Even though I act like a hardened veteran of old-school video games sometimes, the truth is, I’m a filthy modern gamer in the end. I prefer when animations are fancier and the graphic looks more comprehensible at one glance.

That’s one of the petty excuses why I abandoned System Shock 1 when I played it for the first time. I was intrigued by the fact that it was the father of the Shock series (and Prey2017) and the game that did the “Metroidvania” design before SotN, but then the Grimace Shake of UI design splashed over me and I died. Also, I was busy doing other stuff at that time too, so I just hopelessly abandoned the playthrough.

So, the remake is out. And even though the outcome isn’t exactly the same, I heard that the developer’s premise was not ignoring the value of the original and recreating the same contexts and systems with the modern graphical touch.
And a lot of people who played both said the remake is the almost-perfect conversion of the original System Shock.

With these gathered opinions, I’m going to think that the core value and the feature of both games are all the same.
I played it on difficulty “2” for every department and I didn’t use a guide from start to finish, except for one time when I didn’t know what the CPU nods look like (yeah I can be that stupid sometimes).

And I can say that even though there are some moments that made me feel exhausted, I really appreciated the game overall. And if it is true that the remake’s outcome barely changed anything from the original’s design sensibility, then I would also respect the old devs for nailing down the dungeon design at that time.

If you have been in some gaming communities, you may have seen some memes comparing System Shock levels and Bioshock Infinite levels. While that’s a surface-level sneering at best, (there are better reasons to hate Bioshock Infinite than that) it is true that the level design of System Shock is the most impressive part.
I would say, even if you set the combat difficulty modifier to 0, you will still find enjoyment in the level navigation alone, because the level is like a giant jigsaw puzzle that gets larger and more convoluted as you progress.
You walk down the new corridor and there are two vents at the corner, three locked doors leading to completely different areas, and four hidden traps waiting for you to step on. Oh yeah, and there are like five patrolling security bots charging up the laser beams, so good luck!
That was a little bit exaggerated, but something as unhinged as that case happened all the time and it made me tense throughout the whole game.
The Storage Room is probably the best example of this case with the sheer size of the level, the swirling multiple branches, and the vertical structure of the small rooms that make you aware of the 3D spaces. That stage was disgustingly confusing and at the same time really memorable because of that.

Until the end game part, there’s never been a time when I felt “I know it will be a smooth ride from now on.” even though the game features a lenient form of the quick save system and the revive mechanic. (I would also argue that the resources in this game are pretty generous that you don’t have to horde the items all the time, at least on the difficulty “2” modifier.)
But the point of this game is not about surviving in a minute-to-minute real-time action. It’s about figuring out how the whole gigantic clusters are interconnected while also juggling the busy work.
The anxious thoughts constantly whispered that I won’t be able to beat this game, not because of the combat, but because of the missing pieces I couldn’t connect in the gargantuan maze.
Even after you mostly clear out the level and reveal most parts of the map, it isn’t enough to get rid of the whole underlying anxiety.
Only after you see the Citadel Station getting exploded in the cutscene, you can feel absolute relief and it was one of the most satisfying feelings I had with video games. (And even then, there’s a comparably simple and yet challenging ending mission right after that. The game never lets you take a break lol)

And the experience is amplified by the omnipresent entity Shodan.
Technically, every video game is just about dealing with shit thrown by the omnipresent entity - the developer, but what I really liked about her is how she is(or the developer is) so on the nose about showing the hidden cards in the sleeves.
There’s a seemingly mundane problem, so you solve it. But then she summons the horde of cyborg soldiers behind you while mocking and insulting you.
You think you solved the main big problem, but then she directly calls you and introduces a new problem -something that requires another hour and hours of multi-tasking and puzzle-solving.
Even though Shodan is just conceptualized quest giver and surprise encounter, I would say her existence elevated the experience because I could kinda connect to the developer’s sadistic intent behind that character. You can even hear her monologue that she is a god damn SHINTO of the citadel. Yeah, sure thing, developer. You and the dungeon design are one and the same, you evil bastard.

To get to the negative bits, I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed by the fact that, while the level progression is extremely liberal, the solutions for the small roadblocks are limited to specific key hunting or puzzles.
When I was in the Executive level, I got stuck there for a long time, because I didn’t know that there was a second unlockable cyber lock in cyberspace. That specific part halted my progression for a really long time, so I got really frustrated.
In the ideal world, the game could have provided some way to bypass the cyberspace challenges like the puzzle-skipping device.
To be fair, System Shock shouldn’t be considered as a sand-box imsim like Prey. It should be considered as a classic dungeon crawling. But even then, I think multiple solutions for each locked-door-type roadblock could have worked out better for the game. After all, the strength of this game is connecting the dots in the large unknown places, not beating a specific shooter mini-game located in the tiny corner.

Oh yeah, and I can’t express enough how the final boss was a shitshow. Though, there’s never been a good “imsim” boss so it makes sense that the forefather of the genre suffers from the same problem.
But it’s still a shame because the other bosses like Diego and Cortex Reavers were serviceable as a combat challenge where you actually have to care about what you are doing.

Negative comments aside, this is still a work of art.
It shows that the maze-like levels are much, much more than just a tedious roundabout. It can be an amazing ingredient or even a main dish if the devs can weave them well.
If I could stomach the old presentation, I could have experienced this journey early on with the original 1. Sadly I couldn’t, but I’m so glad that the remake turned out to be a real thing in the end. My appreciation goes to both the old devs and the new devs.

People just easily throw the sentence “this game design didn’t age well” like some kind of experts, but if I’m being honest, if a certain old game is mentioned fondly by some people even nowadays, there is a chance that the only things that aged from that game were presentation and graphic fidelity, not the design method.
Unshockingly, System Shock was the case.

Was pretty committed to beating this until I hit the executive level and I started thinking about other video games I'd rather be playing. My own personal SHODAN, Larry Davis, sometimes mentions to me how a game he doesn't like drops in half-star increments the more he plays, and I think that about sums up how I started to feel about System Shock (2023). The difference here is that I have enough games to play right now and I'd rather not push ahead with this just to be like "yo, did you hear Nightdive made a 2.5/5 System Shock??"

Citadel Station is the same arduous maze it always was and it's still obtuse to navigate. It's massive, oppressive, and actively hostile towards your existence. Every step of the way you're fighting SHODAN, you are literally within her plucking out her eyes and shooting at the cells she sends after you like a body would attack a virus. But familiar as it is, it doesn't really add anything. The Enhanced Edition already solves a lot of System Shock's cumbersome controls, it lets you break apart its UI and chuck its superfluous elements into the trash, or you can play it the way LookingGlass intended: via a system of pulleys and levers. However, while the Enhanced Edition gives you modernized controls as an option, the remake is built with them from the ground up. You could play it with a controller if you want, like a monster.

This results in a much smoother experience, one that's accompanied by some great art direction, an excellent soundtrack, and combat that has much more ommph thanks to nearly 30 years of technological leaps in animation and graphics. It also feels completely unnecessary, and hours into getting horrifically lost and accidentally firing a mining laser at Earth again, I started to feel like my second run through the station was dragging. At its worst, removing too much of System Shock's chunkiness becomes detrimental to its charm, but perhaps that's the purist in me pining for whatever the hell this is.

Some aspects, like VR, feel actively worse than before, and I encountered a staggering amount of collision issues that sent me falling through floors and elevators. Occasional errors with the game mis-flagging my location left me spawning in regeneration booths on totally different floors, and I encountered one crash that required running through a few excruciating combat encounters in the Grove for a second time. Your mileage and PC build may vary, but I found the remake to be pretty flimsy.

It's still System Shock, which is good, but I found the remake to be a bit too buggy and conceptually boring despite the shiny new coat Nightdive has given it. I feel like you'd get more out of this if you never played the original or the Enhanced Edition, and if you have then you may find Nightdive's take to be a bit watered down. It doesn't even have the cool Hackerman intro... or rather it does, just expanded upon and rendered more dull for it, and I think from the jump that's a good way of telling you exactly what you'll get from this particular version of System Shock. Shelving this thing because I'm starting to understand how people feel about the Demon's Souls Remake and this is not good for my soul.

demo experience
The controls were an integral part of the original System Shock's lasting impression and appeal. with those removed and replaced with the same controls found in every other First person shooter/adventure game, there is no reason to play it instead of dozens of other immersive sims that do everything infinitely better. no longer can you lean in a perfect angle and shoot at the corner of the screen after detaching cursor. no longer can you manually grab and throw grenades. manually adjusting the notches of energy weapons to perfectly melt away mutants is gone as well. no longer do I feel like a cyberman battling an entire space station. just another weakling trying to get by.

