System Shock (Remake)

We are just rats in a maze.

I turned 32 years old during my playthrough of System Shock’s remake for consoles. I am just old enough, I think, to remember a time when first-person shooters shared far more in common with mazes than gymnasiums or amusement park rides. Yellow cards, blue cards, green cards, and narrow tunnels were all we had before Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995) “invented” jumping and looking up and down, or before Half-Life (1998) “invented” rails as a narrative device. There were only corridors and locked doors you had to remember the location of; some games didn’t even have maps! 

Is this where I’m supposed to say, “…and we liked it, damnit?” I guess I’m not quite that old.

Anyhow, before either of those games made it onto the scene, sci-fi FPS/RPG hybrid System Shock introduced us to an even more important breakthrough in maze exploration: disruption. Before I explain what I mean by disruption, I should clarify that 1994’s System Shock also has jumping, looking up and down, and on-rails sections, but nobody seems to remember that. So, in an age where games were either all story (typically delivered through the text-based adventure genre) or all gameplay, it was rare for a game, particularly a first-person shooter — the pinnacle action videogame genre of the time — to trouble gameplay with narrative, or vice versa. Arcade and home console publishers had carved out a market for hard, fast fun by the early nineties, with platformers, beat-em-ups, and other games mostly built with coin operation in mind. Even PC games fell in line with this trend, as DOOM rushed on the scene, guns akimbo, asking, “What if we brought the action to PC, and we made it harder and faster?” System Shock, in defiance of the fast and hard, asks, ”What if we didn’t?”

This isn’t to say that System Shock lacks the familiar guns, pickups, cards, and mazes of that era’s DOOMs, Heretics, and Wolfensteins. In fact, it even shares their lone-wolf superhuman bloodbath-like quality. However, it also does everything possible to slow the player down. There are curious chunks of cyberpunk ephemera everywhere — with accompanying helpful text descriptions — to turn players’ heads and make them ask, “Ooh, what’s that button do?” In contrast to DOOM’s shooting galleries, the rooms in System Shock are small, and doors sit locked behind puzzles of wit or memory. For example, keypads dot the mazes, and their solutions are written on monitors and logs scattered throughout the game’s space colony, Citadel Station; the solution numbers are often found elsewhere on the level or on a separate level from the accompanying keypad. Another common puzzle is the cyberspace puzzle, stylized by Tron and Neuromancer (where William Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace’), in which players must navigate a 360-degree flight shooter to find and sever digital locks. System Shock also has a limited inventory, with a cumbersome design reminiscent of Resident Evil (to note, System Shock 2 introduced this and System Shock’s remake co-opts this system) where players must conserve its minimal space.

In these ways, the game purposefully slows players down, effectively gesturing them toward the maze, asking them to see it for what it is, to memorize it, and to luxuriate in the maze as the journey — as opposed to DOOM’s the destination. System Shock wants you to know you are a rat in a maze, and that is terrifying, though oddly thought-provoking.

Regardless, every room in System Shock is still a fight for your life. Even on lighter difficulties, power-ups and ammo packs are lifesaving and scarce, so conserving them is key, especially early on. Players additionally need to return to the scant medical bays on Citadel Station in order to restore health and energy (certain weapons and power-ups require energy) regularly, meaning they will often need to backtrack through rooms that may have an enemy or two in them again. Of course, respawned enemies might drop extra ammo or health packs, but they may also cause the player to use up the same resources. In most new rooms, you can expect several enemies and/or other hazards, a few bits of lore in the form of e-mails and audio logs, some ammo and food/healing items, and occasionally new guns or suit power-ups. These survival elements add complication to the game: where it rarely presents overwhelming enemy numbers or fast-twitch muscle tests, it rather asks that players strategize, manage resources, and evaluate risky situations.

Thankfully System Shock balances risk and reward well, keeping things manageable but thrilling throughout. In fact, it is the singular case of an RPG where I found minimally-healing food items to be a viable and worthwhile health source. The potential of helpful resources in every room encourages players to unravel Citadel Station’s secrets and venture into darkened map zones; conversely, those secrets and the rooms they occupy have the ghastly shadow of the game’s rampant AI antagonist SHODAN over them. Her hostility and strangely serene detachment lends terror to situations that might seem pedestrian if they were accompanied by, say, a blistering heavy metal soundtrack and 57 mph strafing speed. At the risk of sounding like a DOOM hater (DOOM rules, in spite of all that has been said here today), I want to say: System Shock is not DOOM, thank god. Anyhow, as players’ health and resolve dwindle, they must cautiously backtrack through potential low-health combat situations, compounding the dread of SHODAN’s omnipresence. And because of System Shock’s slower pace, the player has ample time to reflect on their place in her station, to notice that it is a damn scary space.

