Thirty years after the release of the original game, we're going back to the Citadel space station as a nameless hacker forced to fight a disturbingly sexy AI gone rogue. A demo version of System Shock remake, the pioneering action RPG released by the legendary Looking Glass studio in 1994, was released during the recent Next Fest on Steam.
Important disclaimer: I spent dozens of hours playing the sequel, but cannot say the same about the first System Shock game. Sure enough, I read a few reviews and the full walkthrough, so I had only a general idea about the gameplay and story, but my first attempt at playing the original release ended after about an hour. For the purpose of this review, I installed it again and finished the first level on medium difficulty — roughly the same area as covered in the remake demo.
The whole idea of making a remake of the Looking Glass classic looks quite impressive, because the devs, Nighttime Studios, seem passionate about reviving classic games. More than that, they have the know-how as the team consist of vidya veterans who worked with ageless classics like New Vegas, and they even claim to have gained support from the original creators of System Shock. Well, this looks way better than another lazy, cheap remake made to cash out on gamer nostalgia. Let's see if they were able to succeed in reviving a title released during Dubya's presidency.
A poor lonesome hacker
The first thing we'll need to do after starting the game is to choose our difficulty. The original SS was quite unique because its difficulty system was quite flexible, and the remake keeps that feature. Depending on what you expect from the game, you can turn it into a mindless shooter or a demanding puzzle game. Another option is to turn on an in-game time limit to make things spicy (or even more stressful).
The intro sequence is hardly original. Looking through the lenses of a drone or another flying machine, we are soaring among a standard cyberpunk hellscape: rain, gloom, enormous skyscrapers and flashing neon signs. The drone stops at the window of a small important and we jump into the shoes of its sole inhabitant, a nameless hacker. After a brief look around, the only option we have is to... hack by clicking the laptop on the desk. Using an executive file named BTTRNG.RAM (I've seen worse puns) we break into the internal network belonging to a dastardly megacorporation called Triop. Predictably, a bunch of heavily armed corp goons breaks into our cosy little place. A rifle stock lands on the hacker's and he wakes up far, far away on board a space station. A top-level corporate suit named Diego has a simple job: to hack the local AI and switch off any ethical restraints created by its makers. He promises to reward the hacker with an exclusive neural implant which would make him the king of the Net. The job is a piece of cake and we're about to receive our reward, the coveted augments, which means a lot of sleep after the surgery. The lights go out.
The awakening is more than rude. Our hapless hacker is lying on a bed in a dimly lit medical bay — and there's no nurse to give him the proverbial glass of water. After grabbing some basic gear from a nearby shelf, including a solid metal pipe, he leaves the small room. The first thing he sees are massacred corpses of crew members, and then two crazed medical bots attempt to perform a very invasive form of surgery on his poor body. Very soon, a megacorp shill named Rebecca reaches him on the radio. The briefing isn't long: Shodan, the local AI, has apparently gone absolutely insane (splendid job, hacker!), took over the station and butchered its crew using its own army of mutants and cyborgs. The psychotic e-girl is loading up a huge mining laser because she wants to blow up the Earth to smithereens. Now it looks that our e-criminal is about to try becoming the saviour of mankind.
Things to do on a space station when you're (almost) dead
The general objective is to reach the command level of the station and switch off Shodan's power button. The goal is far on the horizon, though, and most of the time, we're busy with something more mundane: survival. Cautiously exploring the station corridors, we send our enemies to mutant hell, collect various equipment and try to make sense of the entire mess that's currently happening. A crucial role is played by audio logs lying here and there containing recordings made by crew members (and they're usually found near their massacred remains). By listening to them, we're able to piece together the dramatic backstory which happened after Shodan's rebellion, but they're also important for finding keycodes for locked doors and, more generally, to figure out our next objective.
