System Shock (2023)
Given its development problems, the fact that System Shock is a functional, stable game is a mini-miracle, but by sticking so rigidly to the original’s ancient design it will appeal more to series fans than newcomers.
Deep in the bowels of Citadel, the space station that’s been taken over by a heinous, hubristic AI known as SHODAN, I’ve lost track of how long I’ve spent scurrying around the unchanging halls of the Maintenance floor. I’m looking for (or at least IthinkI’m looking for, based on nebulous audio logs) one final security camera tucked away in the upper corner of some room somewhere, so that I can unlock the Repair Bay. With no guidance, no indicator of what my objective is, all enemies on the level dead, and a labyrinthine map of cut-paste corridors, this experience truly takes me back to an earlier, less refined epoch of gaming.
There are little glimmers of ways in which this experience could be cool, and novel, and showing us how we’ve been softened over the years by games that are too eager to hold our hands when we get waylaid, but most of the time, the theory behind this uncompromisingly old-school design manifests as tedium when I find myself lost for the umpteenth time, backtracking through the map and looking for that one audio log, that one security camera, that onecode randomly written on a screen in a completely different part of the levelto help me progress.
As a fan of so many of the wonderful games descended fromSystem Shock—Deus Ex, BioShock, Prey, and their kind—I was eager to go back to ‘where it all started,’ but in a form that would hopefully be a bit more accessible than the now-ancient original game (which Nightdive itself remastered in 2015). The thing is that being the grandfather of immersive sims doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a great immersive sim by modern standards, and in terms of those important im-sim touches like character-based progression, creative ways of engaging in (or avoiding) combat, or multiple ways of completing objectives, this remake actually feels quite primitive—more like a first-person shooter (and not a great one at that) in which you just so happen to have an inventory.
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You gain upgrades along the way, like an item sensor, super-sprinting, and energy shields which you can turn on in exchange for energy, but they’re very much linear. Your inventory, meanwhile, will mostly get filled with bric-a-brac like pens, mugs, and blood plasma bags that you vaporise and can then exchange for currency. Having to pick up and vaporise things individually in your inventory is a pretty fiddly business, and one of the many points where I wish they’d implemented some kind of cool solution, akin to Atomic Heart’s Polymer Glove, to make this kind of busywork a bit speedier. Of course, a couple of hours into the game it becomes very clear that Nightdive cares not for modern conveniences.
And that might please the purists, who’ll be happy to hear that Nightdive Studios’ remake of System Shock is very much a graphical overhaul that keeps the design of the original game, warts and all, largely intact.
You, as a hacker, are sent into a space station where the AI, SHODAN, has gained autonomy, taken over the ship’s security systems, and subsequently the whole ship, killing most people onboard or turning them into mutants under her thrall. You must get onto the ship, shoot anything that moves, and destroy the CPU nodes on each of the station’s mazey floors to eventually confront SHODAN. You’ll get no objective markers nor even any indicator of what your current objective is, and will need to infer what to do almost exclusively from audio logs. This is actually something I started getting into a groove with with the help ofSteam’s new note-taking feature. I was all onboard for having to figure this stuff out for myself, and you can see below how I was jotting down potential objectives, and going back through audio logs to note potentially critical information or codes; there’s a genuine pleasure to doing your own investigating, not unlike following the nebulous narrative threads in Elden Ring.
But even Elden Ring knew how to guide you along the critical path, whereas in System Shock you’re relying entirely on audio logs, codes, and other morsels scattered randomly around each of the levels; an audio log that reveals the storage unit where the enviro-packs are kept may be on a corpse deep in some secret room at the end of an obscure service tunnel, and at one point the code to a door is for some inscrutable reason flashing up on a screen at the complete other end of the level.
The navigation and visibility issues (which Elijah astutely covered in his hands-ona few months back) aren’t helped by various UI oddities. For instance, on the map, the Legend only tells you what a few of the many icons on the map are, while certain crucial icons such as elevators sometimes fail to appear. At one point, I was looking for a room called ‘Storage 9,’ but for some reason it wasn’t appearing on the map even when it turned out I was hovering right over it (whereas all other Storage rooms were marked on the map). When you pick up a keycard, meanwhile, you have just a few seconds to read what door it corresponds to, as it’s not viewable in your inventory. Lots of little things like these can really exacerbate the game’s already sluggish pacing.
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The claustrophobic map design—largely retained from the original game—feels like a holdover from those old-school dungeon crawlers where you moved around in ‘blocks’ and had eight-directional turning while navigating confusingly samey corridors. Unlike, say, Prey’s TALOS station, it’s not a particularly striking place to explore either in terms of aesthetic or layout, and it’s often too cramped for you to be able to express yourself in combat and play it as anything other than a pretty rudimentary first-person shooter.
