Nightdive Studios‘ System Shock remake swims in déjà vu. That’s somewhat predictable, considering the game it’s remaking is almost thirty years old, but you needn’t have played Looking Glass Studios‘ 1994 original to feel a sense of familiarity within the gore-slick hallways of Citadel Station.
That’s because, over the last three decades, parts of System Shock have been set upon and repurposed by legions of inspired developers. Set on a once-thriving space station in the not-so-distant 2072, System Shock begins with its protagonist — known only as The Hacker — awaking to find a rogue AI has slaughtered, mutated and gruesomely augmented Citadel Station’s populace. A microcosmic post-apocalypse, the station’s downfall is charted largely through audio logs that rarely land far from the gored bodies of their authors.
Sound familiar? The premise — an isolated yet wholesale disaster — has since cropped up in the likes of Dead Space, Prey and Bioshock, with the last two serving as self-professed spiritual successors to System Shock. Though System Shock wasn’t a commercial success for Looking Glass Studios, its ancestors took its teachings on to sell millions of copies: single games like BioShock spun into franchises, and Dead Space — now a respectable 15-years-old — was recently treated to a critically-acclaimed remake of its own.
In short, developers have spent decades playing with System Shock‘s formula — yet rather than dilute the iconic game’s impact, years of successful iteration have only served to highlight the triumph of Nightdive’s 2023 remake. While the remake throws in enough new content to spice things up for veterans of the ’94 original, it largely just bridges a 29-year gap with vastly improved graphics, movement, gunplay and UI. Above all else, Nightdive authentically captures the spirit of System Shock — fishing out everything that made it so successful, and re-homing it for modern consoles.
That approach has created the perfect remake. While the original game was revolutionary, three decades of evolving technology have been unkind, and it now resembles a clutter of pixels letterboxed between unsightly interfaces. A game’s lasting legacy isn’t always enough to reconcile its strengths with the passage of time — something that can be hard to admit if you’ve grown up with a game, and a topic I came to terms with when GoldenEye 64 made its way to the Nintendo Switch.
As someone born three years after System Shock‘s original release, I suspect I’m not the only person who would have never met SHODAN if not for Nightdive. That’s why this remake feels so essential: time has weathered the ephemeral parts of System Shock that were limited by technology, but the core that made it so influential has endured. The story of Citadel Station’s downfall is just as captivating as it was in 1994, while SHODAN, the station’s God complex-toting rogue AI, remains one of gaming’s finest villains — and, if anything, feels even more relevant as debates around ethical AI ramp up.
As for the parts that haven’t aged as well, Nightdive’s remake is a much-needed touch-up. System Shock‘s elements of horror get their bite back with modern-day graphics: corpses lie cushioned on their own innards, while dismembered limbs sit inches from the hungry mutants munching on the rest of the body. Dealing with said mutants feels fantastic, as sparse ammo means you’re often clubbing them to death with a wrench, constantly rationing your resources in a way that has rarely been meaningfully replicated beyond BioShock. It all adds up — in tandem with a new lick of paint for Citadel Station, System Shock once again feels like a feverish, vibrant cyberpunk dream.
Though recent years have seen gamers question the necessity of remakes, System Shock proves that some stories are too important to gather dust. Thanks to Nightdive, the same magic that captured the hearts of players and developers in 1994 has been unleashed upon a whole new generation, and the game’s player-submitted Steam reviews are flush with newcomers experiencing SHODAN’s God complex for the first time. Decades later, System Shock remains vital to its genre — and unlike the “upgrades” SHODAN offers, this evolution is worth celebrating.
System Shock is available on PC, with PlayStation and Xbox versions planned to launch at a later date.
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