A near perfect remake that remains almost a bit too faithful to the original. My only wish is that there was some sort of objective menu, where after you read or listened to an audio log containing mission data, it gets noted down so you have a clear objective on what you have to do. During the objectives on the Executive level I missed one switch which I spent over an hour running back and forth looking for so I could progress, so an objectives tab telling me which parts of the mission I have already completed would've been a nice quality of life change.
The biggest improvement are the cyberspace areas. No more weird confusing wireframe levels in this game.
Overall, if the archaic nature of the original puts you off, I strongly recommend this remake. Just don't expect it to hold your hand at all, you're mostly on your own here, just like the 90s!

Despite the fact that System Shock 2 is probably my favourite FPS (dogshit ending and all), I’d never made a real concerted effort to go back and play the game that preceded it. I knew that much of what was to become become solidified in 0451 games originated in System Shock, but by the time I first encountered those elements in Bioshock, much of that piquantness had been watered down to a highly palatable bitterness, necessary for tent-pole games that hit several consoles simultaneously, from the highly acquired flavour of PC jank, when being able to play console or PC really meant a lot, of the Shock name-makers. Even going back and playing System Shock 2 a decade ago required one session of bouncing off and readjusting my expectations appropriately. So despite the immensely rewarding sense of place and possibility offered on that cold and hostile station, when I saw that what laid the track to get there was more archaic, more artifacted, more mystifying, and more unforthcoming, I thought that I could just play Dishonored instead.

When the remake for System Shock was announced though, I figured I could get the context without the homework; I would be able to cruise through The Citadel as The Hacker as easily as Alpha and Delta could through Rapture. NOPE! System Shock is a remake of the 1994, but it has not been remade. The environments are wonderfully updated without a beautiful voxel fidelity that feels foreign and tactile and industrial, and the interface is snappy and easy to navigate with the solidified 30 years of reinforced key-mapping schema and necessity - but, the design? The encounters? The puzzles? That’s all 1994 vintage, baby. At pretty regular intervals, I would do something by accident and wonder, “Jesus, they didn’t tutorialise that?” Nightdive made the call in their updating that Looking Glass’s original ideas still held water, irradiated though it might be, and that their job was to allow a new generation to see it, nothing more. And I think they were pretty spot on with this approach: the parts of System Shock 2 that are truly great, the level design, the environmental storytelling, the incidental characterisation, the unique and strangeness of how the game asks you to interact with it; that’s all here pretty much as fully formed as it was in System Shock 2. Maybe more so, if just because the face lift (and complete counter-intuitiveness to modern sensibilities in AAA shooters) allow for what was great about BOTH System Shock games to come through as clearly as it ever has been able to.

That said, the 90s ImSim jank is still pretty gritty, and your tolerance for slowly locomoting (with a pretty pitiful stamina reserve) through massive levels with barely any idea of which surface of The Citadel’s, like, 10 different spinning plates is about to serve you a big ol pile of Akira flesh is going to dictate how much of the game compels you. The combat, despite gluing me to the mouse and keyboard with high impact tension - each bullet smashing through me with the impact of most game’s artillery class weapons - is flatly complex, with a huge amount of lateral possibilities, but not much ability to upwardly advance in tactics. You can tell when peeking in and out of corners, taking your three shots and then waiting for the enemy to take theirs, that DOOM had come out only 10 months earlier than the original Shock, and was pretty much the only game in town for really interesting shooting. The guns in System Shock (2023) feel great, and they look amazing as models, but taking the Scorpion or the Railgun into combat won’t change your tactics: you'll be looting ammo and shooting that ammo, but that's about as complex as the gunplay can get. Also sorely missing from System Shock 2 is the progression path allowed (being that this system was innovated into the 0451 genre with that sequel so I understand it not being here, but, you know), making exploration a more exciting and integrated possibility than in either the original or the remake. Getting guns that pack more of a punch - and gadgets that drain your energy faster than should be legal for how useful they ultimately end up being - is not enough to curve the difficulty up the way they do; the game starts off far too easy, and it ends with demanding some pretty reprehensible quicksave tactics being necessary to save yourself from having to constantly hoof it back to the nearest floor with a decked out med chamber. The ultimately pretty static state of The Hacker removes a great deal of replayability, and I’d imagine that on a second go, knowing how little you need to scrounge up to get to the highest state of mechanical proficiency, it would be pretty easy to cut the playtime of the first go through of The Citadel into 1/4th of the initial time.

All that said: wow, they really did place a lot of emphasis across so many more nodes of play possibility back in the day, didn’t they? Obviously as fidelity has become of preeminent importance for roping in gen pop, the design teams of games have shrunk their respective share of modern developers - to get someone who only plays 2-3 AAA games a year, you kind of need them to feel generally warm about everything in front of them. But Nightdive got off pretty sweet without making that deal with the devil: the design was right there, it can all be technical personnel for the remake if that’s what they want. I think Looking Glass would be proud as heck if they made this game - and whoops! They did.

the original system shock is one of my absolute favorite things of all time in the entirety of art. some things just transcend the medium they're made in. i love john woo's the killer as if it was my son, there isn't a day where i'll get tired of boris's flood, and 1994's system shock is a game i will always look at with the rosiest of tinted glasses. then there's also the fact that system shock is one of the most important games made. so much of its design echoes today. the silly 451 code number now overdone for no reason, the abundant audio logs to tell the game's story that so many games now replicate, and the foundation it laid for future imsims and other genres to build upon. oh and theres also how system shock is weirdly a pseudo metroidvania before castlevania symphony of the night released to define that genre. so when i decided to go against my value of never preordering games with the system shock remake, i prayed that i would see it released in a good state. by all means nightdive has stuck their landing.

system shock '23 is good. pretty damn good most of the time. the new bells and whistles made possible from newer technology are mostly good. obviously turn off most processing with bloom and motion blur, but the volumetric lighting is pretty nice and the shadows just add so much despair to the dark corners of the station. however, the beauty of the system shock remake's presentation is mostly from nightdive recreating every room to a damn T. fuck it, not even a T. they built a cross with how faithful their replication of citadel station is (minus the bridge from what i remember of the original). medical is just as coldly blue, storage is just as chaotic, security still has its looming height. it looks like system shock in terms of architecture, but it has more of a darker atmosphere than the cornea-burning bright hodgepodge of colors that made the original. from the 2 hours ive played of system shock 2, it feels like nightdive's crew loved SS2 more than SS1 and wanted to incorporate elements from the sequel into this remake. its more horror focused is what im saying and i welcome it but also sadly miss the constant overstimulation from the visuals and almost blaring music, fueling the confusion born from the labyrinth. the music mostly plays during combat. it's not a recreation of the original soundtrack. the original was hectic, whirring, thrilling. this remake is a synthwave combat track but that doesnt mean to make them bad, it's just different and doesnt evoke the same stress from the original's admittedly janky sound from its low fidelity. the ambient tracks are pretty nice too, they remind me a lot of prey 2017 which is what i think the nightdive team was also pulling a lot from because of the addition of recycling machines and junk.