While peeling back the blood-soaked pages of System Shock’s narrative is frightening in its own right, what it signals in the larger videogaming landscape is, I believe, far more chilling. In 2012, Nightdive Studios founder & CEO Stephen Kick discovered that the System Shock series had become abandonware — it was no longer available to play on any modern computer or game system. What’s more, the license for System Shock 2 had been deserted entirely, so he scooped up the game’s rights and re-released it for modern PCs. Over the last decade, Nightdive became popular for rooting out abandonware gems and serving remakes and remasters for them: the Turok and Quake series of first-person shooters, as well as adventure classics I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and The 7th Guest, are just some examples of Nightdive’s expanding catalogue of classic rereleases.

These games are, of course, mere drops in an ocean of retro games and systems now endangered by the likes of disc rot, hardware failure, server shutdowns, DMCA notices, old-fashioned library (and library donor) philosophy, and backward ESA policy. Who knows how much game history could be saved from extinction in the coming decades if we cherished and respected these great old games — games that bring joy to fans and influence new scholarship and even great new games? On its own, System Shock has influenced thousands of developers, paving the way for videogame juggernaut series like Bioshock, Thief, Deus Ex, and Dead Space, as well as some of my personal favorites like Cyberpunk 2077, Prey (both of them), and The Outer Worlds. And it was almost lost media.

It is clear to me that Nightdive’s System Shock remake does respect and cherish its original product. Its puzzle design, audio logs, and characters remain largely intact, though Nightdive has adeptly implemented great new additions to those lineups, including the “rats in a maze” quote from earlier, some of its own puzzles, and a few bloody new secrets. The “mazes” (levels) themselves are also highly familiar, though they deviate and increasingly expand by the end. While the System Shock remake is far from the inch-by-inch geometric copy that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 alleges itself to be, its remade components either feel like passionate replicas or meticulous evolutions of the original product: the lighting in System Shock is immaculate, its added accessibility features are helpfully modular, the music and voice acting fits the game’s tone, and its visual style is spectacular.

Honestly, one could write a thesis paper on the visual style of System Shock (2023), especially the way it subtly employs pixelated textures as flair, in a fashion reminiscent of George Miller’s fast-motion effects in the Mad Max series or Danny Dimian and Josh Beveridge’s stop-motion emulation in the Spider-Verse films. These are difficult effects to pull off, and they are risky, with a high likelihood of making their products look “unfinished” or antiquated. Done right, however, they add life and artistry that wouldn’t exist without them. The pixelated textures in the System Shock remake are like jewels atop the smooth chrome of its modern-made doors, weapons, buttons, and other assets, popping with a nostalgic cyberpunky flair that isn’t merely satisfactory; it works.

Many of the audio logs in this game are pensive or downright chilling.

There are a few things that don’t work, though, in this console remake. Firstly, the controls are hit-and-miss. I will preface this by saying that the introduction of the controller feels like destiny when taking into consideration the “slow down” design philosophy of the original. Taking out the granularity and (for some) swiftness of mouse-and-keyboard controls feels like an appropriate final layer of contemplative jank in the System Shock “slow down” equation. The controller offers couch comfort at the cost of desktop precision, and this move feels natural in the System Shock gameplay ethos.

Unfortunately, however, two key features are not mapped to controller inputs that can and should be, namely power-up switching and activation. You can find and equip several power-ups on your journey through Citadel Station, such as a shield, radioactive protection, and night vision. They are situational, but very helpful in certain moments. Without a keyboard, however, you cannot activate these with button presses. Strangely, you can assign them to buttons, but as of this writing those button presses do nothing. Because of this, I wound up rarely using power-ups, as the energy drain was too severe, and the inconvenience too high, to activate them within the menu only to forget them until my energy was gone. Secondly, the map control layout in System Shock is strange, with it opting to zoom with face buttons and pan with exclusively the d-pad. The game also has some run-of-the-mill modern console game issues like auto-enabled motion blur effect, locked framerate (it is 60 fps, at least), and a reliance on surround sound for audio immersion, though the latter is mostly an issue specific to horror games.

Minor quibbles aside, System Shock is a bonafide classic any way you play it, especially if you play it on consoles for the first time through this remake. If you are looking for compelling horror, a good first-person shooter, or science fiction RPG goodness, look no further. If you want a retro-fitted videogame that retains its original’s mazey philosophies, with keycards, corridors, and zero tutorials, you’re in for a treat. If you want to support game preservation through abandonware resuscitation projects like Nightdive’s, there are certainly worse ways to spend your money. After all, without the historical context of important works such as System Shock, without even simple access to it, we might be doomed to wander the maze of modern videogames blindly.