Nothing immerses me more in immersive first-person games than having to witness an immersive DOOM 2016 first-person animation each time I pick up an audiolog, sadly they didn't go all the way and implement laborious canned animations for picking up every individual item like in the beloved immersive first-person game THIEF 2014. The maintenance level was the dark spooky area in the OG, so naturally the brilliant minds at [REDACTED] made sure that it was the most well-lit place in the game while the rest of this authentic Prey remake looked like Doom 3. You can't write notes on the map because that's lost technology (just like free-aiming or going prone) and we need to have platform parity for the sake of the five people who backed the kickstarter of a remake of a PC game to play it on their Xbox One back in 2016.

Not to sound like a Pretentious Gamer Man, but I really love how deliberately obtuse this is, especially in comparison to how the later Shock games would streamline both level design and game systems. Not to mention the fact that it's just gorgeous to look at while sitting at a total of 8 gigs(!), which just goes to show how lucky we are to have such a high-gloss remake of a game like this. Firmly believe that if Baldur's Gate III hadn't come out and (deservedly) taken over the world last year, you'd have a lot more people coming out of the woodwork to talk about this one.

These are the kinds of games that need remakes. A game so dated that its 1994 visuals and gameplay really have dated far beyond their means.

Having never played the original, admittedly the first few hours of this were disappointing because I was expecting an immersive sim like the sequel and the spiritual successors like Bioshock and Prey. You get the full feel of exploration, progression deduction, but the complete freedom in gameplay like you see in Prey is not here. There isn't 5 different ways to gain access to a room. This is more of an open dungeon crawler crossed with boomer shooter gameplay.

Faithful in a good way for the most part; there remains a complete lack of handholding as the game expects you to use your brain and deduce where you need to go and what to do. Mildly faithful to a fault; the cyberspace 6DOF gameplay parts are utterly tedious and pointless to play, and feel like they don't belong. They could've seriously found something different to replace them with. I'm also not sure what the point in creating a relatively nuanced respawn system was - limited on each level, you keep your progress - when the game gives you a saving system that practically encourages save scumming.

The first 3/4 of the game are the most entertaining. Don't look at guides and delve deep into the mystery and confusion of how you escape this place. But the final few areas are a bit of a slog and turn into a more uninteresting linear affair of progression to the final showdown, which in itself is a massive, uneventful whimper with barely any closure or resolution.

It was a long time coming, and I'm just thoroughly impressed and satisfied with it. It's a shame the Immersive sim genre will never gain the traction it deserves, what with the disastrous route Arkane have taken. We need fresh blood in the genre, a hero development team that spearhead a rebooting of a niche, the same way Mimimi rebooted the Desperados style of games.

Pleasantly surprised with this remake of the original PC game given the difficult journey this game's development went through. Its visual style has a nice balance between pixelated objects and modern graphics that's true to how the original game looked decades ago.

I think it "feels" appropriately modern when it needs to be like the combat and hacking into cyberspace, but manages to retain that old school feel when it asks players to keep track of current objectives and passwords on their own instead of having a side bar saying "GO HERE" (at least on the default difficulty settings).

The game does not have the most satisfying of ending sequences, but as a whole I would still recommend people to try it out whether for nostalgic reasons or if this is your first time experiencing the original.

As someone who considers himself a huge fan of "immersive sims" (about as blurgh of a genre name as IDM or boomer shooter), the original System Shock - the daddy of the genre - has been a humongous blind spot in my gaming experience. I knew pretty much all there is to it thanks to decades of reading PC gaming magazines, online retrospectives and trivia banks, but... well, I missed the boat back in 1994 and the UI was an outdated challenge even back then, let alone now. I filed it away as one of those things I'd crack when I got in a really retro mood but, predictably, the day never came.

And now we've got the remake! The developers NightDive (who have carved a niche in bringing back 90s PC shooters to the modern day) have approached the act of presenting System Shock to the modern audiences in the exact right way. The central experience is nearly identical, to the extent that you can use walkthroughs for the original game and they're pretty much 90% correct for the remake as well (and don't expect the game to hold your hand in telling where to go, those apocalyptic audio logs aren't there just for worldbuilding). There are however tweaks where it's been deemed helpful - balance changes, additions to both the enemy and armory repertoires, some new audio logs explaining little gaps in the original (and foreshadowing System Shock 2) and minor gameplay additions. The big change is obviously how the game plays, in that it now behaves like you'd expect a first person game to do in the 2020s and that makes for both a smooth and incredibly immersive experience. I also love the little touch in how the updated graphics have a touch of old-school scruff into the textures, turning the visuals into a fascinating hybrid of the 1990s and 2020s - once I got accustomed to it, I fell in love with it and I think it adds a lot to the game's incredibly tight atmosphere.

