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 labyrinthine multi-level structure where SHODAN always seems one step ahead.

In both versions of System Shock, surviving almost any given enemy is simpler than cracking the puzzle box of Citadel Station. A typical objective might work something like this:

• Hear about some flamboyantly omnicidal plan of SHODAN’s, often from SHODAN herself, who loves taunting you as much as she hates humans.
• Wander around whichever level of Citadel Station you happen to be on, fighting an ever-proliferating crew of mutants and cyborgs, plus some robots that will make you rue the invention of the printed circuit board while watching the game’s map fill in and taking note of its many locked doors.
• Loosen SHODAN’s hold on the level by shooting security cameras, flipping switches, activating resurrection stations, solving high-tech Pipe Dream puzzles, and jacking into cyberspace arenas that work like an even trippier variant of Descent.
• Look around for giant screens with numbers, and for god’s sake, write them down — you’re going to need them.
• Realize you require an item from a different level and repeat all the previous steps there.
• Stumble across an audio log describing the precise solution to stopping SHODAN’s plan and learn you’ve already completed most of it by interacting with every object you’ve seen across the station — unless you flipped the wrong switch in the wrong order, in which case congratulations, Earth is doomed.

I’ve played System Shock several times, and the remake still delivered the feeling of being pulled in several directions at once. I have no idea how confusing new players will find it. Mapping Citadel requires a hell of a trek: the hardest mode requires you to complete the game in five hours — even tighter than the original’s seven hours, which most players consider blisteringly fast — but my normal-difficulty playthrough took about 25 hours. The in-game map is a bit more detailed than before, but frustratingly, you can no longer type notes to remind yourself of codes and item locations. (Nightdive tells me that an update will at least let you place multiple types and colors of icon.)

The remake’s combat evokes classic System Shock for better and worse. There’s a big selection of weapons, including conventional guns and futuristic options like the series’ trademark laser rapier, which in this iteration is ludicrously deadly. You can swap them quickly with hotkeys, making it easier to take advantage of their unique strengths. But enemies are barely fazed by your attacks until they’re dead, so guns feel perpetually underpowered by modern standards. The early game is full of melee combat that feels like swinging a bat into a very angry chunk of raw hamburger. It’s jarring, and I don’t know how intentional it is, but it fits the punishing spirit of the series — at least it’s not System Shock 2, where your guns degrade every few shots. And it’s outweighed by how well Nightdive adapts the original game’s visual language and intricate level design.

The remake leans hard into System Shock’s penchant for making players backtrack, not simply to access new parts of a level, but to manage the most complicated inventory tetris I’ve ever encountered. Much like in the original, your central inventory will probably start running out of space midway through the game. The remake adds a cargo elevator that you can find somewhere in each level — a clever variation on Resident Evil-style storage boxes — but it’s only big enough for a couple of guns or a few aid items. I ended up throwing every other shiny object I didn’t immediately need on the floor outside one elevator like some kind of lonely cyberpunk bowerbird.

On top of that, there’s a new recycling system that gives you even more items to keep track of. Citadel holds vast amounts of junk, and you can pick it up to recycle for big gold novelty coins that let you purchase optional weapon mods. The catch is that there’s only one recycler on each level, so you have to either tote everything there or “vaporize” it into more compact scrap that you can hand in for about half the reward scrip. (A regrettable exception to all this is TriOptimum’s surplus of human skulls, which someone has thoughtfully distributed in crates across the station. The skulls are worthless.) Oh, and the recycler’s compartment is also tiny — literally unable to fit at least one supposedly redeemable item.

This is all building off existing System Shock features: the original game lets you pick up junk for no particular reason, and the sequel has a handheld recycler that’s great for accidentally vaporizing important inventory items. It’s more inconvenient than either system, yet oddly satisfying and ludonarratively hilarious. My hacker might raise a middle finger to society, but when it comes to corporate litter removal, they’re a model citizen. It’s probably okay if yours isn’t; I bought nearly every mod I could get my hands on and still ended the game with a huge stack of coins.

These changes don’t make the game feel existentially different, and the levels, while not a one-to-one copy of the original, are often extremely similar. The biggest update is the game’s look — which is gorgeous.

Nightdive has nailed the sinister corporate banality of Citadel, from its fake-looking wood paneling to the gratuitous high-tech buttons on the furniture. The game is full of stark and glossy corridors whose ominous glow would make Thomas Kinkade jealous, and its enemies retain the high-concept weirdness early shooters excelled at. (Why would an AI mutate a human being into a shrieking doll-faced pterodactyl or an invisible beach ball that spits toxins? Why not?) It bears some similarities to the recent wave of indie boomer shooters, but unlike many of them, it rarely mimics ’90s graphical limitations. Its cyberspace sections have gone from bare wireframes to glistening metallic mazes, and parts of Citadel — like a set of domed garden groves — are eerily beautiful in a way no ancient PC could render.

The remake doesn’t quite have the aesthetic intensity that made parts of System Shock so compelling, though. Its shadowy levels, like the station’s maintenance bay, are no longer so dark and disorienting that they require planning every step. Its music is perfectly good, but it doesn’t match the driving techno earworms that the original burned into my brain. Its enemies mutter creepily to themselves as they move around, and SHODAN is once again played excellently by her original voice actor Terri Brosius. But it feels overall like a lesser attempt at the nerve-wracking soundscape of System Shock 2, although failing to beat some of the best horror audio design of all time is nothing to be ashamed of.

Until a few months ago, I was unsure this remake would ever exist. Originally funded on Kickstarter back in 2016, its developers placed it on hiatus a couple of years later, citing severe creative difficulties. Nightdive isn’t best known for making games; it primarily rereleases hard-to-find classics, and its last major development effort was a badly panned remaster of the Blade Runner adventure game. I’ve seen the System Shock remake mistaken for System Shock 3, a doomed sequel whose rights now belong to Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent.

But the end result is a delightful surprise. Where January’s Dead Space was an elegant update to a relatively recent horror game, the new System Shock feels neither affectedly retro nor entirely modern, neither lo-fi indie nor blockbuster-big. It’s one of the most subtly odd labors of love I’ve seen in the past few years. And like SHODAN, if you embrace its unconventional values, it will amply reward you — on its own somewhat painful terms.

System Shock will be released on May 30th on PC through Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store.