No system shockwe will not have prey. we will not have Bioshock. we will not have dead end – In fact, Dead Space is the most notable on this list, as Visceral’s body horror masterpiece was originally envisioned as a sequel to System Shock. System Shock and its direct sequels defined the horror genre and, to a certain extent, the way we tell stories in games.
But it’s probably a part of gaming history that a lot of people get lost in. The games that came out later became available on more platforms and captured a generation of gamers on Twitter and social media platforms, redefining survival horror. Ken Levine and his action/horror genre in BioShock stole System Shock’s thunder and turned the entire genre into its own image. Visceral and Dead Space moved the genre into the hands of Call of Duty players. Both helped the genre move from survival horror to action horror.
Glenn Schofield gleefully watched a million Isaac Clarks shoot out countless alien limbs, Ken Levine grunted at a million Booker Devitz found a million A beacon and predict a million plot twists. Each of these games juggles genre conventions to offer something distinctly different from System Shock…but none of them would exist without a superb debut from Look Glass Studios.
As a remake, the 2022 edition of the game fires on all the cylinders that made the original so special: the game starts with a bang, and you – as an unknown hacker – instantly bite more than you can chew, forced to Enter a dangerous world full of rebellious artificial intelligences, murderous mutants and mad science. Think about the beginning of The Matrix, if it were directed by David Cronenberg, or Alice in Wonderland directed by HR Giger, and you get a taste of what would have happened.
From here, you’re thrust like a rat in a science experiment into a maze of claustrophobic spaceships that were – once upon a time – inspired by iD games like Doom or Wolfenstein. Unlike those games, though, Looking Glass devoted all of its R&D budget to emerging systems. A complex network of complementary mechanics plays a role in the game’s open level design. Player choices, enemy effectiveness, powers, weapons and systems all dance around each other – this ballet of tiny moving parts – creating an interactive genius that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Nightdive Studios, the studio behind the remake, will never be able to re-bottle this lightning: That (space) ship has sailed. But instead of redefining the industry again, it could do the next best thing: write a love letter to this piece of gaming history, making it available to anyone who wants to play it, while amplifying the ingredients of the original game very special.
After a hands-on demo of the game at Gamescom 2022, I was blown away by the effort put into the remake. It’s not some cynical cashing out, or some half-hearted asset flip, no: you’ll feel like you’re reliving something special when your hacker avatar is taken into a terrifying wonderland made by SHODAN. Gaming is the equivalent of watching your favorite rock band make their 1997 hit album, cover to cover or whatever. All the best parts, all the stuff that gives you goosebumps. Just a little new, a little different, a little weird.
The core highlight of System Shock remains how it casts you, the player, into a fragile normal character, completely reduced to flesh – just a paranoid wreck, sticking your virtual ear to a virtual door to see if there’s something The genetic abomination on the other side, aim your shotgun in your face. But, just like in this universe, you quickly get bloated with powers, weapons, and options. You can pick up anything – anything! – If you think it will help, please use it. Just try not to be too indecisive, because even indecision at the wrong moment will see a wandering cybernetic behemoth smear your brain on the walls of the ship like mush. And you don’t want that. You want to live, right?
Luckily, Nightdive Studios has changed the opening compared to the original – unlike Warren Spector’s original, this game has some tutorials, a set of hand-held flash cards and interactions that can introduce you to a more ‘immersive’ sim’ Aspects of sci-fi spectacle. It doesn’t detract from the feeling of it all at all. In fact, I think in 2022, you need that kind of positioning or our TikTok, Uber Eats, and fast fashion-addicted brains will misfit and disengage. Long live the company! It’s all very branded, isn’t it?
Nightdive also maintains an aesthetic. The whole game is gorgeous — filled with neon, sodium orange, terminal display green — but when you look too close, all of that is filtered out by this particular pixel effect. If you come back decades later, it looks like you remember what the System Shock looked like. If not, then looks like what you’d imagine a 90’s game to be like (until you go back, fire one up, and go ‘gosh, is this really what they put up with!?’)
No matter what Nightdive has done since the announcement of System Shock, the end result is worth it. This project is damned – it feels like SHODAN itself is in trouble and insists that the game is one of its perfect children, just like the way Nightdive treats it. Originally slated to release on PC and Xbox One in late 2017 and on PS4 in early 2018, System Shock was first positioned as a remake, then a remake, and then something else entirely.
Now, it looks like a remake – but it’s self-aware, self-critical, and keen to prove itself to anyone who’s been criticizing the project since it was originally conceived, and about six years ago it had its EVERYTHING when anyone thinks “remastering the base game” needs to stand there with The Last of Us, Final Fantasy 7 and even Crash Bandicoot. I can’t wait to crack the last thing once and for all.
System Shock Remastered is in development for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. It’s still tied to 2022, but no more specific dates have been announced.
