I've taken a couple of days off work to catch up on some games I've been meaning to play for a long time, this year in particular has been a very exciting year for remakes so I grabbed one.
I've always loved Bioshock style games and System Shock was on my list for a long time, I just didn't want to deal with dated graphics and shaky gameplay.
I guess that problem is solved with the remake, which I understand is a rework of the entire original game with various improvements (graphics, sound, gameplay for the most part).
I knew it wasn't a long game but a survival horror style game that could be beaten in a day or two so I gave it a shot.
The whole intro where we're a hacker trying to steal information from a corporation gave me the feeling of playing something like Cyberpunk instantly, there's also some Blade Runner vibes with the opening designs.
The plot is a bit confusing to me, we are hired to shut down an AI that seems to have gone rogue in one of the corporations we wanted to rob, after a session with it to shut it down we are drugged and when we wake up everything has gone to hell.
You can clearly see where Bioshock gets its inspiration from, the first part where we wake up from our slumber only to understand our situation and grab something to hit is a postcard I've seen many times in the game.
But what defines the horror and suspense in this game is the loneliness, the lack of characters to interact with, when we leave our room we find dead bodies everywhere, having to figure out ourselves how to open the locked doors.
There is a bit of puzzles too in all this, but mostly jumpscares whenever the game can, the mutants that are all over the ship are tough but clumsy, we can surround them and hit them hard with our weapon until they are reduced.
It looks like the ship has been completely infected and we enter an Alien movie with a retro-futuristic theme, there are cyborg surgeons, robot guards in the corridors and people still use e-mail to store important information, like the combination of most of the doors on this ship.
You can tell they've given the graphics a makeover and I'm happy with the psychedelic sequences we get when we connect to some network on the ship and float around in space trying to reconnect power to certain parts of the ship, I feel like if I was on drugs I'd be on a trippy trip right now.
The best part of the game so far are these sequences, I'd have to see how the original game was to judge properly but for the most part they had me glued to the screen with all the movements and sound.
I can only imagine how cool this would all look with some extra work on the modelling, the blade runner vibes are there and could be expanded a bit more, there are also touches of comedy here and there but what reigns in this environment is suspense, the hits are hard and ammo is scarce or not available at all.
It's a bit difficult to judge System Shock today more than as a product of its time, it had an interesting premise that served as an experiment for other projects, it didn't sell very well at the time and I don't expect it to exceed expectations today, however I can't help but get attached to the aesthetic that reminds me of how simple videogames were just a couple of years ago.
As a last thought I want to say that I'm in favour of remakes, they might be comfortable for studios, not very challenging for some developers and complete cashgrabs, but if we can see classics rebuilt and that way new generations are encouraged to play them I think it's worth it.
All yours, @slashint - Gamer, Video Game Analyst.
