The long-awaited and much-delayed remake ofSystem Shockcame out this week, andit’s been a mixed old bag for me(with the emphasis on ‘old’ there). It’s clearly a labour of love for Nightdive Studios, and in some ways that love’s a little bit too apparent as they decided to basically leave the remake as obscure and fiddly as the original 1992 game.
Don’t just take my word for it: the consensus on the remake is pretty divided, with the game averaging 75 on Metacritic at the time of writing, with a lot of scores coming in quite a ways above and below that. Your mileage will vary depending whether you find yourself frustrated by the mazey map design and the obscure puzzles, or whether you consider those kinds of things part of its anachronistic charm.
But if you’re curious about the immersive sim genre that the original System Shock helped spawn, yet the remake’s mixed reception has given you pause, then rest assured that there’s a game out there that serves as a beautiful homage to System Shock while feeling decidedly more modern, glossy, and (in my opinion) fun than Nightdive’s effort. That game is2017’s Prey, made by Arkane Studios, which to me is one of the most underrated and too easily forgotten games of recent memory.
Prey’s setting is the Talos-1 space station—a shining monument to scientific utopia; a symbol of a brave new world in which nations set aside their paltry Earthly differences in pursuit of a greater understanding of the universe by studying the mysterious Typhon life-form. Talos-1’s lavish art design—a bit Deco, a bit 60s American, a bit Soviet—makes it appear solid, unshakeable like a cosmic pyramid of the future.
Then, much like in System Shock, everything goes wrong, as just about everyone aboard the Talos-1 gets killed when the mysterious shape-shifting alien species known as the Typhon break containment. It’s up to you, Morgan Yu, to try and bring things back under some semblance of control, while continuing to figure out the motives of the Typhon.
To aid you, you’ll have the option to specialise in a number of Neuromods—powers derived from the Typhon, which let you do things like fire super-heated plasma, or transform into random objects, ranging from innocuous cups to gun turrets at higher levels. Or you can say ‘no’ to the alien powers, and go down a human skill tree instead, embracing skills like hacking, engineering, as well as the arsenal of interesting and original weapons at your disposal.
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System Shock, on the other hand, has a comparatively linear progression system. Sure, you might find some upgrades and not others on a playthrough, but you basically hoover up everything you find, and they don’t force you to think about your build or about howyouwant to approach the game. To me, that makes System Shock feel mostly like a first-person shooter with a few frills and an inventory rather than a proper immersive sim offering myriad ways to approach obstacles and combat. I’m sure all this stuff was trailblazing back in 1994, but I expect a little more versatility from such a game in 2023, and Prey offers that.
The layout of System Shock’s Citadel station is cubic, cramped, and confusing—like a single-layered warren of Minecraft tunnels designed for you to get lost in (a relic of 90s game design, when padding out games with obscure puzzles and inscrutable navigation was a quickfire way of ‘expanding’ a game). Talos-1, on the other hand, feels like a lived-in place. With its retrofuturistic architecture and logically compartmentalised layout, you rummage around in living quarters, corporate offices, and mess halls, listening to audio logs that slowly reveal touching stories between the station’s inhabitants.
Traversing Talos-1 is a lonely, paranoid experience as you’re constantly wondering whether an office chair will suddenly turn into a Typhon and attack, or whether there’s a Telepath around the corner that will turned those mummifed corpses lying around into Phantom enemies. Despite this, Talos-1 is filled with humanity. You’ll find games consoles in every common room and sleeping bay, and copies of a trashy sci-fi comic saga, the Starbender series, scattered around the station. You also find remnants of a game of tabletop D&D (called Fatal Fortress, in reference to early Arkane game Arx Fatalis), complete with character sheets filled out with endearingly messy handwriting, and a treasure hunt that you’re able to embark on.
The D&D tribute is fitting, because Prey, while not an RPG, shares with the tabletop game an open, improvisational approach to each encounter. Confrontations with larger Typhon like Telepaths, Technopaths and the formidable Nightmares are rarely head-on affairs unless you’ve piled Neuromods into your weapon skills. Each enemy has its elemental strengths and weaknesses, so you need to assess your environment beforehand and search for things that can be used to your advantage; a wall, perhaps, that you may scale with your GLOO Gun to a higher vantage point, a burst pipe spitting fire that you can lure a Typhon into, or an alternative, unexpected entrance to a room (such as via a vent).
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The Typhon may be a homogeneous bunch, but encounters with them are unique and circumstantial, shaped by a potent mix of systems and environments that conjure unexpected scenarios. I recall one Nightmare encounter in the Arboretum, where it was blocking my path into the main area. I inched up to the beast when its back was turned and transformed the lumpy husk of a nearby corpse into a friendly Phantom. While my pal kept the big bastard busy, I morphed myself into a nearby turret and peppered the Nightmare as it Benny-Hilled my Phantom around the area. Another time, I outwitted a telepath patrolling a swimming pool by heading to the gym area overlooking the pool, smashing through the glass, then bounding around between the large light fixture platforms where it struggled to zero in on me.
Prey is hands-off about pushing you along its narrative path. In fact, it’s one step short of plonking you in the lobby and saying ‘Right, I’m off. Enjoy’. Those ambling first hours of Prey invite more curious players to explore the place, and start experimenting with the GLOO Cannon; throw some balls at the wall and see how they stick. It’s an eye-opener when you first use your GLOO ledges to scale to an area you thought was only reachable by a Grav Shaft, or reach a balcony leading to a room that you’d otherwise have needed a key code for. It’s a dream for speedrunners too, who use the GLOO Cannon in combination with glitches in the world geometry to skip to whichever parts of the story and space station they please, ultimately completing the game in a matter of minutes.
The System Shock remake is an interesting artifact, taking us back to the difficult and dingy designs of the past through the lens of modernised (though still charmingly retro-tinged) graphics. Prey, on the other hand, pays homage to System Shock but moderniseseverythingabout it, fully embracing the years of progress made in the im-sim genre and gaming as a whole in the intervening 30 years. Both experiences have their merits, but if you want to see the modern-day manifestation of the many cool ideas introduced by System Shock (minus the undeniably irreplaceable presence of the villainous AI SHODAN), then Arkane’s overlooked gem is the best way to do it.
You can grab Prey for super-cheap these days, and it’s bundled in with Game Pass too.
