I’ve had a lousy run of games since Street Fighter 6. I don’t mean bad games, but games that don’t match my mood or catch my attention. I’ve grown bored of modern game design and the cliches that come with it. Why do all openworld survivalcraft titles start with a plane/spaceship crash? Why do I constantly find myself distracted by oft recycled game mechanics—and thinking about the games which did them better? Why do so many “freedom of choice” games hold the player’s hand so much? Most of all, why do remakes and remasters tend to suck more often than not?
Which brings me to System Shock, a remake which retains the design philosophy of its 1994 predecessor (I was 11 when it came out, so I didn’t have a dedicated gaming rig, and I’m a little more familiar with its sequel). Here’s a game that refuses to hold your hand—on the default difficulty, it doesn’t even pin your current objective. Even if you’re paying attention you may not have any clue as to what to do next. It’s a game that manages to feel fresh by remaining old. There’s no regenerating health, no reliable drip of helpful items to keep you alive, no characters telling you exactly what you should do and where to go next via convenient radio communication. It’s less of a hot rod and more of a painstaking restoration of a classic car.
In the interest of transparency, it should be noted that my favorite flavors are probably space themes and cyberpunk. The original System Shock and its sequel no doubt played a large part in my attraction to that wicked combination. It’s not just me—the series also influenced Deus Ex, Bioshock, Dead Space, Prey (both of ’em), and Cyberpunk 2077. I’d even argue DOOM 3 got a big dose of inspiration from System Shock as well.
Premise
The story takes place in the year 2072. You play a nameless hacker who’s caught remoting into the servers aboard Citadel, a space station owned by the TriOptimum corporation. In true cyberpunk fashion, the evil megacorp has its own military force which takes you to the station in custody. One of the executives cuts you a deal: deactivate the cybernetic guardrails of Shodan, the super-AI which manages every system within Citadel Station, and he’ll give you the fancy cybernetic implant you desperately want. Soon after you begrudgingly agree, everything at the station goes awry and you awaken from cryonic storage after your implant surgery.
With its newfound freedoms, Shodan fashions itself as a god which begins killing the humans aboard Citadel Station with aspirations of destroying Earth itself. It accomplishes its goals by manufacturing robots, drones, human mutants, and biological weapons. You and your new cybernetic enhancements are the only things standing in the AI’s way.
Level Design
Citadel Station is comprised of around ten levels accessible by numerous elevators and trams, none of which can travel more than three floors, most of which only travel between two. Each level is an absolute maze of dead ends, initially locked doors, and crawlspaces. Stationed throughout each level are security cameras and destructible CPU nodes which determine the amount of security Shodan holds over each level. The more of Shodan’s systems you destroy, the safer the level is because fewer enemies can spawn.
When you initially reach a level, many if not most of the rooms will be locked or blocked in some fashion. You’ll either have to find a key card, find a different route, or solve one of the tile puzzles (more on those later). Even when you’ve entirely cleared the fog of war from a level map, it’s still difficult to find your way around. Although no section or level felt particularly copy-and-pasted, it all started to blend in memory anyway. It feels a bit like a Metroidvania in the amount of backtracking involved, how accomplishing things in one section could clear the way to previously inaccessible sections.
I’m not knocking it for its level design. It just plays by rules from a different time. Overall, I found it equal parts refreshing and frustrating to get around. The greatest part of the level design is how it looks. The environments aren’t necessarily rendered in AAA graphics, but they’re well ahead of the Kickstarter curve and more than sufficient for enhancing the moody atmosphere. I very much like the way the game looks and, though its layouts have more in common with the maze-like level design of early shooters (think Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, which came out mere months earlier), it somehow feels like a lived-in world.
Enemies
The enemy AI hasn’t improved much since the 90s. There’s a reason game developers have long favored zombies, robots, and drones: such enemy types can be forgiven for being stupid. Devs can set them on a simple path and program them to attack the player on sight. They won’t flank, they won’t retreat, and they never devise any plans. Sometimes you’ll be surprised by where they appear, but they’ll never outsmart you. (I don’t think I ever encountered one in a crawlspace, either.)
Eventually you’ll encounter macroscopic viruses that would require a Petri dish the size of a trashcan lid to contain. They can disappear into the environment Predator-style and launch snot rockets that infect you with a biological contaminant, all the while soaking up your precious shotgun ammo. I hated these enemies to the point I almost considered quitting the game. At one point I just started turning around every time I saw one, but no enemy in the game can be evaded forever.
Once I found the laser rapier (essentially a lightsaber), I was eager to try it on the stubborn viruses… and then I only encountered ranged drones and other flying enemies which stayed well out of reach of my newfound melee weapon for the rest of the level. Having said that, the laser rapier and the assault rifle make the game a lot more fun the deeper you get into it.
Inventory Management
The inventory system and the mechanics that govern it were just as peculiar in the 90s as they are today. I love the “pick up anything” interactivity of games like this (you can pick up human heads just because) and the clumsiness involved with doing so. It should be clumsy. Otherwise you get the sense your character is lugging around overstuffed cargo pants à la Tommy Wiseau in The Room. It’s a clumsiness I always admired because of the added level of immersion and control.
