob grabs the nastiest cleaner he can find to combat the spread of the Meat Moss. It's got a WHMIS logo for "Harsh Corrosive" on it. After spraying down life support with it, he slips in a puddle and gets a chemical burn on his rear end.
- Human Popsicle: The player started the game waking up in a cryo pod. It's noted that FTL works on rules similar to that of MechWarrior: A "jump point" where all a system's gravity is canceled out must be found, then the ship's jump-engine is fired. Getting there can take a while. Furthermore, the drive is usually calculated to move the ship to just outside the target solar system until the crew can map the new jump point. This can take a very long time, so non-essential personell/passengers go into the deepfreezer until they're needed
- Humble Goal: One quest was to get a cookie.
- Kaizo Trap: Word-for-word, in fact. Killing certain zombies sometimes results in the parasite attacking Rob personally.
- Kill It with Fire: A weapon upgrade for the Blaster causes its shots to become superheated, which causes bad guys to catch fire.
- Laser Blade: The Fiber-Optic Cutlass; which is a length of fiberglass with a laser shining through it.
- Made of Indestructium: Rob's smartphone is of the "legendarily indestructible Noikus brand."
- MegaCorp: The only civilian organizations able to fund interstellar travel; so greedy they charge for air.
- Mushroom Samba: Botching a Life Drain roll results in "Straining your pineal gland" and hallucinating a purple dragon, which does That Russian Squat Dance.
- My Little Phony: Searching an Undead Child results in finding a "Your Small Horse" doll.
- No Biochemical Barriers: Lampshaded. "It would take innumerable biochemical adaptations to allow one creature to hack another's nervous system. Nevertheless, [it] pulled it off."
- No Ending: Ended on the cusp of the final boss fight due to lack of interest.
- No OSHA Compliance: The engineering section fills with radioactive gas when the reactor core is vented.
- Parasite Zombie: Crewmen with a Puppeteer Parasite living in their chests.
- Paying for Air: Military ships have free air provided to colonists via an onboard ecosystem, but MegaCorp ships tax passengers for it.
- Plasma Cannon: The blaster and the pulse rifle for most of the game, and the Ogre's Mjolnir Plasma Lance and Pulse Autocannon.
- Porn Stash: The first data chip Rob finds is "A naughty magazine someone put on a flash drive and hid in a box".
- Powers as Programs: Two abilities come standard on the Psi-Amp; more can be learned by way of thumb drive.
- Psychic Nosebleed: The result of a botched psi roll.
- Psychic Powers: Psi powers, and the alien Hive Mind communicates with Rob by way of telepathy.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: The Captain, who unlocks the Armory soon after Rob meets him, and gives the Ensign access to the Registrar just-in-case.
- Red Shirt: The Ensign, who is "On his first cruise, handed a blaster and kicked out the door to guard the real officers from their own diseased crewmen".
- Repressed Memories: The zombies are crewmembers trapped within their own bodies while the parasite drives them around. Rob takes this information and sticks it "in a little box" buried deep down in the mind. The same with the fact that someone must have baked the cookies for the first Bear Zombie he fights; "into the same grave you buried the ethical questions about the zombies in."
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Subverted; the shotgun sees very little use; the players preferring to stick with the blaster and pulse rifle. The Ogre's Volley Gun, however, is a four-barrelled shotgun that fires explosive darts.
- Shout-Out:
- The Psi-Amp takes the form of a lens on the back of one's hand. Lampshaded.
- Metal has a life-force, allowing Life Drain to affect metallic objects-for example, the Ogre.
- Standard FPS Guns: Knife (the fiber-optic cutlass), pistol (the blaster), Shotgun ("A good old-fashioned Hogleg with a smoothbore design"), and assault rifle (the pulse rifle).
- Sword and Gun: The cutlass and Blaster got dual-wielded almost exclusively.
- Tastes Like Friendship: Offering a "survivor" ration bars in the Engine Room level.
- They Look Like Us Now: Infiltrator Zombies, until they pop into a "scrawny version" of the Bear Zombie. The first (and only) encounter with them in their human form is a small child who got lost in the engine room.
- Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
- Firing the shotgun in a tight corridor results in bleeding ears.
- Trying to operate the Ogre, in vacuum, while in planetside mode, results in overheating until the heat-sinks and radiators are properly deployed.
- Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Every weapon on the Ogre has infinite ammo, except the flamethrower.
- Voice of the Legion: The alien hive mind speaks in a "Voice of voices".
- Wave-Motion Gun: The Particle Lances mounted on the Ogre as Shoulder Cannons, which are miniaturized versions of a starships main gun.
- Wolfpack Boss: "You doubt it will stop trying to kill you... despite issuing a formal challenge..."
