On a macro level, System Shock (2023) retains the bones of the 1994 original. This isn’t all that surprising given that System Shock (1994) and its sequel was largely responsible for popularising the same bones many games would go onto build from in turn.
A first-person, open-zone shooter replete with world-building text and audio logs, riffs on the capitalist machine, and an omnipresent antagonist many of us would consider the original mother. She wasn’t a stepmother, she was the mother who stepped on us. Nightdive Studios is a team that understands the importance of games like these, having dedicated its development output to modernising the fundamental texts of the medium so that new audiences can experience a loving facsimile of history.
The friction in System Shock comes from history’s inevitable march though, as contemporary mechanics are bolted onto an aging core system, creating a uniquely uncomfortable but not uncompelling tension point. The bones ache but the flesh is taut, the game recognisably a rebuild of its source material but only to an extent, beyond which point the expectations of recognisable gameplay languages begin to rub against Nightdive’s apparent intent to leave the baseline experience intact. It’s deeply fascinating from an academic standpoint, but the moment-to-moment experience of System Shock suffers for it.
System Shock Review
From the jump, System Shock attempts to weave this medley of old and new with uneven effect. While the original game opened with a brisk cinematic introducing us to the world and stakes of the story, this remake opts for an extended bit of largely unnecessary interactivity. After an admittedly cool sweeping drone shot through a dystopian cyberpunk world, we settle in the apartment of the protagonist, the Hacker. Here you can fuss about the small home, push buttons to turn on ovens and showers, admire the shelved easter eggs and so on, but it all feels rather flat. Soon your computer will ping, and the plot kicks off in earnest – you’ve been caught hacking into the TriOptimum Corporation’s crown jewel space station, Citadel Station. From here you’re strongarmed into helping one of the corp’s execs who offers you top-of-the-line implants in exchange for switching off the safeguards on Citadel’s AI operator, SHODAN.
Waking from the implant procedure some six months later, the world has shifted on its axis. In removing SHODAN’s ethical restraints, the AI has decided to make a few changes to her home – namely the eradication of the human race. Turning every camera and node into her eyes and limbs, SHODAN has deployed a biological weapon onboard and subsequently turned any person she could find into a hulking, cyborg monstrosity or just an outright ghoul. Recruited by a voice on the radio, the Hacker sets out to explore the labyrinthine halls of Citadel Station and sets himself on a collision path with SHODAN’s new world order. Between the virus, the slick corporate world, and the gendered AI, it all makes for a very tropey, schlocky set-up – but these are tropes made tropes by System Shock.
From here the game opens up in dizzying ways as the Hacker can relatively freely roam the station, mapping it out as he progresses. Citadel Station is a nightmarish achievement in play space design, something I still find myself unable to fully commend or condemn. A sprawling, claustrophobic environment that feels allergic to humans in a way that is both fascinating thematically and disappointing literally. I don’t get the impression this is a space in which people used to function, it’s too abstracted and clinical for actual life to have lived, but in that dissonance, System Shock creates a strangely compelling, if frustrating, maze. It is all too easy to get lost as indistinguishable and cramped metallic corridors snake around you in every direction, the game’s minimalist map only helps to let you know if you’ve been this way before but not its relation to the thing you’re actually looking for.
I kinda fuck with it. It’s repellent, ugly, and mean-spirited in ways I usually only find in FromSoftware’s catalogue. But in the latter, I’m given the tools to be ugly back while System Shock rarely ever does. Combat is the headline change from the original game with a tweaked melee system and modernised FPS mechanics. These are aggressively fine additions, neither method is particularly satisfying to wield as you clumsily dance around foes to whack ‘em or fire off limp shots from around corners. The inclusion of relatively modern combat does tilt the Nightdive formula though, shifting the game further from its roots and closer to something the original would go on to inspire. It’s a no man’s land of a choice, neither fully embracing the stilted deliberateness of ’94 nor bringing the remake up to the standards seen in its far smoother controlling contemporaries. Add in the often gruelling difficulty spikes and System Shock starts to contort in strange ways.
The Hacker has access to a host of technological upgrades and enhancements, alongside consumables, grenades, and a slew of junk items to collect. Junk items that you gather from around the world can be turned in at recycling stations for currency that is in turn used for ammo and health packs at vendors. All of this is cobbled together in a Tetris-style inventory screen that is aesthetically pleasing but has far less functionality than the freedom the original game provides as weapons, consumables and junk all clutter the same, finite space. With repeated trips to recycling stations needed to clear space, it doesn’t feel like intentional friction but an oversight that hampers the natural flow of exploration and scavenging.
Free exploration is also broken up with fun-enough puzzles and discreet Cyberspace segments during which you’ll control a little fighter ship in a 3D vector space, blasting away at programs to unlock doors and the like. These are a pretty neat little extrapolation of 94’s sequences and would be an outright blast if it wasn’t for some balancing around hit detection. Elsewhere pacing feels strangled by player freedom, an unfortunate and likely unavoidable side effect of letting you loose in a maze with little guidance. Too often I would stumble into progression, blindly flipping switches and hoping for the best – the exact opposite of the game’s narrative intent. I don’t feel like a brilliant hacker in a showdown with an even more brilliant AI, I just felt like an idiot groping in the dark.
Which, like Citadel’s abrasive structure, could be an interesting point of player tension and one I haven’t quite been able to stop thinking about. I didn’t finish System Shock, its languished pacing and perfunctory mechanics both eventually ground me to a halt around the seven-hour mark, but I can’t deny how much the game has consumed my thoughts since. The repetitive nature of the game’s world snaking its way into my memory, an aesthetic collage of rich and deep modern lighting with ever so slightly pixelated art making for an out-of-time experience. The thud and click of machinery are a droning, reliable soundscape (though the music in the original remains a work of art, this minimal approach has its appeal).
To say nothing of the woman of the hour; SHODAN has an eternal quality to her, the kind of villainous presence modern games only ever brush up against. Returning voice actor Terri Brosius has done an immaculate job of recreating her seminal delivery in the remake, and thanks to a lighter touch on the creepy warbling, SHODAN feels much more…human to me. At the end of the first level of the game, the Hacker has scored a winning blow against the AI. She questions him with an almost sensual fascination; he is still very much an insect to her but her curiosity seems to be genuinely stoked by his actions.
SHODAN is such a relentlessly compelling antagonist, and Citadel Station’s inhuman structure is so thoroughly uncompromising, that despite not having all that much fun with System Shock, I come away unable to shake its hold on me. My experience of the ’94 original is entirely through YouTube retrospectives and the Waypoint (vale) 101 on the game but even I can see how this remake warps the experience in not wholly successful ways. So, it stands that System Shock is less of a modern means through which to experience the best of the original but a separate beast, one far clumsier but in much nicer lipstick. And yet, I’m downloading System Shock 1994 as I write this, so here’s looking at you, Hacker.
System Shock was reviewed on PC using digital code provided by PLAION.
