The System Shock remake is a delightful surprise
The TriOptimum Corporation may have unleashed a murderous AI upon the world, but as I prepared to vaporize the hundredth empty soda can and food wrapper I’d picked off an eviscerated corpse, I couldn’t deny it had an A+ recycling program.
System Shock is one of the rare video game remakes that may actually be wonkier and more complicated than its source material, and I wasn’t expecting it to still be so much fun. The game is a nearly beat-for-beat reproduction of the ’90s Looking Glass classic, a groundbreaking early first-person shooter. But developer Nightdive Studios has updated the original with a striking visual style and some new gameplay elements. It’s a complex, sometimes frustrating experience that can’t replace its predecessor but offers a nicely similar taste.
System Shock takes place in a retro-future where the year 2072 looks like 1994 and is set mainly on the sinister megacorp TriOptimum’s space station, Citadel. A slimy TriOptimum exec coerces a hacker into flipping off the “don’t be evil” switch for Citadel’s AI SHODAN, who (with my full support, honestly) declares herself a god. SHODAN sets up a veritable matryoshka of plans for destroying humanity, ranging from space lasers to a grotesque virus. As the hacker, you have to thwart every one of her gambits and finally destroy her.
The original System Shock seems less widely remembered today than its sequel, System Shock 2, and spiritual remake, BioShock, and it’s quite a bit less approachable — until a 2010 mod, it required approximately half your keyboard to walk around. But it has a distinctive feel that none of its successors reproduced. It’s a stylish and action-oriented yet highly methodical entry in the survival horror canon, focused on navigating a
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