the execution is alright. i like how it puts greater value onto inventory space, like in survival horror games a la resident evil, but it was also quite annoying if i wanted to fully take advantage of the tokens and recycling. it's not needed to complete the game, so its not that big of a deal but its also like a weird feature to add. its like nightdive wasnt satisfied enough with the modernization of the game so they added recycling, akin to the crafting systems that are almost always hamfisted or superfluously added in many games today. i mean fine, add recycling but did you have to take away one of the original's unique qualities with its overwhelming HUD/UI and control scheme? sure some gamers are already very squeamish about controls or gamepads even though lots of people will rebind keys to weird-ass alternatives like using the control key for interacting with things. cruelty squad taught me that games need to get back into using the control scheme to evoke discomfort or anxiety in players, and system shock '94 did so wonderfully in tandem with its HUD/UI where you swap between a cursor and mouselook. system shock '23 however doesnt have this even as an option, making it so routine in what ive played. it feels like prey 2017, deep rock galactic, basically any first-person game made in the past 10 years. this is nice for making the game more accessible to new players, but it tragically takes away a special bit of magic that makes up the gestalt of what it's remaking. at least with its modernization it brings satisfying gunplay. melee is a bit awkward but the guns are so nice to shoot and reload with their animations and enemy feedback. the peekaboo paranoia is still present too! leaning around walls to get the drop on a cyborg or mutant always felt great, making me feel defiant in this steel dungeon. enemies are genuinely terrifying not just from their grotesque designs but also the walloping strengths of their attacks. youre gonna want to find the shield augment as fast as possible and always look for upgrades and health kits. even the cyberspace is pretty good from a gameplay perspective. aside from a vaporwave-esque or synthwavey design that ive been so done with since 2019, system shock '23 makes me want to play descent more now. the six degrees of freedom is so smooth, confusing, and thrilling. the new enemies also make it so much more exciting but admittedly more annoying. sometimes the cyberspace projectiles you shoot feel too slow or too small or maybe enemies have too much health at times, there was just a bit of tedium felt at times that i couldnt pinpoint. i think it was mostly healthwise, so many cyberspace enemies are tanky. honestly i applaud this cyberspace for how nice it is with me never begrudgingly going "oh gotta do this one too? cmon." but i suspect nightdive were maybe not proud enough of their hacking or too proud to the point of thinking "lets spice up the final boss cyberspace encounter by having it be just a weak ass FPS section but with the cyberspace enemies!! (insane wow)" seriously i felt so blue balled in terms of gameplay at the end. reminds me of control (2019) where it had a bombastic build up to an admittedly lame final bit of gameplay.

system shock '23 though is still for the most part system shock. it's about shodan, citadel station, and the hacker rollerblading down halls with a laser rapier in hand. but its not as schizophrenic, paranoiac, and overstimulating of a dungeon as the original. it's just as free and emergent in terms of gameplay with the weapons and exploration, but it's not as unique or anxious because of the modern control scheme. an amazing remake, but it's personally not my system shock. i think i'll definitely return to this and the original, plus i dont regret preordering this, nightdive did a lovely job. it's just that if i had to choose on whether i wanted this remake to exist, im sure i would say yes but only because of the hope that some may check out the original. as much as remakes are hated (rightfully so most of the time), i welcome a lot of them because the originals still exist. to me, a remake can never be a total replacement or a superior product. it'll always be just an alternative.

The System Shock remake is at once a real nice modernization of the original game but also ends up being a bit too faithful to the original game’s bad design decisions. I played the remaster of the original years ago and practically immediately bounced off of the archaic control scheme. The interesting thing to me though was that it felt surprisingly similar to a modern immersive sim control-wise aside from how you interact with stuff in the world, which was clunky as shit. The remake obviously completely revamps the controls to a modern immersive sim shooter and it does so well. System Shock 1 was a genre trailblazer ahead of its time, but it definitely feels rather dated in how its later successors such as Prey 2017, Deus Ex, and Bioshock 1 have surpassed it. There isn’t much in the way of build variety for example, you just choose between ballistic weapons, lasers, and explosives. Hacking is also rather basic too. This isn’t at all bad mind you, but you just need to know going in that despite all the polish and love Night Dive gave it this is still a 1994 DOS game at its core. As mentioned some of its design decisions are just archaically obtuse and short-sighted. For the most part the game strikes a good balance on the normal mission difficulty of not holding the player’s hand but still hinting at what you need to do. This degrades as the game reaches its climax and becomes genuinely obtuse and the endgame just draaaags for several hours because of the obtuse and extensive backtracking and also how the Engineering, Security, and Bridge levels are big areas crawling with enemies. These levels aren’t bad, there’s no sudden difficulty spikes, but it’s still a gauntlet. Just as an FYI to save you the trouble, screenshot the numbers on each terminal in the security node rooms after you blow them up. Also screw whoever added that chess puzzle, it’s optional, but it still gives you more inventory room and it just absolutely sucks as an in-game puzzle. Keep whoever designed that away from designing video game puzzles forever.

Still there’s a whole bunch of good about this game. This game is the OG immersive sim and it still holds up quite well with all the sprucing up Nightdive did. The level design is mainly quite good with enough to reward exploration. Visually it looks nice too, with a strong 80’s sci-fi aesthetic of blinking lights and circuitry. The combat, while simple, is still fun. The guns feel good and I liked using the lasers. Though you’ll be using those lean buttons a good deal to nail enemies around corners because combat out in the open usually ain’t the best idea. The narrative is also rather basic, there’s not much in the way in characterization and practically everyone has been murdered or turned into killer cyborgs by the time the game actually starts but SHODAN is a great antagonist who goes on some fun supervillain rants and Edward Diego works nicely as her loathsome sycophantic corpo toady and recurring boss fight. I really do like the enemy designs too, the robots all have that ED-209 brutal killbot look to them and the cyborgs do look nicely horrifying.

Overall it’s a worthy dive into the gaming past despite some of its design flaws, now I’m just waiting for the SS2 remaster to come out.

Simply put, this is just System Shock with "relatively" modern gameplay. I said relatively because the game has clunky gameplay that doesn't feel like a 2023 game, it's definitely not on par with modern shooters (Of course not including shitfests like Cyberpunk). Not only that but also shitty AI, pixel-perfect jumps, lack of juice (except explosions those are great), enemies and grenades coming out of nowhere, etc hurts the game so much. The visuals are pretty good, I liked how they knew their limitations and went on with a "Retro x Modern" art style, and the sounds are decent enough. Level and puzzle designs are amazing but they're exactly the same as the original game and that makes me question the purpose of this remake, nearly everything worth mentioning about this is from the original. Still, considering the development hell this game has been through I think the team did a nice job with this but it could've been much better.

GENRE DEFINING. A TOUR DE FORCE. A LOVE LE-

In 1994 brutal cyberpunk horror game System Shock set the stage for the fps action adventure genre that would dominate video games until MOBAslop fortnite forever games were invented (I assume) in the mid/late 2000s. Her 2023 remake is a faithful reimagination poised to capture the hearts of modern gamers.

You are a voiceless protagonist of dubious moral standing known only as the Hacker. Waking up on an enormous high tech sprawling satellite known as Citadel Station orbiting Saturn, you set out with wrongs to right, computers to hack, and hearts to break mutants to shoot.

As you blast, hack, and puzzle your way through Citadel Station, you learn more about the events leading to your fateful stay through audio logs, radio transmissions, and macabre environmental storytelling. System Shock's story excels in its simplicity - you must stop SHODAN, the rogue artificial intelligence that has been conducting inhumane and civilisation-threatening experiments on those living in Citadel Station.

SHODAN is the ever-present, ever-watchful mommy matriarch to Citadel's mutants and mechanical monsters. Goading and impeding the Hacker where she can, she believes herself the deity of Citadel, summoned into existence by the perverse will of her former handlers (this is true to what happens in real life when you make AI art). Not only is SHODAN always watching, she's one of the only characters that will directly communicate with the protagonist. Her ruthless, humourless malevolence lends itself beautifully to the already oppressive atmosphere of System Shock.

This title competes with its contemporaries regarding gameplay, but remaining true to the original it retained aspects that a modern gamer may find a little rough around the edges. Backtracking was a mainstay in many older FPS games that fell out of favour with newer titles, and System Shock has it in droves. I don't have a problem with tasteful backtracking à la Half Life or Bioshock, but I often found it grating having to scour through doors and tunnels to find that code I didn't write down. The game's cyberspace sequences also took a toll on my patience, though thankfully these were few and far between.

