I’ve heard of SHODAN but to get my first glimpses of her in this remake–my hairs stood on ends. The world is full with interactable items – some of them useless, some of them fascinating, many of them inducing a slow-moving sense of dread. A remake of System Shock wouldn’t be true to the original if it didn’t. I felt so supremely stupid when I realised my oversight – and that might be a good thing, because it highlights the System Shock remake as a game that will ask you to think. Only, I’m so used to have developers use blaring white or red paint to indicate what’s interactable and what isn’t, that I didn’t even think of it while I scrambled around, dying of radiation poisoning. To return to the point, the difference in design philosophies was ironed into my mind when I was stuck down an irradiated zone for a solid three minutes, incapable of finding my way back because the force field I used to get down would not go up. ![]() A comparative study between the two would be a joy to work on. While updated, I could feel a very different logic underlying System Shock than the one that brings Prey to life. At any rate, if this is as faithful a remake as it seems to be, I can see how some of what Prey did was very much inspired by this classic–the protagonist’s apartment in this demo, for example, struck me with its similarities to the apartment in which Prey’s opening takes place.īut the design principles in Prey are much different, more modern, than those that define System Shock. My closest point of reference to System Shock has to be something like Arkane Studios’ 2016 title Prey in many ways, Arkane has been the torchbearer of the interactive sim genre over the last decade, although of course a studio like Deux Ex: Human Revolution’s developer Eidos Montreal is to be celebrated in almost equal measure. System Shock is firmly in cyberpunk horror territory, where it should be: a mysterious virus has ravaged the space station you awaken on, turning the staff into zombies but that’s far from where the unshackled AI SHODAN’s ambitions end. The graphics may not be mind-blowing photo-realism but they don’t need to be they are brilliant at setting out the tone this game has to establish to be faithful to the original. Cautious, afraid, I’d move on with the greatest care–and just when I thought I’d wisened up to the game’s tricks and calmed down, the System Shock remake would get me. The demo of the remake has convinced me that developer Nightdive Studios knows how to set a tense atmosphere, one that had my pulse quickening every time some nightmarish space-zombie or robot jumped me from a nook or cranny I’d failed to spot. ![]() System Shock is the granddaddy of immersive sims, a game nearly thirty years old by now, known by every hardcore gamer but experienced by an increasing minority after all, we’re being babied by gamer-friendly systems and few of us have the appreciation for the rough’n’tumble design principles of yesteryear, right? Right!
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