And... that's all there is to it, in a good way. System Shock wasn't the first of the immersive sim family tree (and I really would love Ultima Underworld to receive a similar remake), but it's the one that codified the ethos of the genre - (0)451 and all. Because the remake is kept so faithful, there's no unique twists to the core formula and it's bound to be incredibly familiar to everyone who's played games like this in the past; if anything, for veterans of the genre who've experienced its growth it might not even feel that much of an immersive sim as System Shock stays a little more on rails and how it gives the player the freedom to proceed in their own way is a lot more micro level. But it speaks a volume to the legendary strengths of the original game that you don't need anything else. The experience of surviving through the Citadel station, scrounging for ammo while outsmarting its rampant AI and eventually beginning to gain an upper hand - it's incredibly gripping and it doesn't need anything else. The relative simplicity of System Shock is one of its great strengths because it allows it to focus on the feel of the experience.

System Shock is a great example of what remakes ought to be: taking great games whose strengths have been damaged by time and technology moving on, brushing them up and bringing them closer to modern day sensibilities in presentation and gameplay but understanding and retaining what made them so special in the first place and not touching that.

(a small minus however that whilst you can customise nearly all controls and a number of gameplay elements, the quickslot inventory has been left oddly rigid: you can't choose which way scrolling the mouse wheel moves the inventory up and down, nor can you rebind the keys for the quickslot inventory. As a non-WASDer who apparently scrolls his mousewheel to a non-standard direction, I was a lot slower than I should have with my inventory management)

Prey 2017 is high up there as one of my favourite games of all time, so a remaster of what's essentially its grandfather works well for me. From what I understand Nightdive were as faithful as possible to the original which if that's the case then System Shock holds up pretty damn well in my opinion, love the labyrinthine design and exploration that's encouraged as well as plenty of enemy and weapon variety. The lack of any sort of waypoint or marker is something that threw me off at first but greatly enhances the game since I had a lot of fun trying to work out what to do and where to go, and the same goes for the story which was pretty engaging to piece together via audio logs etc. I also really dig the art style and pixelated graphics, just a really nice touch overall :)

System Shock's 2023 remake felt like an insight into what people valued about the original, why it left a mark, and how far the imsim (immersive simulation) genre has come.

Citadel Station is big, bright, and labyrinthine. Seemingly every wall and ceiling covered in glowing screens and lights, making readability (what can I actually interact with? what am I supposed to do in this room?) hard to parse for the first several hours of play. The station's layout intensifies this sense of disorientation. Each floor of the space station is sizable and sprawling, with twisting, intersecting, and hidden rooms making navigation as much of a mental exercise as the game's basic "redirect the flow" puzzles. This sense of disorientation feels thematically apt, but it has costs: prodding at every surface and/or overlooking critical buttons & switches is frustrating, and the puzzling architecture eschews any sense of verisimilitude. (The game pokes fun at itself with a one-off audio log about how SHODAN intentionally designed the station to be maze-like, which, haw haw, but remains a barrier to immersion.)

The means of interacting with the environment are also generally primitive: run, jump, shoot, and press buttons. While the game does find some simple but effective ways to iterate on those, I couldn't help but think about the ways Arkane's imsims have pushed environmental interactions forward (Dishonored's blink & rat possession! Prey's foam crossbow & mimic matter! Metroid Prime's scan visor & morph ba- wait a second).

Narratively, the game feels a bit thin. After a tightly-paced opening, nearly all of the written content that follows is audio logs of the crew at various points of suffering and SHODAN's taunts. It still hits some good narrative beats, but anyone hoping for thoughtful insight into Shodan's motivations or, frankly, any well-developed cast members (arguably beyond Shodan) will be disappointed.

Speaking of Shodan - while her taunts and traps were fun, it felt a little flaccid due to the reanimation mechanic. (Basically, you can unlock fixed respawn points that will allow you to die & return without losing any items or progress otherwise.) When her most devious trap turns a game over into a slap on the wrist, it starts to feel like she's all bark and no bite. (Segments without these respawn points are a bit more engaging.) Were other consequences for taking the respawn - additional enemies encroaching into new places, traps set for your return - deciding between taking the respawn or reloading a save would be fun! But as it stands, it felt like an odd and underdeveloped choice. (There is a difficulty option that addresses this by putting a hard 10-hour cap on gameplay. It's an interesting option, but it seems ill-fit for a first playthrough - mine took me 18ish hours.)