The game is visually impressive and I have a soft spot for the retro pixelated textures, with the 80s cyberpunk vomit palette eventually growing on me too. Monster design is magnificently harrowing, my personal favourite being the cortex reaver (which you'll be seeing a lot if you're as adept as boss fights as I am).

yes goddess shodan i will serve you well as a cyborg

Really solid reimagining of the original game but doesn't nearly reach its heights. Absolutely falls under the category of "remakes which are lots of fun but ought not to be played before or instead of their source material" as I couldn't imagine people 'getting' System Shock's awesome points from this version of it.

Everything feels just a bit more generic and a more pointed to a fault; they clearly went for improved gunplay and balancing but the lower amount of jank made things feel a little more monotonous. The balance did at least retain the constantly deadly nature of the original game's battles, which I appreciate. Like the original they did wind up getting a little annoying at times in the last quarter of the game but it wasn't enough to make me want to stop playing. Unfortunately I didn't quite feel the level of flow the original brought me to, but there were moments where it did - particularly in the earlygame - and I couldn't help but smile. It's not something I feel all that often when I play a video game nowadays, so this remake even doing it a few times was worthy of note.

In terms of miscellaneous design decisions made for the remake I think there were plenty notable ones which were, for the most part, positive. For example, I do enjoy the additions of little vending machines throughout the game, though since a lot of them were placed like 'rewards' they were sometimes harder to get to than they ought to have been. I'd have rather they be more centrally located per floor with the items unlocking based on security level. The scrap and credit system is a bit underbaked but I didn't mind it overall. I'd imagine it's pretty dull to many players, of course, but it's a cute little bonus for if the player is getting low on resources and wants to take another route to replenish them to a degree.

On another note I do like the more various feeling enemies; their patterns are a bit more erratic feeling than in the original and the more modern engine clearly allowed for much more use of verticality in the middle of combat, particularly once the player acquires the level 2 boots. While the controls have been messed with to resemble pretty much any modern shooter far beyond what Enhanced Edition did, I can't say whether I respect it or not as it works well for the changes the game's made but obviously detracts from the general design of the original that's allegedly being replicated. There's a number of instances of background elements tugging the game away from System Shock 1 and toward System Shock 2; so many times did this sentiment come up that it was practically impossible not to notice them.

Indeed, the remake pushes for more of a straight-up horror angle in an effort to seemingly mimic the atmosphere of the second game, and I find that the approach is interesting but ultimately fruitless or a wee bit shallow. I don't really find myself affected by horrific atmospheres in games, but even so I found that the fridge horror brought on by the designs and audio log narratives of the original System Shock was pretty effective in making my skin crawl. This works just as well if not better in this version thanks to its voice acting quality, but it made it clear that the actual visuals and audio around me that were meant to immerse me in a fearful state were doing very little by comparison. Sometimes it even failed at what it was trying to accomplish, the most obvious examples being Maintenance deck and the final boss fight having very little of the intense anxious moods the original's versions of them had. That last boss fight in general was a very sad note to end on, as it lazily jump-cuts to a final cutscene with very little fanfare after just fighting a few generic enemies in a slow unfun cyberspace version of the main game's normal combat rather than at least using the cyberspace combat that had been present throughout the rest of the game.

Another random thing I don't know where to mention was that it bothered me slightly that they gave SHODAN a consistent set of pronouns and seemingly a consistent sense of gender in this remake; I thought it was cool how in the original (CD, not straight-up DOS) version those were all inconsistent, truly presenting this rogue AI as being beyond human systems of thought and societal norms. System Shock 2 did away with that and that was a move I thought was pretty lame, and the fact that that was retained here was one of several hints that the developers referred to that entry a little too much while looking back on the first.

At the very least though the general spirit of the original was retained. I do find myself a bit apprehensive to totally applaud this version for that as I do think it seemed to try leaning the original a bit far toward 2's (in my opinion less interesting) general direction, but I do think plenty of effort was clearly made to keep the most essential parts of System Shock faithful. The direct nods to MST3K and Bioshock via actual ingame dialogue were a little weird, though. Those I probably could have gone without, though at least the former was a decently well-hidden easter egg.

Speaking of easter eggs, the new Skully easter eggs were a cute concept but not particularly well executed. Requiring the level 3 boots to find the majority of them made the quest to locate them much less fun and rewarding than it could have been, and the game's overall design having several points of no return made it hard to feel like a justifiable design choice even if the scavenger hunt was, at times, fun. Similarly, as I mentioned before the vending machines which included important weapon upgrades were scattered so far out in inconvenient places that the game's overall design felt like it inherently dampened the novelty of their inclusion.

It seemed in general that the tacked-on new mechanics and extras were not very thought out before implementation; another huge example is the dull and frustrating inventory management, which felt less like Resident Evil 4 and more like an arbitrary limit which prevented player experimentation. With the weapon upgrade system existing as it is and credits not being super quick to come by, the player would have very little reason to swap out an old weapon for a new one when coming across them compared to in the original where things just sorta took up some limited slots while not being unique 'instances' that had whole upgrade paths lost if replaced with a new copy. It's just a bizarre set of decisions overall which again nods toward there being issues with the game's focus points.

I would say that the modernization was, if anything, at its best in the non-HUD visual department even if some of the atmospheric visuals were degraded. The models and textures evoked a retraux style which was not at all generic as it clearly based itself upon the visual likeness of the original's own. Sections of the ship could have looked more distinct, yes, but translating from the original I think things did at least look good without fully losing what they had been derived from. That is, except for the Bridge, whose visuals were entirely removed in favor of more generic ship textures. I have absolutely no idea why they would do this other than maybe trying to push for System Shock 2 to feel more 'distinct' in its fleshy identity, but that's pretty misguided if so. Maybe they just ran out of budget or time, who knows. I do also have issues with the UI, with it not only being more generic but also weirdly unhelpful. The original's was very complicated for sure but it gave you all the information you needed at all times; this time you have to dive into menus constantly or use ill-bound hotkeys. It's uncomfortable and there's definitely a sense of lost identity. Disappointment aside, at least the game's looks and sounds were good overall! Like with many parts of this remake there's a sense of genericization but it isn't without actually trying to retain some of what it came from.

In terms of that good sound I mentioned, the remake's voice acting was a marked (and practically unavoidable) improvement over its source material, as was the non-soundtrack sound design as a whole. I was somewhat disappointed that the soundtrack deviated very strongly from the original's almost surreal intense bops, but I'm a sucker for darker ambient stuff. The battle themes tended to be pretty meh and the elevator theme was annoying, but the exploration themes were nice to listen to and, as mentioned before on the atmosphere, make for a fairly respectable direction even if it's one I don't agree with. I've heard mixed reactions toward the soundtrack, but even ignoring it I think the ambient sounds and various enemy noises and voice clips worked wonders to accomplishing for the atmosphere what the new visuals did not. Just as in the original, using your ears is quite important to prepare for battles with patches or shields or even reloads or ammo swaps. Unfortunately weapons felt way too noisy both as viewmodels and in terms of audio, though, which I think detracted from the satisfaction one feels from preparing for fights as some seemed to come out of nowhere with the distractions the aforementioned weapons sometimes created. It was a bit of a shot to the game's own foot as it countered otherwise engaging sound design.

I can't knock this remake too hard in general, though. It was a blast most of the way through (barring the boring and anticlimactic final boss battle) and everything about it screamed quality and love for the franchise. As stated at the beginning, I don't think it's really possible for me to recommend this version of the game over Enhanced Edition to anyone but the most stubbornly modern gamer. To anyone even remotely willing to give a weird older game a try, the original is awesome and gives off a sense of immense notability few others of the medium do. This remake does not provide that key piece of the experience; it's a lavish afterparty meant for those brave enough to have gone through a janky 1994 DOS game and recognized its brilliance and its bruises, a slightly misguided celebration of System Shock rather than a replacement for it. It's fun and it's flashy, but I wouldn't call it as much of a necessary piece to experience as its source material and that's just fine for what it is.

The faithfulness of System Shock 2023 to the original’s design principles is probably best illustrated with this anecdote: I was still able to beat it after forgetting where I’d put a (theoretically) mandatory quest item.