The local fauna is hostile without any exception. Most often, we encounter unarmed, naked mutants skulking around without much sense. They're easy to dispatch, but other enemies provide more challenge: cyborgs armed with firearms and especially the pesky mechanical spiders equipped with flamethrowers. And then there are heavily-armoured turrets and the occasional land mine. Another, less obvious threat is areas contaminated by radioactivity and biological agents.
Fortunately, each problem has its own solution. From the moment of his awakening, our desperate hacker is equipped with a solid piece of metal pipe. While it's rather slow and requires us to approach the enemies, it's more than enough against most of them. Eventually, we're able to find a pistol (with normal and armour-piercing bullets) and a laser gun, the latter quite accurate and deadly, but drawing energy from our own cybernetic system — not that it matters much in the demo level. Finally, there are hand grenades and proximity mines, especially useful when a group of goons jumps at you in a narrow corridor.
This is a cyberpunk setting, so even in a middle of a space horror story, we won't run from the awkward question of money. There are a few handy vending machines on the medical deck where you can get snacks, medkits or even weapon mods. Nothing's for free, though, so it's time for being enviromental friendly. The only way to get solid cash is to recycle the useless trash we find on your way, from broken guns to empty soda cans. You can either do it at a special station or vapourise the items directly in your inventory (presumably using nanorobots). For larger items, there's a slight income difference between the two methods but the vapour method saves us a lot of backtracking.
From time to time, we encounter a locked elevator or door and are forced to become a janitor. After finding a nearby panel, we get to solve a puzzle which will be familiar to all Bioshock fans. To put it short, we're dealing with another reiteration of the ancient puzzle game called Pipe Dream. The goal is to redirect energy a stream of energy by clicking at a bunch of nodes until the gauge at the bottom fills up. Nothing too demanding, unless we chose the higher difficulty level which requires a lot of trial and error.
Our heroic hacker will have a chance to use his unique skill, too. Just like in the vanilla game, a terminal gives us access to the station's cyberspace where we can find scraps of information, and more importantly open certain doors. The hacking level in the demo is simple enough and requires us to fly around virtual corridors and chambers, shoot up viruses and reach the information node. However, the interface suggests that hacking will get more complex in the full release, with various power-ups like shield and invisibility.
Pixels, lights and scary noises
Compared with other games featuring similar settings like Doom 2016 or Cyberpunk 2077, the visuals in the System Shock demo are underwhelming. Sure enough, the chiaroscuro combination of pitch-black corridors with bright neon lights adds greatly to the atmosphere, but when you approach any object or wall, the textures look incredibly pixelated. Enemy models are no more than average, too. This is just my uneducated guess, but it appears that the devs wanted to make a compromise between modern high-quality games and the visual style of the original game. Some people won't be happy about it I guess, but as a veteran gamer who remembers the 90s well enough, I'm fine with that. Not to mention those mediocre graphics mean the game will run well even on weak rigs — my gaming PC that I bought seven years ago had no problems with running the demo on the highest details.
There's not much to say about the sounds, but the music comes off surprisingly well. What we have here is solid dark ambient (I guess, I'm not a music journo or anything) with a droning backing track, synths and faint echoes of guitar riffs. All in all, it makes a great backdrop to the action on screen. The actors' voices are also correctly chosen, and the show is of course stolen by SHODAN herself — the actress really knows how to play a whacky but, after all, extremely intelligent AI, not without a sense of humour either.
To sum up my experience, the demo versions of the System Shock remake is promising enough. Personally, I've finished the demo three times and feel ready to pay the full price for the final release, something I haven't done in a very long time. You can see the effort put into faithfully capturing the experience of the original and, above all, the respect towards it and the work of the Looking Glass studio. Of course, it's important to be aware that this is still a version labelled as a beta, the full game may encounter new problems and we'll probably struggle with a multitude of bugs. Nevertheless, it looks like the release of the revamped SS will be quite a high-profile event in the history of remakes of computer classics.
All screenshots were made and edited by me.