Other bits are similarly impressive by 1994's standards but undercooked or unremarkable today. Combat is fine - some of the weapons are especially satisfying to use, but enemy AI is disappointingly limited. Cyberspace segments play like baby's first Descent & could be shortened or cut. The soundtrack is extremely functional cyberpunky techno that left little impression.

As a fan of imsims, I enjoyed the look into the genre's history through the murky lens of a faithful-seeming remaster. I wouldn't recommend it to those interested in trying out immersive sims - honestly, just play Prey (2016).

I was like 3 years old when the original came out so I never got a chance to experience it when it first released. Because of this I will be judging this game not as a remake but as a new game because in my eyes, that's what it is. I understand this may be a little unfair so I will do my best to be aware of the context in which this game exists. System Shock was originally a DOS game and if you aren't past your prime yet and thus have no idea what DOS is think the Original Doom, Civilization, and Wolfenstein games. So in that context this remake is a wildly impressive step up in terms of quality. However judging based on 2023 standards this game just doesn't hold up when compared to some of the more advanced remakes that have come out in the past few years like Resident Evil 4, Final Fantasy 7, and Demon Souls for example.

Starting with the graphics, the visuals here have a style that I really enjoyed because it feels somewhat modern but clearly not shooting for realism. I'm an art style over realism guy so this aspect was fine to me. Realistically speaking though graphically we are looking at something in the neighborhood of 2007's Bioshock level (Note: I will be using Bioshock a lot as comparison because that is pretty close to what this game felt like for me). This was right in the middle of my formative years so maybe that's why I am so fond of that look. For a 2023 game though, the argument could be made the graphical fidelity leaves something to be desired.

As for the gameplay, this is the aspect of the game I found myself liking the least. System Shock plays (again) similar to Bioshock in that there isn't really a cover system and combat engagements are usually spent strafing side to side trying not to get shot while simultaneously shooting your target in hopes they die first, only in this game you don't have magic powers in your left hand that help dispatch of enemies more efficiently. This style of combat feels a little clunky and dated but is mostly fine. The problem here is that you take a lot of damage per hit and healing items are rarer than they feel like they should be. It almost seems like the game wants you to use the respawn mechanic when exploring and save your healing items only for when you are progressing or fighting a boss. This just didn't feel good to me as dying is always something I try to avoid at any cost in games. Because of this most of the game I found myself low on health and stressfully light on healing items. I will add that the game has seemingly robust difficulty options where you can adjust the difficulty of the world/missions, the combat, the puzzles, and the pretty lame cyberspace sections separately. I kept everything on 2 (normal) for my playthrough but in hindsight probably would have had a more enjoyable time setting combat to 1. Sadly I don't think you can change difficulty mid game though so I was pot committed at the point I decided I would want to change it.

The world design and lack of a leash I found to be quite refreshing and Shodan is a memorable antagonist. I love when a game lets you figure out the world at your own pace and doesn't have huge map markers telling you exactly where you need to go. In System Shock you have to figure it out yourself based on logic. This will sometimes be an audio log mentioning a way to get past a certain area and sometimes you will simply have explored everything in an area and thus decide it's time to move on and come back later when you have the proper key or item to progress. While this may be a tedious system of trial and error for some, I found it engaging and immersive. The only issue with this design is that it requires a lot of backtracking if you are actually going in blind and enemies respawn quite often so you will run into scenarios when you don't have the ammo to spare on respawning enemies but need to dispatch them in order to get to where you are trying to go. It's just another wrinkle in a game like this, isn't necessarily bad but at times you will feel like you are being punished for being inquisitive or not immediately figuring out what you need to do.

Ultimately I enjoyed the game, though it felt dated immediately. Part of me enjoyed that it felt like a classic game but another part wished they had updated it to be on par with the present day state of the art. I'd like to hear what went into the decision to remake a game in the 2020's, that originally came out in the early 90's, but only update it to roughly 2000's standards. I imagine they were worried that updating it too much would risk making it not feel like System Shock to a person who loved the original. I can see this argument, but as a person who never played the original it just felt like I was playing an old immersive sim akin to Bioshock... Which is one of my favorite games, but I imagine I wouldn't like it nearly as much if I played it for the first time today.