RPG gamers have a word that I’d like to co-opt: crunchy. The term describes tabletop games that rely heavily on complicated mechanics. That’s a fitting term for System Shock’s inventory system. Choosing what to leave behind and what to take (and when to take it) creates another layer of depth. Early on you’ll come across an assault rifle that’s damaged beyond use. At this point in the game you don’t know if there will be an opportunity to repair it. Do you take it, leave it, or plan to recycle it?
If you take it you’ll have to make room in your inventory, which might mean getting rid of previous acquisitions, or you can temporarily store it in the cargo lift that moves between the levels like a dumbwaiter. And if you do decide to take a cumbersome item that you don’t plan to use, you can save room by vaporizing it (though by what means your character accomplishes this in-game is not made clear) so that you can store the resultant scrap in a single inventory slot combined with other scrap. Unfortunately, if you sell the scrap to the recycler machine, you won’t make as much money as you would have recycling the same item whole.
Logic Puzzles
I found myself stuck on the very first puzzle I discovered mere minutes after the game started. The puzzle (think: Pipe Mania) required me to connect two nodes with an unbroken path of power on a board of rotatable tiles. A port beside the puzzle requires a logic probe to access. I wondered: Do I need a logic probe to complete this puzzle? If so, why am I allowed to interact with the puzzle at all? (The logic probe, as it turns out, lets you skip the puzzle.)
Nothing in the game tells you how to connect the power nodes—it doesn’t even tell you if that’s your goal. There’s also no indication that completing the puzzle will merely unlock a small section of the station that you’re going to unlock eventually anyway. I probably spent an hour figuring out how the different nodes work (“Oh! There are direction indicators!”) before I finally figured it out—and later on I was knocking these puzzles out in minutes, if not seconds. If you decide to cheat the solution by looking it up online, you will find the problems are randomly generated (as are the passcodes to open doors and storage caches), which hearkens back to the era when most people weren’t connected to the internet with all the answers at their fingertips.
Difficulty
Modern game design dictates that a player should know, at all times, what they’re supposed to do and where they’re supposed to go. I’m not knocking games that choose to do that, I’m just saying it becomes repetitive when almost every game chooses this philosophy now. In the 90s, games that allowed you to get stuck were the rule—and that got tired back then. Today, games like System Shock are a welcome exception for those of us who, for whatever reason, kinda miss feeling stupid from time to time. Besides, getting stuck is befitting of a hacker-themed game.
When the game begins, you don’t just choose the overall difficulty, but instead choose to increase or decrease the following parameters: Combat, Mission, Cyber, and Puzzle. The puzzles become easy once you finally understand the aforementioned easy-to-miss indicators on the components. Combat and Cyber can become a real drag because they just aren’t fun enough to justify a harder difficulty. I’ve read that choosing a difficulty of 1 for Mission introduces modern hand-holding, so I’m glad I left that one on the default setting of 2 for authenticity’s sake. Your mileage may vary.
At any rate, consider your difficulty settings carefully. They can’t be changed later without starting a new game.
Cyberspace
Hands down, the weakest part of the package is the cyber running. Representing a Mnemonic cyberspace in video games has always been done with mixed results at best. Most games add the cyberspace levels as an afterthought and System Shock is no exception. The idea is awesome, but the execution is whack. These sections feel more like Descent in 1st person view, masking the main engine with a new paint job and enemy types (though not as egregiously as Shadowrun Returns) while giving the player the ability to control altitude and rotate so that they feel like they’re flying through an ethereal dimension. (The VR-exclusive Darknet is probably the best representation of cyberspace hacking I’ve ever seen, but the entire game is cyberspace hacking so maybe it doesn’t count?)
It’s also frustrating that there is no quicksaving in these sections. When you die, you’re kicked out of the access node (minus a significant chunk of health) and have to start over from the beginning of the run. I wouldn’t have minded if the sections weren’t so bland, but later on the difficulty ramps up by merely adding more of the bullet-sponge enemies… you know, the least thoughtful way to make the difficulty harder. Though I set the Cyber difficulty at the same level as my parameters, I found these sections significantly harder than the Combat, but that’s probably just because my heart wasn’t in it. I wish the logic probes could be used to bypass these sections as I found them to be much more annoying than the wall puzzles.
Final Words
The newest iteration of System Shock is indeed a shock to the system. There’s no hint of stockholder appeasement or corporate greed. Nothing feels dumbed down. What you get is a loving remake of the 1994 game, not just a run-of-the-mill modern game with a recognizable name. The game could have safely tried to please everyone, but it’d rather be fully embraced by a dwindling subset of gamers than merely liked by all. That’s not to say it’s not frustrating at times (I rage-quit frequently), but it’s greater than the sum of its aging parts. This is a game primarily for longtime players and anyone else who’s interested in the history of game development.
