[Review] System Shock (2023)
In 1992, the foundation of what we’d know today as the “immersive simulation” genre would be laid with Ultima Underworld from Origin Systems. It’s not literally a simulator, “im-sim” is simply a way of describing a game whose primary focus is immersing the player in its game world with large, atmospheric and often isolating maps, a myriad of minute interactive details, and intricate, if sometimes unnecessary, mechanics. Many of the crew who worked on Ultima Underworld would move on to create System Shock in 1994. For an MS-DOS game, it was highly ambitious and still maintains a strong following as a cult classic to this day.
So much so that in 2016, Nightdive Studios, a company with a reputation for revitalizing classic PC games, went to Kickstarter to pitch a full-on remake of System Shock, and the campaign was a considerable success. Nightdive released an early alpha demo alongside their crowdfunding campaign, and though its map design was virtually identical to the original, they employed a more grim-and-gritty, realistic and modern approach. It didn't take long for them to switch gears, moving from Unity to Unreal Engine 4, and shaking up their design philosophy in the process. This shift in direction is reflected in the version of System Shock released a few weeks ago, and has proven to be quite an authentic remake, for better or worse.
For starters, the original System Shock for DOS is a little clunky to play today due to its arbitrary control scheme – though to its credit, WASD and mouse aiming had yet to be cemented into PC gaming normalcy. The remake controls how you would expect a modern first person game would. Rather than moving the cursor over the screen to pick up and interact with objects, you simply point the center of the camera at them instead. Of course this all goes without saying, but I want to stress how updated standards alone already makes the remake a vastly more playable game than the original – you really had to put yourself in the perspective of a 1994 PC gamer to really appreciate the original, and with the remake that’s no longer necessary. And of course, as expected from a remaster of a classic PC game, you can remap the controls mostly however you like, which you likely will (the original's right-click to interact is still the default).
Nightdive also took the liberty of changing the map's layout a bit from the original. Though many areas have been redesigned, many others remain virtually the same. The remake's visual identity is comprised of vivid colors combined with blocky, almost voxel-like geometric details in the environment, giving the game a unique yet familiar vibe, like how you would imagine a DOS game with modern graphics to look. It’s pretty rad. The game world already looks good from a distance, thanks to Unreal Engine 4’s lighting, specular highlighting and bump mapping, but when you get up close you can see that textures are actually rather low-resolution and lack filtering, contributing to the game’s retro aesthetic. It’s a clever way of adapting the original game’s more abstract world into modern graphics. Though my experience with the original DOS System Shock is limited, I believe it'll be easy for veteran players to recognize areas from the original based on the visual design language alone. I’m confident the majority of purist System Shock fans, the ones who would be fine with keeping everything exactly the same underneath a just fresh coat of paint, will be happy with how the remake turned out.
Aside from the graphics and controls, the mission structure and plot remain practically unchanged. By the time you get acquainted with the modern controls in the newly added apartment prologue, the plot kicks off as you, no-name John Hackerman in the year 2072, are abducted by Edward Diego, the head honcho of TriOptimum Corporation, a mega-corporation that operates in a space station orbiting Saturn. Diego has taken issue with the morality of the station’s omnipresent AI assistant, SHODAN, and wants you to hack her morals away in exchange for free cyber implants. You oblige, but the implants require six months in a coma to safely install, and after waking up from your half-year nap, all hell has broken loose. The 10-level TriOptimum Citadel station is in disrepair, with rogue machinery and hostile mutants running rampant. A handful of rebels are still surviving and fighting on the upper levels, and it’s not long before you’re tasked with reaching the top of the station and re-programming SHODAN’s morality.
Part of the appeal of the im-sim is piecing together the story as you play, typically through environmental storytelling or notes and logs left behind by inhabitants of the game’s world, whether or not they’re still alive (usually not). The original System Shock was arguably the first game to properly implement a system like that, and the remake easily carries that torch. Audio logs, a feature of modern games popularized by System Shock’s spiritual successor Bioshock, abound in the flickering, dismantled corridors of the Citadel. What makes this storytelling characteristic of the im-sim is how it ties into gameplay. Information necessary to proceed through the game is delivered via such means, just like the original.
To survive in the Citadel, a plethora of resources is provided to you. Healing and buffing items in the form of temporary patches can be found on bodies, in storage boxes, or just lying around. Same goes for weapons and ammunition. System Shock’s combat, whether by means of melee weapons like pipes and wrenches, or ranged weaponry like guns and energy blasters, is a large improvement over the original DOS game, but is merely acceptable by today’s standards. Weapon design feels a tad unfocused and the enemy AI (which is to say the behavior of bots and mutants you’ll regularly encounter, not the game’s villain) is too basic to make it intrinsically fun. That said, it is a little unfair to be overly critical of System Shock’s gunplay when it’s just one part of a greater whole. The bigger problem lies with dying – if you die, it’s game over and you have to reload, unless you find pods not unlike the vita-chambers in Bioshock, after which dying has no negative consequences whatsoever. You just have to trundle back to where you died and resume whatever it was you were doing.