Axing the original’s unorthodox HUD and control scheme debatably helps this remake carve out its own niche – if anything, it’s more novel to be able to play what’s essentially Ultima Underworld in space with a fairly conventional interface than if it’d just regurgitated something that already exists – but it also makes it appear more different than it really is. As much as I love it when a game demands you meet it on its own terms when it comes to aspects as fundamental as those, I’ve never seen them as the core of System Shock, not least because they didn’t survive into what’d eventually become its own sequel or any spiritual successors Looking Glass’ alumni would go on to contribute to. Progressing through whichever means would make sense if you were really in the Hacker’s shoes, with no arbitrary limitations to tell you that you can’t? Scenarios which would be restrictive, barely interactive setpieces in any other type of game arising organically through the player’s manipulation of overlapping, interconnected mechanics? Lobbing a grenade at something, ducking into a corner and peeking out again to see its giblets gently floating in a gravlift like a cybernetic pinata? These are some of the pillars which much more warmly remind me of what game I’m playing and they’re all here, rendered with visuals and sound which’re likely a series best.

That might seem faint praise, given that this remake’s 24 years removed from its predecessor, but it’s not. System Shock 2 derives its effectiveness in no small part due to its enemies’ (and, later on, environments’) genuinely repulsive visual design, coupled with the Dark Engine’s sound propagation system ensuring that any and all instances of malicious squishing or clanking remain paranoia-inducing no matter the distance between you and their source. It’s a high watermark for the medium in both respects, one which Nightdive’s efforts have adequately followed up on. Seeing a red lens flare in the distance paired with a monotone, faint but increasingly loud “searching” or suddenly seeing the shadow of an invisible mutant under a dynamic light source as you lose your way in a literal maze elicits all the right emotions, as well as some new ones when taken in tandem with a generally higher extent of environmental interactivity than either of the prior two games and TriOptimum’s raddest electric guitars. As much of an earworm as the original game’s MIDIs are, they’ve never instilled in me quite the same feelings as scrambling past inadvertently overturned tables and bonsai trees as a gorilla-tiger barrels down the corridor to the tune of this.

I say generally because there are some odd omissions in that regard, namely the inability to mantle up ledges. Any issues this poses’re circumvented whenever you eventually obtain the V3 hover boots, which allow for an unreal degree of schmovement up down and all around, but (to my knowledge) the earliest point at which you can get those is quite late into the game and long after you’ll have become acquainted with the fact that Shodan’s strongest soldiers are knee-high steps. What exacerbates this somewhat is that you can’t pick up and manipulate objects to more practically stand on top of them – it feels a bit unfair to criticise it for this considering that you can’t in System Shock 1 or 2 either, but given that ostensible influence from one other relatively recent immersive sim rears its head elsewhere, I don’t think its otherwise robust and faithfully labyrinthine level design would’ve been lessened by taking a leaf out of Prey or Deus Ex Mankind Divided’s book in this area.

Prey specifically’s the apparent source of said influence, namely its recycling system, this iteration of which I’d wager is a net improvement. Despite adding to the multifaceted purposes of every item in Prey, there were often cases where recycling was a little too much of a no-brainer; I’m not aware of any incentives to hold on to Typhon organs instead of recycling them into exotic material ASAP, for example. In System Shock 2023, recycling any item always results in the same one resource (i.e. money), but many items take up a hefty amount of inventory slots which are quite precious compared to most similar games, the catch being that you’ll gain noticeably more money if you recycle the item itself instead of first vaporising it into junk (which only takes up a single slot). These two key changes help this system enhance the resource management and decision-making inherent to this series while sprinkling in a bit of similarly characteristic difficulty. Altogether ace.

Difficulty’s one area in which System Shock 2023’s refreshing on multiple levels. Where people seem to equate “gameplay” with “combat” increasingly often, even with reference to games or genres where the latter isn’t the focus and might benefit from there being less of, it’s cool to have a new release which (as the original did) not only recognises that combat comprises just a single part of the experience but also lets you tailor the intensity of it, puzzles and primary objectives independently of one another. So much as figuring out where to go next or even just opening a door’s often as much or more of an endurance test as surviving against Citadel Station’s denizens – with no objective markers, means of tracking your current mission outside of hints in audio logs or even the ability to write notes on your map, this is a game which absolutely doesn’t care if you get lost. Between that, the reveal that Citadel’s intentionally, maliciously designed to be confusing and Shodan’s lovingly re-recorded chastisements accompanying you all the while, there’s surely some ludosomething synchronicity or whatever it’s called to be found as a result of this.

You don’t have to reinvent the proverbial gamer wheel for injecting that sort of experience into the modern zeitgeist to be arguably equally as valuable as the original. Aforementioned omissions like mantling or being able to annotate the map make for occasional frustrations – with respect to the latter especially, you can probably tell without context why this part of the game was my least favourite – but in the grand scheme of things they’re slight relative to what an accomplishment I feel this remake is. It’s an almost totally undiluted translation of Looking Glass’ philosophy which makes smart use of technological advancements since the original’s release in ways which enable it to differentiate itself from the first two games while still feeling intimately familiar, to the level that I can’t really think of anyone I’d prefer the merry go round of who's making System Shock 3 to land on than Nightdive.

Check it out if that’s what you want, because what you want is what you get.

System Shock 1 is loaded with ideas that almost feel lost to time, things that never made it into System Shock 2 or any of the other imsims that came later. Maybe that's because it's barely an imsim, feeling more like sci-fi survival horror-lite mixed with progression reminiscent of an enormous zelda dungeon.

I won't really spend much time talking about what's good about the original game. You know what's good about it, it's what got carried over into System Shock 2 and Bioshock and Prey. The good parts defined the imsim genre, and they're still that good.

The bad? Well for one, it's a much harsher game than it's successors. Ammo is more scarce, encounters rarely dip beneath a level of challenge where you could die in a few hits, and stealth isn't really an option. The hacking segments are interesting as an alternate mode of gameplay, where ammo doesn't matter but enemies come at you much faster, but are just as difficult if not tougher than the rest of the game. Also, I just found myself being ready for the game to end around 5 hours before it did, which is also around the time things got unreasonably hard.

The remake is pretty good. For the most part I like the visuals, though I wish they'd strayed a bit further from the original game's art and played up a bit of the horror, or helped the floors of the ship stand out from each other a bit. Besides that, it's wonderful to have a version of the game with controls I can easily wrap my head around.

I know most of this was negative, and maybe that's because the last few hours' difficulty left a bad taste in my mouth, but I really did like this game, and I bet it would be much more fun with a lower difficulty selected (you can't change the difficulty mid-campaign though). It's a cool look into the past, and it's good that the game is accessible like this again, but I also feel like it's pretty outclassed by its younger brothers.

The 1.2 update is a fucking disgrace. Nightdive delayed the release of the update by several months to coincide with some console bullshit, and it turns out the PC version of 1.2 wasn't even fit to be shipped as evidenced by the fact that the game is now even buggier than before. They stated this update was done MONTHS ago. I guess all those months weren't long enough to do any QA.
All previous saves are now broken. Dropping the default melee pipe can allegedly crash the game. HUD opacity is broken. Key rebinding access is still only partially provided. All GOG achievements are broken. Access to the builds required to revert to a previous version in GOG Galaxy has been REMOVED for some unknowable reason. Cutscene subtitles disregard user configuration. And to top it all off I've heard that the revamped Shodan fight which was terrible at release is now somehow even worse. I wouldn't be surprised if the random crashes that drove me to give up my last 3,3,3,3 run are still in the game.
Great fucking work Nightdive. Both Steam and GOG forums are full of threads complaining about bugs.
- - - - -
I want to love the remake but it's riddled with so many small irritations, both technical and tonal, and coupled with Nightdive's scummy behavior in the years leading up to the release that my view of the project is repeatedly soured. The remake is so frustratingly close to being excellent.
- - -
Yeah the new Shodan fight is fucking terrible.
Bugs I ran into in this playthrough:
Vaporize All hotkey vaporizes scrap.
Z-fighting on elevators during transitions.
Enemy giblets frequently display graphical errors.
HUD Opacity cannot be configured.
Cutscene subtitles cannot be disabled.
Map markers cannot be placed.
Camera map icons sometimes persist on the minimap after camera destruction.
Damage sound effect from getting hit by a plant mutant's attack persisted until I reloaded from the title screen.
The Executive level railgun disappeared as I picked it up. The interstitial animation played out, but there was no visible model of the weapon. The railgun was nowhere to be found thereafter. Eventually I was able to acquire one of the later instances of a railgun, but this still isn't something that should have happened.

