Which is fine, that’s how it was in the original, but to throw you into the deep end and ask you to find your way through feels unnecessarily fiddly and at times incredibly frustrating. There are no quest markers or hints about where you should be going next to progress the story, only reminders of your end goal. This means that I spent a lot of time scrolling through the emails and logs I’d acquired to figure out which one told me I needed to be in a specific place, what was in that place, and where that place was. Many of the audio logs that contain information about the goings on of the station will also be the only way to gain information about how to progress through the various levels of the station and eventually (hopefully) take down SHODAN. It’s a good yarn, but the way it ties into the game’s progression creates a few frustrations that feel as if they could have used an update. For the most part, System Shock’s plot remaining largely unchanged in the remake is a fine choice, with the tale of a mysterious criminal protagonist known as “The Hacker” trying to evade the clutches of sassy rogue AI SHODAN to survive on a largely corrupted space station still holding up as a compelling story. While this type of environmental storytelling-driven narrative is now more familiar to many players, it’s still an interesting way to tell a story when done effectively. When it was released, System Shock was innovative in its approach to narrative delivery, using the discovery of audio logs and emails to slowly build out the world of Citadel station. But delivering the perfect balance of familiarity and innovation is a very delicate dance, and now that the remake is here, there are going to be some mixed reactions on how well developers Nightdive Studios have managed to perform. The remake, first announced in 2015, promised “a faithful reboot” of the game that would offer “a modern take” on its Kickstarter page. Long-running series such as Deus Ex, Bioshock and Prey have all been listed as spiritual successors building on the foundation that this space horror adventure built, making it a seminal point in gaming history. System Shock became a cult classic when it was originally released in 1994, and there’s no denying its influence on the modern gaming landscape.
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