System Shock review: Big SHODAN is watching

System Shock was a foundational game for a lot of reasons. It introduced a first-person semi-RPG adventure that would go on to inspire elements of BioShock, Half-Life, and so many other story-heavy shooters. It walked so a lot of games could run, so it was always going to be a tall order to remake such an incredible, yet unoptimized classic. That said, Nighdive Studios took on that monumental task and, many years after the remake’s original announcement, have brought System Shock back in beautifully grotesque and streamlined style, even if the path forward can sometimes be dizzying to follow.

A good reason for AI regulation

For those who don’t know the story, System Shock takes place in a fictional 2072 in which the player is a hacker that tries to steal a military cyber implant from a group called the TriOptimum Corporation. When the hacker gets caught red-handed by authorities, he is taken to TriOptimum’s Citadel Station in space. There, the station’s supervisor Edward Diego offers him a deal: remove the ethics and safety barriers on Citadel Station’s AI and he can have the implant he stole. The hacker agrees, does the job, and is then put under for the surgery. However, when he awakes, the station is in chaos. Without ethics barriers, Citadel Station’s AI, known as SHODAN, takes control of the station, kills and mutates all humans into her unwilling servants, and plans to do the same to Earth. The only reasonable force now equipped to stop her is the Hacker.

System Shock’s story is classic and sets up an incredible journey re-imagined by Nightdive. The chaotic and malfunctioning Citadel Station is a vast and ominous environment in which a mix of machines and humanoid mutants wait around every door. It’s made even more unnerving by the fact that every once in a while, you will hear a little beep that tells you a camera is watching you. While she initially found you curious, your progress soon convinces SHODAN to make direct contact and let you know she’s always watching and has found you to be a nuisance. Her conversations are almost always followed by new threats to deal with, and it becomes horribly clear that the things that happened to Citadel staff are what she will subject you to should she succeed.

What a sight she left behind in the aftermath of you freeing her, too. Citadel’s pristine machinery and electronics are smeared with the blood, gore, and malfunctions of the humans that tried to fight back. The only clues to the path forward are in said viscera, as well as the audio and text logs that summarize the staff’s desperate attempts to stop her. It both serves to tell you what kind of chaos you wrought when you set SHODAN loose and leaves you the clues necessary to pick up where they left off.

Ultimately, Nightdive’s new take on System Shock is an incredible reimagining, arranged in splendid and atmospheric fashion. The only negative take away from the game's presentation is that the same corpse model was used for nearly every victim you come across, always looking zombified without hair and the only difference being some limbs or the head missing based on how they died. Otherwise, the station itself is complex and very compelling to explore. Music is used sparingly to add atmosphere to otherwise silent situations. Most times, the halls and rooms of Citadel Station are filled with the noises of whirring or malfunctioning machinery, punctuated by your own sounds or those of creatures lurking around corners. It’s highly effective at keeping the tension thick.

Fight back any way you can

Gameplay in Nightdive’s System Shock remake is where old school players of the original will enjoy it most. The original featured a sort of goggled view in which much of the bottom and top of the screen were taken up by inventory, map, stats, and more. It’s a style that was similar to many RPGs back in the day, but also serves to make the old game a hassle to play due to its poorly-aged UI. Nightdive frees up your entire screen with vision of the station as you explore it, reducing the UI to a minimap and hotbar of weapons and gear at the bottom and your health, energy, and status at the top, making it much easier to take in the environment.

You’ll need to pay close attention to your surroundings, too, and not just because SHODAN’s minions are everywhere. Citadel Station is, in many of its areas, a claustrophobic and maze-like array of halls, rooms, and maintenance tunnels that you’ll need to search every nook and cranny of if you want to find the information you need to move forward. I found myself lost often within its vast complex. Thankfully, the map is helpful in this regard because the game charts areas you’ve explored in real-time. However, when the place I needed to go was somewhere I’d already been, it was sometimes difficult to remember where I’d needed to go to get there. System Shock doesn’t really have a waypoint system to show you the way to objectives. You’ll just have to be vigilant enough to recall important points you were unable to open or interact with and how to get back to them.

Getting lost is dangerous for another reason, as well. SHODAN is relentless in her pursuit of you and the items you need to fight her minions off are scarce. Moreover, running into new enemies isn’t always a signifier that you are on the right path. You could have cleared out an entire section, but more will eventually show up. I found this out the hard way when I watched a panel in the floor raise up and deposit a new foe in front of me. So it becomes just as much of a race against time to progress, lest you end up having your resources drained by respawning foes that will leave you ill-equipped to take on bigger threats later.

SHODAN’s minions and the way in which you dispatch them are re-imagined well. Simple human mutants can be dealt with a good whack to the face with a pipe or wrench. However, the game escalates the threat steadily with soldiers of mixed biological and mechanical components, machines that blast you with all sorts of hazardous effects like electricity or acid, and even more horrors SHODAN has cooked up in her mechanical cauldrons of corpses and robotics.

In turn, by searching hard enough, you find all sorts of gadgets to aid progression and better deal with foes, whether it’s the mini pistol that gives you your first real firepower or the Sparqbeam that lets you conserve ammo at the cost of using your precious energy as ammunition. Later tools get even more fun, including laser rapiers and shotguns that can shoot incendiary rounds. Energy is hugely important in System Shock as it not only powers some of your weapons, but also gadgets that help you along the way. Mapping, headlamps, item finders, and more await if you pay attention to your surroundings, but using them drains your energy bar, forcing you to ration your supply when it comes to exploration and combat. I loved that balance and how much stress it adds to decisions. Every step forward relies on careful conservation in a way that reminds me of good horror games.

There are only a few leftovers from the old days I wish Nightdive did away with in reworking System Shock. The map is not helpful when it comes to finding important locations and the lack of waypoints or explicit objectives often left me having to reacquaint myself with text and audio logs to remember exactly what I was doing. It also felt less than optimized for gamepads. For instance, the crouch button is also your cancel button, but the game lets you move and interact with your environment in real-time even when in the menus that access inventory, maps, and logs. I often found myself toggling crouch when backing out of the menu and there are plenty of other spots where the functions clashed on gamepad to the point where I moved to keyboard/mouse, which felt better.

Nonetheless, Nightdive’s version of System Shock also lets you adjust many aspects of the difficulty to create a custom challenge. If you want combat to be easy, but puzzles to be hard, or vice versa, you can do that. You can even make it so you only have five hours to beat the game or if you don’t take control of regeneration bays in each area of Citadel Station and die in that area, then you die permanently and have to reload a save instead of just respawning. As complex a maze as this game is to play already, I can’t wait to see what an optimized run of this new System Shock looks like under these conditions.

How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?

The original System Shock was foundational to so many games that would come after it, but it aged like milk in its gameplay and visuals. Nightdive’s System Shock remake keeps much of its successful elements intact while doing away with a lot of its archaic issues that would drag down a modern game. It doesn’t do this perfectly. There are still a few pain points that I feel could have been addressed, but this is an incredible first-person adventure. I would go as far as to call it a solid survival horror game. Citadel is an amazing and ominous environment to explore, and SHODAN does you no favors in traversing it. However, it feels all the better when you overcome the challenge and open the path forward. I wish it had waypoints to help me keep track of my situation and it needs optimization on gamepads before it comes to consoles, but this is still an incredible reinvention of a monumental game and I’d argue it’s the best way to see what the first System Shock has to offer.

This review is based on a digital PC copy supplied by the publisher. System Shock comes out on PC on May 30, 2023, and on Xbox and PlayStation platforms at a later date.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.