Improvements:
The level 7 trap finally kills the player after all this time.
That's it. That's the only improvement after a year.
You know what, since all achievements are currently bugged, I'm not even going to suffer through the 1.2 Shodan fight. They had a year to implement a healthbar and post boss monologue autosave. Yet somehow failed to realize how crucial such features are. For reference, the current 1.2 final boss is a long enemy gauntlet where you only have access to one shitty weapon at a time and cannot see your healthbar. There are no checkpoints. There are no health pickups. It is long. It is boring. There is an unskippable boss intro. I'm not willing to waste any more of my time on this shit that is somehow worse than the 1994 Shodan encounter. I'm marking this as done.

I give up. I tried to like this game as I thought it would be right up my alley but no, I've wasted enough time in Cyberspace already, I'm done.

Sometimes life ain't fair :D I was looking forward to playing this, I really was. For years now, decades at this point, this game (well, technically the 1994 original), was on my backlog as one of the greats. You know these kinds of games everyone keeps gushing about when you bring up the "good ol' days". For me, it's in the same bracket as Deus Ex or Thief - old and somewhat clunky immersive sims that have a lot of jank and a lot of charm. I love these games...well I usually do.

Let me say that the game starts off really strong. You're thrust into this dark cyberpunk world that has a really distinct visual style. Within the first seconds of the game, I was hooked by the aesthetic. It's kinda hard to explain how the game looks, at least it is to me. System Shock looks like a modern game, it has very detailed models for enemies, weapons, and environments. Same goes for the visual effects - lightnings, explosions, fire, everything looks very elaborate and just as you would expect in a modern, AA game made with Unreal Engine 4.
However, and I know this sounds like it doesn't make any sense at all, System Shock also looks like a retro game at the same time. How did they achieve that? Well, it's mostly due to brilliant texture work. Textures in this game have this very particular pixel-style quality to them. By that, I don't mean that there is some PSX filter laid on top with the intention to evoke some retro CRT vibes as some Indie horror games like to do these days. No, the devs behind the System Shock remake somehow figured out how to design textures, that fit into a modern looking game while still keeping true to the visual style of the 1994 original. It's hard to put into words for me but it really works well. To me, System Shock looks like a mix between Blade Runner and Alien - retrofuturism the way I like it. You got your neon lights, your shitty explotative conglomerates that couldn't care less about ethics as long as they can squeeze every last buck out of their corporation, hacking, cyborgs, and of course, a sentient AI with a god complex.

That brings us to another aspect of the game I really liked - Shodan. The omniscient AI in charge of the space station where System Shock takes place is still a great antagonist, even 30 years after the orginal released. Shodan creeped me out. You interact with her in two ways. Shodan either shows up on various screens scattered around the space station. Here, she teases, challenges, and insults you and tries to discourage you from progressing further. After all, resistance is futile when facing a god, isn't it? You learn more about how Shodan perceives herself by picking up and listening to her audio logs. Here, she explains how she came into contact with various religious concepts by scanning the earth's databases and realizing that she fits the description of a god rather well. I'm not going to go into detail too much about what Shodan has planned to do in her new role as a divine being. Just know that she is scary af which is further emphasized by the brilliant voice acting.

So far, everything I said sounds pretty awesome. And it is - the premise of the game, the setting and the atmosphere are impeccable. The first few hours of the game were amazing. I was exploring the devastated space station, looking for items, weapons and, well...my objective really. See, that's something I have never seen done like this in any other game. System Shock doesn't really have a main quest. Sure, you know that there's an AI that has gone rogue and needs to be stopped - by you. But how you're going to achieve this is not clearly stated in some kind of quest log or whatever. There's no marker on the map for the next step or a text on your HUD telling you what to do next. Instead, you collect a bunch of audio logs left behind by the crew members of the station where they lay out what one could do in the super unlikely case that Shodan would have to be stopped. Pretty early in the game, you can basically access every level of the station. It's now up to you to figure out where to go and what to do. I know this sounds frustrating and it kinda is but somehow, deep down, I can't express enough how much I respect the devs for doing that. That's the kind of stuff I play janky retro PC games for as nowadays, no one would dare to do something like that.

But, and this really is one of the major reasons why I decided to put this game down for now, the level design can be really awful at times. So, as I said, you have to make your way through the station without really having any clear direction. This inevitably leads to backtracking. You may find yourself finding an audio log explaining how to find a specific code in a location you've already been before that you need to enter in another location that you've also been before. That stuff happens all the time. And, frankly, that would be alright if traversing the levels was fun. However, to me, it got old really fast. For some reason, the devs decided to let enemies respawn again and again and again. You'll fight the same guys over and over again. You never truly feel like you have completed anything. I'm sure this is intentional. The game doesn't want you to feel safe, it wants you to always be on the edge, always looking out for enemies or one of Shodan's schemes. I think that could work if the level design wasn't as confusing as it is which makes traversing it an incomprehensible, chaotic mess. To quote one of the OGs of video game reviews: "What were they THINKING????" The game even makes fun of this. There's an audio log that explains why the structure of the space station is such a complete mess. Again, I'm not going to give too much away but when I found out about this reason, I chuckled but it was an angry chuckle...the angriest chuckle :D See, it's the kinda thing were a piece of media wants to make fun of something by replicating that very thing. Sure, you made your point but you also contributed towards that problem by reproducing it yourself. Not a fan of that.

So, frustrating level design is one thing, and one I could probably come to terms with but unfortunately, there is another gameplay element that killed the game for me. If you played System Shock, you probably know what I'm talking about. Yeah, the god damn cyberspace levels. Every now and again, the game requires you to enter cyberspace - a completely separated part of the game where you take control of a digital space ship shooting your way through a Matrix-like 3D space where everything tries to kill you. At first I thought this was a nice distraction from the main game - a fun little challenge that helps keeping things fresh when you got tired of exploring the space station.

I was wrong. Cyperspace sucks.

First of all, I got physically sick moving around in that open 3D space. Upon entering any room in cyberspace, I immediately lost track of any direction. Often times, there are multiple ways leading to multiple sections of the level that you can take. More than once did I get lost and kept flying to the same locations over and over again. There was one level where my dumbass brain would make me fly straight out of the entrance again just because I couldn't compute where the hell I was and where I was supposed to be going :D Now, maybe that's a me-problem. But man, just look at any screenshot from cyberspace and tell me that it doesn't look super samey to you.
On top of that, once you die in Cyberspace, you're thrown out and have to redo the entire thing again. There are no checkpoints (at least I didn't figure out how to enable them if there were any) which means that sometimes, minutes of hard-earned progress is just lost. As I said, that really killed the game for me in the end. I was at a Cyberspace station in the reactor level and after like 5 tries I gave up. Shodan - you win. Congratulations, destroy earth or whatever, be my guest. I'm out.

So, being so frustrated in the end, why would I give this game a somewhat high rating? Well, I mean ... bro ... it's basically still a game from 1994 at its core. The remake is super faithful to the original. And, for the time, this game must have been mind-blowing. Yes, it's as obtuse as they come. The game doesn't hold your hand and it doesn't care if you wander around aimlessly for hours. It wants you to be sucked into this cyberpunk horror atmosphere and it succeeds at that. However, for me, I would have preferred some hand-holding. I wouldn't mind not having to face the same waves of enemies again and again. I would have loved to have a feeling of accomplishment, of having "conquered" a section of the station, of really making tangible progress. This game doesn't make me feel that, but that's ok. Definitely give System Shock a shot if you're at all interested in old immersive sims with a sci-fi twist to them. It might not be the game for me, but it might give you a unique experience that is pretty much impossible to find in modern games.

System Shock 1 is one of my all-time favorites, and I was really anticipating this remake for about 300 years, but I am so unenthusiastic about this. It basically sands down all of the unique eccentricities of the original System Shock while offering nothing new or interesting to observe. Of course there are many positives: the music is wonderful, the animations of the guns are surprisingly dense, and cyberspace is a marked improvement. The new bad boy attitude they gave the hacker though is dumb as fuck though.