More fun to me was the game’s overall resource management. With limited inventory space, you can’t carry all of your gear around like Gordon Freeman, so you have to balance your arsenal accordingly. In addition, objects that initially appear to exist only to serve the game’s immersion can be collected, crushed down and recycled into corporate fun-buck tokens that you can spend at vending machines scattered throughout the station. Consumables and weapon upgrades can be earned this way, creating a fun and rewarding gameplay loop that provides an additional sense of progression. That said, you will often find yourself juggling items between your inventory and a stash, either through the convenient cargo lift which lets you access a small number of items on any level, or just finding a safe spot and dumping it on the floor (don't worry, nothing you can pick up ever despawns). It might not be fun to some, but I liked regrouping at my hoard on level 3 whenever I ran low on ammo or needed to keep key items from taking up precious room in my pockets.
Speaking of progression, you start the game in the medical bay, literally level 1 of the 10-level Citadel, and your goal is the bridge on level 9 – a reactor level sits beneath the medical bay as a “basement” floor. The levels themselves are large and densely maze-like. On the one hand, it’s really fun to explore each floor and fill out the map. Security cameras and massive CPU nodes need to be destroyed to loosen SHODAN’s metaphorical grip on the station, and finding them all encourages thorough exploration of each floor. You’ll also routinely find new cybernetic enhancements, like a shield or an item-locating radar, that help you get around the Citadel more safely. Before I forget, these enhancements, along with certain weapons, use energy, the blue bar under your health bar - both of which can be refilled for free by going to certain stations.
On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to get lost, and the in-game map can be confusing at times. I feel like System Shock would have benefited from a 3D map like the ones in Metroid Prime or Doom Eternal. Along the way you’ll need to either solve puzzles that aren’t easy, but lack variety (there are only two types of puzzles), or enter cyberspace to open up new areas. Cyberspace exists as a pseudo-minigame taking the form of a six-degrees-of-freedom shooter (not unlike Descent or Forsaken) with abstract, simplistic vaporwave imagery. These are fine and help shake up the gameplay a little bit, but end up harming the game’s pacing more than helping it. There were times I’d finish a puzzle and have no clue what it even did, and the large number of keycards you'll pick up over the course of the game makes it unclear which doors each card will unlock, something Metroid and Doom, again, have done well at conveying. Often I would find a locked door, go do some more things, then come back and find that, oh hey, I’m allowed to go in here now.
This brings me to my biggest problem with the System Shock remake: Your primary goal of reaching the bridge to defeat SHODAN is clear, but the step-by-step goals needed to make progress are not. That’s not to say I want hand-holding in games – my game of the year last year was Tunic and that game was similarly, if not more obtuse. But I’m the kind of gamer that just sort of ignores audio logs, especially when a considerable portion of them have no useful information and are there just for immersion's sake (for example, the vast majority of SHODAN's messages are just taunting the player). You better be paying close attention to those logs, and you also better be paying attention to where specific things are on specific floors so you can swiftly do what has to be done to move on. Although there is a record of audio and data logs you've found that you can refer to at any time, they sometimes lack the context needed to put two and two together. And having to turn around and go back to refill stations, recycling stations, vending machines, etc., distracts you from your objectives, making them harder to remember. It’s not that anything you need to do is particularly challenging, it’s just a lot to keep track of and hard to follow everything when the game is so big and maze-like, especially when you need to return to a previous floor. The game assumes – and virtually requires – that you know exactly what you’re doing.
System Shock left a strong initial impression on me until I reached a point where I simply couldn’t move up to the next floor until I did something in the reactor level. Unsure of what I had to do, I meandered around for two hours looking for anything I missed, like finding a needle in a haystack. Sadly I reached the point where it felt like I was wasting my time and resorted to following a guide for the rest of my playthrough whenever I got lost. I didn’t want to, but I felt like I wasn’t going to finish System Shock unless I did. System Shock does have a variety of difficulty adjustments, four categories that you can set to 1, 2 or 3, but you’re locked into them when you start the game. I played on all 2s and die-hard System Shockers may be quick to point out that there is a difficulty setting that enables objective waypoints. That would be great if you were allowed to lower difficulty settings during the game, and also if it actually worked.
Performance is solid, but still lacking - system requirements are rather light, but it has the all-too-common "shader stutter" whenever something new is loaded in. It doesn't make the game unplayable, but it's absolutely noticeable. It's also kind of buggy. I had plenty of less serious bugs, namely ragdolls resetting when entering an area, causing me to be alert over nothing, as well as the game occasionally freezing after reloading a quick save (quick loading again easily fixes this). However, the game crashed on me several times in my 24-hour playthrough with no rhyme or reason – System Shock seems to just crash whenever it feels like it. I also had a weird bug where I reloaded into a void with a miniature piece of the Citadel in the distance, but that only happened once and quickly undid itself. These issues, along with present but poorly adapted controller support, makes System Shock feel like it’s still in early access. Note that System Shock is only available on PC for now, but is planned to be released on consoles in the future. You’re welcome for beta testing your game, Nightdive.
I don’t want to sound like my experience with System Shock was overly negative – it wasn’t. I definitely had more fun with it than I didn’t, and when I was in the gameplay cycle of going someplace new, clearing it of enemies, finding new things and regrouping, I was enjoying it a lot. It was just frustrating when that cycle would come to an abrupt halt. I know I’m part of the problem, but I think Nightdive could have done more to modernize it. If you loved the original System Shock, the remake is very faithful and you’ll probably love it just as much, if not more, and I feel like there's an incredible game buried inside it, but its obtuseness held me back from loving it.
Addendum: The entirety of my playthrough was on the initial launch version, but there has been a patch that addresses some of the issues I mentioned above, although I don't think waypoints have been implimented yet.