On that note, when you’re not backtracking through the ship or picking up pens to vaporise, you’re engaging in combat with the ship’s corrupted denizens—ranging from robots of various sorts, zombie-like mutants, to poison-spewing plants and amusingly derpy-looking Gorilla-Tigers. There’s a decent number of weapons, many of which are upgradeable at dedicated vending machines, and you also gain a few abilities that could, in theory, make combat a bit more flashy, such as super-speed-sprinting and the ability to hover when you jump.
In practice however, the environments are too small and the mechanics of those abilities too clumsy for you to take on enemies in interesting or creative ways; the sprint has this nasty glide effect that tends to snag you on the walls, while the jump could really have done with some kind of air dash to make combat feel more dynamic. The damage you dish out lacks impact too, with enemies not physically reacting to damage, then flailing around weightlessly like plastic bags stuck to your foot when they die. To the game’s credit, it has some nice dismemberment effects in fairness—a kind of lo-fi version ofDead Island 2’s FLESH system—where you may, for instance, blow half a mutant’s head off, revealing the entirety of their tongue lolling around in their now-roofless mouths.
Be it a boss or a grunt, the AI isn’t too bright, and it will rhythmically shoot at you even if you’re well out of sight around a corner. That means combat is almost always reduced to sitting around a corner, figuring out the enemy’s shooting pattern while they uselessly fire at the wall next to them, then popping out between their shots to take your own. There’s really not much room or need for flair here. I had a few satisfying moments where I plonked down proximity mines to blow up multiple enemies, but more often than not, they’ll blow themselves up with their own mines.
One bigger encounter I had with a kind of gravity gun-wielding warehouse bot basically self-resolved when I was around a corner (as usual), and it launched an explosive barrel at the wall right next to it (because apparently enemies in this game can track you through walls and have no sense that bullets can’t penetrate them). This caused all the loose barrels around it to blow up too. It was a fun little emergent moment, but the fact that it was caused by bad AI was indicative of the combat experience as a whole.
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The best combat encounters for me weren’t actually in the station itself, funnily enough, but in Cyberspace, which you access through special terminals, taking you into a beautiful Tron-like dimension of strange geometries and abstract enemies. Cyberspace plays a bit like the old first-person spaceship shooter Descent, as you guide your flying cybercraft through these spaces made up of seemingly unstable neon cubes, gaining powerups and having shootouts with the computer viruses that have infected the Cyberspace dimension. These segments are legitimately great fun, filled with a confetti of bright lights and high-intensity combat that relies on your maneuverability. It’s one of the areas in which it feels like Nightdive stepped up to truly modernise an element of the now-ancient original game.
The voice acting in the audio logs does make up some ground here, as you get to hear terrified people saying their farewells to friends, people giving all-important clues as to what you need to do yourself, or rebels revealing their plans to take back the ship from the rogue AI. SHODAN herself, one of gaming’s greatest villains for gamers of a certain vintage, is done justice as well; her glitchy, iconic voice is phenomenally layered, as she can simultaneously sound like a sultry cyber-demoness, a baby crying, and a mosquito whining. It’s cool and creepy, and she makes as fine a villain as ever as she goads you on your journey, sets up some truly dastardly traps for you, and rambles in audio logs about her big bad ambitions.
Beyond the voices, the sound design as a whole is a highlight, as computer terminals click and hum when you get close to them, fans whir, and crossing a forcefield bridge gives off that satisfying lightsaber-likewhum. Along with the distinctive colour palette dominated by neon reds and blues and deliberately pixel-heavy textures, there’s a strong retro-futuristic atmosphere here, which means that in the precious moments where the game does flow and you’re not backtracking through its mouse-maze corridors, you can really soak up its unique lo-fi ambience.
System Shock is important in the history of both immersive sims and gaming as a whole, but its successors have done such a great job of building on it over the decades that Nightdive’s attempts to honour the original by rigidly sticking to its design render this remake obsolete by today’s standards. In some ways, it’s a miracle that this game came out at all, given the myriad delays, engine changes, and what we’ll probably learn has been a bit of a development hell. Maybe all that, combined with the studio’s inexperience in making its own games, resulted in Nightdive playing things safe and just getting a technically stable game out the door while not digging into the things that would’ve made it feel more modern.
As things stand, System Shock is one for the absolute purists, and I imagine its Kickstarter backers will be satisfied enough with how it turned out. It’s a technically stable remake that carries over most of the anachronisms and stodginess of the original 30-year-old game. Those familiar with and fond of the original’s seminal labyrinths, bewildering puzzles, and Easter Egg-hunt objectives may appreciate the opportunity to go through them again in this glossier new form, but the amount of friction its arcane design throws up may prove too much for most newcomers.