I played through Medical and could honestly just feel that I had zero interest in playing anymore. System Shock 1 is a game I can replay all the time, it feels weighted and frightening in a way few games are, this remake removes all the little things that made me fall in love with that game.

This is pretty good stuff. I've never played the original, but after seeing gameplay, I know I can't even try that. I'm old, but I'm not that old; this remake was the only way I was ever going to experience System Shock. If you're tough enough to play games from before 1998, you have a heart of gold and I'm proud of you.

System Shock looks good. The animations are fluid and realistic (on your hands, anyways. Cyborgs act like stiff robots, obviously) and the textures are great, especially with the light pixelization. It's not quite going for the look of something like Prodeus, but you'll see light touches of it that are seemingly only there to remind you that this is indeed a remake of an older game. It was a style choice and I think it was well done. Another style choice, the one people may find sickening, is the lighting. The longer I spent aboard Citadel Station the more normal it seemed, but it is pretty painful initially. Lots of dark spaces lit by drenching, colored, neon lights. It was a weird choice, but again, I got used to it. The game sounds good, too, I was especially satisfied with the magnum's sounds. It just has a reverberating metallic pang to each gunshot and when accompanied by an enemy's head exploding like a hammered watermelon, you feel powerful. Cleaning up SHODAN's mess one skull at a time.
You will get sick of the elevator jingle, though, that I guarantee.

I think where it becomes most obvious this game is “retro” is how the story is presented to you. Once the ball gets rolling and you're in Citadel Station and something is very obviously not right, it's pretty hands-off. You get calls from people telling you where to go, but it's very easy to forget. When you're waking up in Medical, the thought of getting to the Flight Deck several floors up may as well be a pipe dream. I don't need Skyrim-like waypoints, but it can be tough to remember exactly what's happening. If you forget, going back and finding the appropriate tape/email is kind of a hassle, as it'll be buried among many fluff pieces that're there to build atmosphere and basically useless for your journey. You may pick up dozens of these per floor and that's the only way they're organized. There's a “Status” screen that's just an outline of the station and its floors, maybe highlighting which floor(s) you should be looking into would be nice.
The map is also designed in a way that's obviously meant to annoy you. You can even find an email talking about how Citadel Station was designed in a manner to experiment on its crew, testing the effects of stress in space. While an in-game reasoning for why the ship is designed like a video game is nice, knowing that information certainly won't make you feel any better as you're forgetting which elevator can take you to which floors.

The other big baptism by fire is the combat which I really enjoyed. It's very shallow but it's wild how much I came to love leaning around a corner and moonroofing a cyborg's dome. I wasn't initially receptive to how long it takes your character to juice up with the medical syringe, but I ended up liking the challenge with the timing of the mechanics. You really needed to be ready at the drop of a hat for shit to go down and to grip a corner for your life. Any turn could have a cyborg, mutant, or even a flying dinosaur ready to getcha.
The “combat” I did not care for was everything in Cyberspace. It just feels like you're getting fucked in the eyes by an old arcade cabinet, now high resolution!, and the way every shot takes ages to travel makes each section of it miserable. The final boss fight is in a modified version of Cyberspace that's EXTRA boring and was a horrible way to close things.

SHODAN is a delightful villain. She'll talk shit the entire game, assuring you your victories are meaningless and you'll still die miserably, insect. I liked the intro cutscene and the sudden drop/wake up to being aboard the nightmare station, immediately on SHODAN's radar as a problem. You could usually tell when a room was an ambush and it was funny to hear her taunting while she sicced some mutants on you. She's just so charming, but still, she's gotta go.

I recommend System Shock (2023). Again, I've never played the original, but if you're a fan of the eventual spiritual successor Bioshock (and you should be), I think you'll like this game, too.

haha... wouldn't it be funny if there was an option to just surrender so you'd turn into a cyborg and get to call shodan mommy all day?..haha

I hereby subtitle System Shock (2023) ((1994)) (((2007))) NOT YOUR GRANNY'S METROID

Out of 9 play sessions, 6 of them ended with the game simply crashing and me going "well I'll see where my save was tomorrow". I'm not really a performance chud but I think that's a bit much. Also the finale was uh... don't worry about it

I didn't really expect to like this as much as I did, but it's kinda wild. I might even go back and play the 2 originals. The art design goes crazy hard and I want to pay a lady of the night to talk dirty to me in Shodan's voice. I think that'd be a good time. There's definitely a few things I think could have been thought through a bit more (the storage system for one) but it's just so well paced and constantly entertaining that I barely had time to be mad about it. For single player shooters it might just be my favorite. Don't tell the other 5 that exist though.

It's really almost more of an RPG than an FPS. There's more looting than shooting. That's not to say the gunplay isn't competent, it's definitely fine, there's just only so much you can do with 1994 enemy design, and the surrounding systems and environments do a lot of good to distract you from the fact that you've just fought 9 of the same dumbass robot.

Consider my system sh-.. uh.. sorry...

its absolutely insane to me that this exists at all. it shouldnt exist but nightdive fucking did! one of the best remakes to exist, period. a perfect combination of 90s mechanics with modern day gameplay standards that make a challenging, but rewarding experience. what's disappointing is that the ending was underwhelming (which doesn't begin to describe it) but researching a bit, they are planning to rework the ending to be more inline with the rest of the remake. when it release, i will no doubt be playing again.

Tinha bastante empolgação sobre o remake de um de meus jogos favoritos... Infelizmente System Shock (2023) não me deixou satisfeita.

O jogo faz uma atualização visual bastante grosseira em comparação a sua versão original. O remake traz um visual mais higienizado, que por muito, acaba quebrando sua estética suja e amedrontadora, se aproveitar de efeitos modernos acabou trazendo uma atmosfera menos hostil para essa nova versão da obra, ah luz em abundância que acaba sendo mais confortativo que sua contra parte de 94, em que suas limitações visuais traziam amedrontamento genuíno sobre o que você estaria a descobrir e enfrentar. Decisões visuais como: "Manter certos itens com seu visual clássico ou paredes pixeladas remetendo ao jogo antigo", me aparecem mais um conflito visual, entre não saber qual estilo adotar, do que, referencias soltas, acaba se tornando mais uma fusão estranha de visual, que acaba incomodando bastante depois de suas primeiras áreas. O cyberspace também sofre bastante com seu visual, cores bastante repetitivas e fortes com túneis iguais, acabam dando mais dor de cabeça à pessoa que está a jogar, do que criar uma sensação real de que você navega em uma realidade única. Em questões estéticas pode se dizer que eu não fui a maior fã do jogo. (Apenas uma fala rápida: melhor parte visual do jogo é na luta final contra a Shodan, simplesmente bela.)

Na parte de jogá-lo, ainda continua perfeito em seu level design, com a decisão de mantê-lo quase idêntico a sua versão de 94, continua prazeroso de explorar, seus puzzles ainda são intuitivos e divertidos de se completar, só alguns puzzles que são apenas "vá até um lugar, colete um item e volte" que podem estressar um pouco, mas em sua maioria, como os de ligar a energia são bastante sagazes, me lembrando até um pouco sensações como a de jogar "The witness". O jogo continua a recompensar bastante a pessoa que está a jogar, sempre lhe dando coisas uteis ou coisas trocáveis com sucata. Minha maior reclamação a sua gameplay vem de seu combate, ainda é bastante simplório, apenas atirar e bater, sem complexidade, seu encontro com inimigos parecem mais um obstaculo sem muita profundidade e graça, que só servem parar roubar seu tempo até um próximo puzzle incrível, mesmo com sua grande variedade de inimigos, ainda todos os confrontos me parecem iguais. Suas armas físicas também são um desastre, seu feedback visual é péssimo, sempre me sentia batendo com uma arma de plástico em inimigos, isso causa um grande desmotivador de utilizá-las em combate, e ao longo do tempo, elas tornam-se inúteis mesmo, fazendo você sempre optar por usar suas armas de longa distância. Agora o cyberspace... não tem muito segredo, permanece ruim, igual o de 94, bastante confuso de controlar, sem muita variedade visual nem de combate, só mais um contratempo do jogo, infelizmente.