If you're into deep exploration first person games with well written world building and the feeling of unfolding a story as you play, you'll love system shock.

Now if you just think you're getting a traditional action adventure FPS and you don't really care about interacting with the world, you'll probably still find some enjoyment but this was not made for you.

System Shock is all about exploring all the levels of the Citadel Station and uncovering what happened while you were sleeping. And it never becomes tiring or like a chore - it stays interesting from start to finish, following a storyline as you go through the levels and find out more through audio logs and environmental touches.

I had an absolute blast exploring Citadel.

Really incredible game, I played the first level of this remake at least 4 times between all of the demos over the years and now that I can play the full thing I can gladly say it lives up to that it lives up to my expectations at least. My biggest problem with this game is cyberspace. I know it was the part people hated the most about the original and I don't think they did enough to improve it here, its just a mediocre little shooter. Everything else though is incredible outside of the ending. I love Shodan she's an incredible antagonist.

SHODAN still relevant all these years especially with Artificial Intelligence taking the world by storm in 2023. Who knew....

SHODAN is honestly without a doubt one of the best villain's in gaming history. System Shock remake certainly lives up to what Nightdive studios was dreaming about when they announced this game back in 2016-2017. A faithful remake with some great Quality of Life additions. It's a great game if you are familiar with the 1994 version of the game. Combat is where it changes the most here. Now that we have established where First person shooters are in Gaming History we can now go back and give the good ol games more of the identity and proper care which is what Nightdive studio does well. With that the enemies are also updated and are more aggressive than the 94' counterpart. Also changing how to "Hack". I really enjoyed this as much as the 94' counterpart as it had a lot of wiring and I wasn't sure where the wall was lol. I really appreciated the art style here where it looks modern from a distance but it retains its pixelated architecture from the Original. Cyberspace will always have a place in my heart and I really owe it to Warren Spector who produced the original to getting me into Immersive Sim games.

The difficulty is what you expect with the tweaks on Mission, Combat, Puzzles etc. I did 2 all the way through and there were times I was confused where to go since its been so long and Old Guides still work on this game to my surprise lol. I do wish that there was a more QOL improvements in the Objective base difficulties. Although I heard switching to 1 on mission gives you generic waypoints, I do wish that was overhauled to give new players who have never played System shock a comfortability into understanding what OBJs have been completed so they do not run around for an hour forgetting weather or not they turned on a switch or forget to write a number they saw on a screen. This is probably my only gripe I have with remake honestly which is it remains too faithful in the difficulty which may turn off some folks.

I really LOVE System Shock Remake! SHODAN presence throughout the game make its seems like she is toying with me at every corner as the "Hacker". A pathetic insect infiltrating Citadel Station. A pleasant surprise to be sure!

ainda prefiro o charme do primeiro. a falta de trilha sonora nesse remake me deixou bem triste. system shock 1 tem toda uma vibe que aqui foi deixada de lado pra ser algo mais imersivo, o que, pra mim, quebrou a atmosfera que fizeram o primeiro jogo. esse remake e o clássico são coisas totalmente diferentes, um é mais uma aventura cyberpunk e o outro um terror psicológico imersivo. não fizeram o que eu gostaria mas fora isso a nightdive mandou bem demais. melhoraram totalmente o combate e aquele cyberspace que me deixou travado na cadeira uma vez que tinha fumado um e fui jogar o original. fico feliz de ter um estúdio que se importa em trazer de volta esses jogos que foram os pilares do que é videogame hoje em dia

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did because I enjoy the immersive sim genre (though I'd say System Shock isn't the most accurate representation of the genre) and all of the well-known games that were inspired by the original System Shock to this day.

Unfortunately, System Shock has something that regularly makes me fall off of similar games, which is a big reliance on quick-saving and reloading. Enemies that kill you with a few shots, health items being very scarce compared to how easily and how much damage you take, multiple areas that you just aren't supposed to be at yet (keyword 'radiation') that will empty your health items before you eventually realize that you shouldn't have been here in the first place and more. It's something that makes me hesitant to say I'd recommend it to everyone, and I think that's more than acceptable among gamers. It's a niche game made for a certain audience who will love it, popularized and refined in games like Bioshock, Prey, Deus Ex, heck even Dead Space and more. And even beyond that, System Shock has done things that I have not previously seen in the 100 other games I had previously played as this retro challenge I'm doing (see bottom of the review), especially in terms of its storytelling, which has caught on in the years to come.

