So, I have to level with everyone here. I have maybe reviewed this game around four times. Every time, I felt unhappy with what I wanted to say and would inevitably delete it. It was starting to become a vicious cycle, and now that I've finally come to this realization, I've decided that this is the last time I'm going to talk about the Enhanced Edition, and by extension, Shockolate. In a word: the game was released broken and never fixed, and the people fixing it through source ports have been breaking even more things, rendering it increasingly more unplayable than the original DOS version.

I don't need to feel like I have to discredit the artistic talent and worth of the original game in criticizing and highlighting my problems with the enhanced edition, because ultimately this is not the original game at all. It does have great things about it. I like the changes to its variable difficulty settings and the fact it does technically run on modern systems pretty much with a lot less fuss than the classic edition's awful pre-configured Dosbox setup provided by gog. But it comes with a lot of systems within it just not working, and especially annoying is that on Linux, it completely ruins the sound of the game and is nearly impossible to figure out how to get it working right. I only was able to fix up a lot of things in asking about source port compiling problems.

On this note, I got a lot of help and a lot of insight about what's wrong with this game through people in the Shockolate discord. Shockolate is a project based on the mentality of Chocolate Doom, which rather than ZDoom derivatives, wants to recreate the game as it originally looked and played rather than enhance it to gel with modern systems better. Everyone there is helpful, lovely, patient, and at times funny and I still sit in there and have been meaning to send a thoughtful thank you post to the person who helped me with all of the compiling problems I was dealing with. But I have to report, his efforts were lost on me and his versions of the game he made especially for me simply did not work. I'm thankful, but I didn't want to burden him with even more troubleshooting. But thank you, Takashi, you really are such a sweet guy for all of the help.

But the problems and minutae of getting this game to be properly ported, especially for Linux are a bit problematic. Not only because of the dense and weird way package management across multiple distros work, and how key packages many video games rely upon may switch versions or switch names in such a way that renders certain programs not prepared for the switch ups to just stop reading these key files. The way fluidsynth broke itself that had negative consequences on a number of programs which relied upon it, which explains a lot of the issues with soundservers and all kinds of other complicated nonsense that, as a non-programmer, I just don't want to be getting in the thick of. And if you do, you're brave. And if you troubleshoot and contribute code to fix these sorts of things, you're a hero to me.

So overall, I'm just really unhappy with this product Nightdive gave people. Because the devs who know how the original game works both inside and out have shared as much that the game gets too many things wrong. The methods to fix it are nebulous and theory and mercurial in application. Is it playable? Yes. But it is it correctly playable in the way it should be? No. I had to do so much investigation and work just to get the music in the game playing, and there was no obvious way to get help for it, that I was getting the help from an unrelated project which simply builds upon the base of the Enhanced Edition. Is this good? No. But it's System Shock. I love System Shock! I am hoping the next time I try to build Shockolate, I have better luck.