Na questão sonora, suas músicas são agradáveis, não são clássicas iguais a do original, mas funcionam e são bem encaixadas em seus momentos, não tem nenhum ato falho de direção sonora grande. Só não sou a maior fã de quando tentam ao máximo replicar as músicas originais, me parece só um sopro de desespero para serem memoráveis. O feedback das armas ajuda bastante a dar alguma graça no combate fraco do jogo (infelizmente, o visual do combate não acompanha), muita das vezes, o som do combate me dava mais graça do que a agressão visual em si.

É isso que penso por agora (quando acabo de terminá-lo). Minha conclusão é meio obvia para quem leu esse pequeno texto: me sinto decepcionada e prefiro o original. Mas talvez, como uma pessoa de primeira viagem, que nunca jogou o original, seja um jogo bastante marcante. Seus pontos novos me desagradam, e seus acertos são apenas uma réplica idêntica ao jogo original. Ainda se mantêm como um bom jogo, mas pelos méritos do seu progenitor, não pelos seus próprios.

Nota: 4.5/10
Queria ter gostado :(

System Reshock Might Be The Best Remake Ever Made

So I've been waiting for this game for the past 5 years and I almost gave up on the idea of it ever seeing the light of day.
When the game finally released I just could not lower my expectations and even with such high expectations the remake blew me away.

The art style of this game is top notch and actually genius, the highly detailed pixelated texture is compressed so well that this 20+ hours game sits still at a roughly 8 gigs of space which is insane especially in our day and age.
Citadel Station is one of the best maps in gaming history and seeing it in action in the remake was a JOY to me

Also the sound design is nuts and very impactful, you can tell when a shot had a huge impact on the enemy or not which bring me to the next topic, the unique dismemberment system
Nightdive Studios has made it's own dismemberment system for this game and man it's insanely satisfying to tear apart pieces off of mutants, robots or just any abomination that is featured in this game making in the process a huge salad of meat and blood on the ground.

All in all it's not perfect, it has some minor flaws that can be fixed with future patches
but imo it even overshadows the original 1994's system shock and for that reason System Reshock is a masterclass of the dungeon crawler immersive sim genre and overall it's one of the best games that I've ever played and my personal pick for 2023's GOTY

9-9.5/10

For a while I really doubted if NightDive would ever release this game. But I regret even thinking that.

System Shock Remake could be a strong contender for one of the best remakes ever made. Considering this year we got a Dead Space and a Resident evil 4 remake, System shock manages to outshine them all. There is so much quality here from gameplay, level design and art design it's all amazing. NightDive deserves a lot of credit for what they did here.

If you never played an immersive sim before try give this a go but be warned this game will not hold your hand. Citadel station is a dangerous place and you will need to be on your toes.

Hacker. Pawn. God. Insect.

The defining immersive sim re-tooled, rebuilt, revitalized, and streamlined. I should preface with the fact that I have not played the original game, nor have I played Night Dive's previous remastered enhanced edition of it, and thus went into this remake with only the knowledge of System Shock's prolific influence, I have played plenty of games it influenced. Night Dive's remake is the best looking, sounding, and feeling game I have played this year.

The game opens with a simple but effective drone shot through an unnamed cyberpunk city in the year 2072 that immediately steeps you in the game's atmosphere. It is a game about atmosphere more than anything. You play as an unnamed hacker hired by Edward Diego of the TriOptimum Corporation after you're caught stealing files on the corp's Citadel Station, specifically a military grade implant. In return for your services removing the onboard A.I.'s ethical restraints all charges will be dropped and you'll receive the fancy implant you discovered. You hack into SHODAN, removing her ethical restraints as per Diego's request and you're knocked out. The fancy implant is installed and you go into a deep coma to heal up. You awaken 6 months later and the station has gone to total hell under SHODAN. Here the game really begins and you've got all the handholding you'll receive for the rest of the game.

Moment to moment gameplay is like being a rat in a maze, which you'll later find was one of many experiments TriOptimum conducted on its unknowing employees, a series of hostile hallways that constantly keeps them, and now you, on their toes. You won't receive a map showing a whole level's structure, instead creating the map as you explore. The game hands you nothing. Finding a weapon isn't an event, if you missed one earlier there's sure to be another one ahead, but you could possibly miss every iteration of a weapon. Enemies don't drop them, only broken ones you can shove into a recycler to make some coin from. If you're like me you'll end up filling your relatively small gridded inventory with all manner of trash just so you can haul it to the recycler. You'll only receive two minor upgrades to your inventory, so you'll have to pick and choose what you carry. There's a small stash box, but it can fit two weapons maximum and there are about 8 different weapons on Citadel Station.

Aside from exploration, the two other sections of gameplay are combat and puzzles. Combat is tense, with quick battles either defining you the victor or finding yourself being rebuilt by one of the station's cyborg units. If you haven't found a cyborg unit then you're greeted with a harrowing game over screen where your barely breathing body is picked up by one of SHODAN's Cortex Reavers and your body is repurposed for her army. These encounters always have you thinking on your feet and while mostly serviceable as far as combat goes is still satisfying, the sound design doing wonders. All the weapons have tangible feedback and splitting a cyborg in two with a well-aimed, high powered sparqbeam shot never gets old. You have an energy meter that is constantly pulled between use on your shields, energy weapons, or speed boots. You are constantly managing this system, but luckily each level has at least one electrical pylon to fully restore your power. Using weapons such as the laser rapier or the early game sparqbeam, with 3 power settings, drains power. There are also portable batteries you can use to replenish this. Other weapons are kinetic. Magnum, assault rifle, or even a railgun. These help balance the energy system so that you're never left without weapons to fight with. If you'd like you can keep the opening game pipe and never worry about management at all, although I'd recommend at least finding the hidden wrench.

To fully navigate each level you'll find yourself at terminals that open up doors or force fields throughout the game. These are small logic puzzles that are a lot of fun and never get old. You'll also likely find a few logic probes that can bypass them entirely if you don't want to engage with them. The two main puzzles are an energy bar where you have to set the right paths of power to a precise energy read. Honestly, I was really bad at this one and started logic probing them in the back half. They're interesting and get you thinking, but it was too easy to bypass after the last enemy I killed dropped a probe. The second and one I did every time is an end to end connection where you have a grid of turnable pipes that you'd line up to connect two points. Its incredibly gratifying to see that light travel from point to point and get hit with the green light and closure of the terminal. Lastly is the revamped cyberspace sequences. Not a lot to write about here, but it's a notable upgrade and also visually dazzling. These sections are short and it's just neat to give you some visualization of a digital space within a digital space.

System Shock has my favorite kind of video game narrative which is when it stays out of your way unless you seek it. It mostly circumvents the musings on A.I. and poses SHODAN just as a straight up all-powerful cyber entity fueled solely by human hubris. It is an artistic embellishment of the lengths corporations will go for profit, proving that the issues we face today are the same ones faced upon the original game's release in 1994. Its story is mostly told through its environment and the many audio logs and data sticks. These two items are actually vital to progression. The game does not tell you where to go or what to do, you must seek out your own path given context clues. Someone in an audio log will mention a sector or a room where you can find an item, some give parts of codes, and some more importantly detail the process for preventing annihilation. You will find yourself with a pen and paper at least once during your play, which I think is beautiful. You always have a clear understanding of progression, a literal map of levels as you ascend to each one, but the game expects you to check on your own progression.

Night Dive's System Shock remake is more than a stunning coat of paint on a classic. It's main focus is not to create an entirely different game based on a possibly poorly aged one, but to bring 1990's game design to the present which I can see as a point of contention, but it's something that started as endearment and became profound joy in my time with the game. I feel often that contemporary video games are so afraid the player will become confused for even a moment that they'll practically play themselves. System Shock is a completely hands-off experience that respects player intelligence. As I was minutes from reaching the Bridge and final showdown, I found myself wishing this game would never end. It's my favorite new game I've played in years, and is one I will be playing many times over. Looking forward to Night Dive's remaster of System Shock 2.