Yet, despite the fact that I can acknowledge and respect what this game has accomplished at its time, it unfortunately never managed to grab me. Both because of the first issue I mentioned, but also because of some other issues. For one thing, the progression in this game truly shows its age. That's a good thing for those who want the remake to be faithful to the original. But to start the game and have a general idea that you're meant to stop SHODAN, but other than that rather aimlessly walk through 9 or so separate areas to just progress further and further to the end, didn't feel all that engaging. It can't be helped that in each area, you look for keycards to unlock progression, a pretty common thing back in the day, and do the same few puzzles and shoot the same few enemies throughout. Enemies that either felt too weak or too overpowered to me. Another thing is the recycling system in the game. To get currency, you grab junk items and vaporize them in your inventory, which turns them into scrap to recycle for the currency. That becomes pretty tedious after a while, and it's not as optional as I anticipated it being because items will be very useful in this game (healing items in particular) and you get very little currency outside of recycling.

The storytelling is pretty good to this day, as it's told through voice recordings for the most part, which gives you an idea of how it was for the people working at the space station this game is set in while SHODAN went rogue. Some of the voice acting is less good than most of it, but I enjoy this style of storytelling and that's true for this game too. The atmosphere grabbed me as well, and the threat of SHODAN was portrayed really well throughout.

Unfortunately, as a package, the gameplay loop itself did not grab me as much as I would have hoped. There is a demo for the game on Steam, so I'd urge you to try it and decide based on that whether you want to buy the full game. It has its many fans, but it's worth mentioning that the game is definitely not for everyone. And I'd definitely say that has more to do with the taste of the player then with the quality of the game, though the game does have its flaws.

(This is the 101st game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

System Shock is a game that immerses the player by setting them loose in a space station with little idea of what is going on or what to do. Because the player must explore the station in order to gain that information, and since the station has been overrun with horrible cyborg mutants, there is a real tension and physicality to the player's interaction with, and understanding of, the game world. There's no glowing marker telling you where to go next, and as such the player must learn the world intimately and keep their eyes open and mind engaged, likely even keeping a notebook while playing.

The System Shock Remake is visually an incredible game, not only doing justice to the original game's design but also just being one of the most stunningly cool and beautiful looking games in modern times. The sound design and music have gotten mixed reception but I personally really liked it and thought the music was great.

In terms of gameplay an approach was taken that kept a lot of the essence of the original game while updating it with what 30 years of game design development in the industry could aid the aging game with. The inventory system is snappy and intuitive, with additional options added in the remake to lighten some headaches and make once useless items more useful.

The story is compelling and the method in which it is told has been made almost a standard for story-driven isolated experiences ever since.

While my enjoyment of the game had its ups and downs throughout, in many of my play sessions I found myself having a total blast and thinking to myself "I am LOVING this", doesn't that deserve a high rating?

Another game I started off really weird with. I played this on launch, really excited to see a reimagining of what would end up inspiring games like PREY and Bioshock and... man was I disappointed. It wasn't... bad per se, but it felt way too cryptic for its own good and relied too much on being faithful to the original for the sake of the fans. A great thing if you are indeed a fan of the original, but not a good thing if you are a newcomer.

After playing SS2 and falling in love with that game so much to the point where it quickly became an all-time favorite for me, I was interested in revisiting this game again, and the recent patch felt like the best opportunity. Does it click fully for me now?

Yes and no. I appreciate and respect this game a lot more now then I did prior, especially as a remake, but I still largely prefer SS2 and I really feel that you should play that game first if you're at all interested in this franchise. That's a game I think anyone can pick up and enjoy. If you liked SS2 already and want something more challenging to pick at your brain or are incredibly familiar with the original, then this game is for you.

