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.
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.Īs 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Sound familiar? The premise - an isolated yet wholesale disaster - has since cropped up in the likes of Dead Space, Preyand Bioshock, with the last two serving as self-professed spiritual successors to System Shock. 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. 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. That’s because, over the last three decades, parts of System Shock have been set upon and repurposed by legions of inspired developers. READ MORE: Best FPS games: what’s the best shooter you can play in 2023?.
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. Nightdive Studios‘ System Shock remake swims in déjà vu.
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