One thing I'll immediately say is PLAY ON MISSION DIFFICULTY 1 IF YOU AREN'T FAMILIAR WITH THIS GAME IN ANY CAPACITY. And if anyone complains at you for doing this, fuck them. This is the big thing that really made me want to revisit this game, since mission skill 1 is supposed to give you waypoints to your objectives on your map and they supposedly didn't work on launch for some reason. And I think save for some of the bugs and jankiness that exist as of writing, this is a great way for people to play this game at first. It's not to say this game is unnavigable outside of it, this game does a good job telling you what to do so long as you listen to audio logs and emails (and the game just gives you the waypoints, no objective list, you still need to put the pieces together to figure out just HOW to do it which I enjoy), but what you have to memorize is way more then in SS2 (a game that actually KEEPS TRACK of your objectives on any skill), and there's no way to take notes in-game save for the steam overlay if you play on there. That and the later half of this game really likes to force you to backtrack to previous floors just to grab one specific item or memorize something for later. At least Abe's head is on the same floor as the door you need to unlock, but if I didn't know I had to memorize the CPU node terminal numbers on my first playthrough to get the self-destruct code, I would've HATED having to go back to write them down again. My only real issue with the waypoints is that sometimes they won't disappear after you did what was tagged in that area which can cause a bit of confusion on what to do next if your brain forgets what you have to do next. As an example, the objective marker on the Cyberspace computer that unlocked the doors to the antennae on engineering didn't clear up even after I destroyed all the locks, which made me second guess myself for a bit since I remember on my first playthrough I forgot one and had to go back to destroy the last one. Again, not a bad thing, and for all I know this'll get fixed soon, but it happened pretty often and it bugged me.

Another thing I'll say off the bat is I really didn't give the combat as much praise as I probably should've back then. Sure, anything is better then the OG's combat, but this game's gunplay is REALLY satisfying. Headshots are meaty and satisfying and slicing a dude with a laser rapier in half and seeing all the blood splash out never gets old. I really appreciated this game's focus on survival period this time around, compared to how frustrated I felt on my first run. When I got into that mindset of vaporizing worthless items for scrap, keeping the ones that were more valuable to recycle later, and playing liberally with ammo and using all my resources everything really clicked with me. At the very least I just wish there was an auto-vaporize function for items that have no as-is recycle value, since it meant after a certain point I focused more on the items that I KNEW had a decent payout, being electronics and broken weapons.

The cyberspace sections aren't bad either imo. I turned them to difficulty 1 on my first playthrough since I remember really hating them in the demo, but idk they were a nice pacebreaker. They aren't exactly complex, but they're fun and simplistic for what they are.

I think timing was what really set this game back for me when it first came out. Comparing this again to something like the RE1 remake, at least RE had so many other games before it that proved to be good starter points. System Shock hasn't had a game since 1999, so in turn more people are inclined to make this their starting point, when it's easily the second least approachable in the series next to the OG, and leading to unfair comparisons (Me wishing this game played more like BioShock 1 was a bad take looking back, since that series plays nothing alike to this one, even compared to SS2). Again, if you want to play this game, either play 2 first or be familiar with the OG, and set that difficulty to 1. Overall a fun time and a great remake, but WILL be make or break for people if you aren't accustomed to this game's specific style of design.

Remaking a game like the original System Shock must be equal parts creatively thrilling and a bit overwhelming. There's all the obvious changes and improvements to be made to freshen the game up for modern players (streamlining the UI and inventory, making certain things like objectives and important items more clear [not in the braindead map marker way ideally], etc.), but those are almost givens. What really matters is everything else, but for the sake of a concise review, we'll narrow it down to two points:

1. Does the game stand on its own? (TL;DR answer: fuck yeah, this game rules. it plays like System Shock 1, if it was perfectly remade in a slightly altered version System Shock 2 [i.e. the Dark Engine])
2. How the hell do you remake System Shock, while making sure it still feels like System Shock? How loyal to the original should you be?

That second point is the most interesting one to me, since the original System Shock's atmosphere and in-game setting (level design, graphics, etc.) were almost a bit cartoonish at times, and undeniably restricted by technology at the time (lots of cubic design, to put it simply). It's very easy for me to imagine a modern triple-A dev team adding a bunch of frivolous bullshit to each area in an attempt to make it more "realistic" and to really drive home how their remake is bigger, better, and more impressive(?) than the archaic original. Nightdive Studios, however, remained loyal to a tee, while still enhancing and grounding the world in a way that ends up being shockingly immersive. Citadel Station feels far more coherent, logically interconnected, and like a real place that exists in this game's world, rather than just connected semi-levels, if that makes any more sense. It feels less utilitarian and more immersive, basically. This is particularly impressive, considering the basically 1-to-1 designs for each area in the remake.

What stood out the most to me was just how this remake felt like a melding of the best classic and modern immersive sims. The atmosphere and ambient soundtrack constantly reminded me of Prey (2017), but it always felt/played like... well, System Shock.

I don't know where I'm going with any of this. It's 3:26 AM and all I want to do is replay System Shock 2. I guess the bottom line here is this: System Shock (2023) is the best remake that the original game could realistically get, which is pretty damn great