System Shock Remake

As a die-hard fan of the original System Shock (with the OG controls), I’m extremely pleased! This is exactly what I’ve been wishing for all these years, and Nightdive Studios has finally delivered. I can’t thank them enough. The game is a 1:1 recreation of the original, I completed it purely from memory, doing everything exactly the same way I had back in the day. That’s how faithful it is.
The game doesn’t hold your hand, there are no arrows, no quest markers, no checklist of tasks like in modern games. You actually have to explore, figure things out yourself, listen to recordings, read logs, and pay attention. True ’90s OG style! It genuinely feels like the devs poured their souls into it: the attention to detail, the authenticity, it’s all there.
If you’re new to System Shock and asked me, “Which one should I play first: the original or the remake?” I’d say: “The remake, for sure.” That’s how good and true to the source it is. From the lighting and the creepy, hopeless atmosphere, to wandering through dimly lit corridors crawling with mutants and cyborgs who were once human, everything is spot on. From the opening cutscene to the final moment.
In short: this is a faithful copy of the OG game, with an untouched plot and with smart improvements that breathe new life into it. They’ve added new mechanics that make gameplay more engaging, modern, and polished.
Sure, there are a few flaws (the cyberspace enemies, for example), but nothing in our world is perfect (except Shodan, hehe), so to me, those flaws are negligible.
I genuinely enjoyed every second of it, just like I did when I played the original back then. My rating: 10/10.
If you’re even remotely interested in the original System Shock, you should absolutely try this remake.

This game answers the question of what if they remade the game but stuck to the original approach so you can see what worked and what didn’t. This is largely what Nightdive remasters do and I love (for better and worse) that they mirrored it in adjusting System Shock for a modern release. If you have any love for Thief or the old days of PC gaming, pick this up.

TLDR: Glowing recommendation if you are looking for a survival shooter with a heavy focus on exploration. If you are unsure, the demo is free to try out. Set Hacking to Easy.
As someone who never played the original this was my first introduction to the franchise. So this review will mostly be for people who are new as well.
This game is about being a rat in a maze. You are a hacker, trapped on a deathtrap of a space station built by a dystopian company and now run by a rogue AI named SHODAN who absolutely hates humanity. She is currently powering up a laser to destroy Earth and you have to stop her. The story has some developments, but overall it serves mostly to reinforce the feeling of hopelessness. SHODAN controls nearly everything on the station and she wants you dead. She holds almost all the cards and will spend the next dozen or so hours mocking you for your insignificance. Simple premise. Great execution, especially thanks to the actress who voices her.
The gameplay focusses around scrounging for supplies and finding a way to stop SHODANs plans. Exploration and resource management are the name of the game. The station is a gigantic labyrinth and you have to learn how to navigate it while spending as few bullets and health items as possible. You also have no quest log. While it is usually pretty clear what your current main goal at hand is, you will have to pay close attention to logs and calls to figure out what to do, where to go and what passwords to use. The game mercifully archives all audiologs, text messages and even NPC interactions, but some codes might be only appearing in the level, so have something to write at hand. If everything else fails there is no shame in looking up a guide online, and funnily enough a lot of the guides of the original game also apply here, which shows how close to the source material this remake is.
The game also has multiple difficulty settings, and for the first time I would recommend setting story not to hard, as that adds an instant death timer which can add a welcome challenge, but it also means that you have less time to explore. As a big focus of the game lies on finding clues and the dopamine rush of discovering a new weapon or a large cache of supplies, having to cut that short and ignore some corners because you run out of time might suck on the first playthrough. I also recommend setting Hacking difficulty to Easy no matter what you are doing, for a simple reason:
The game has some shortcomings. The final boss could have been an email, the shotgun is underwhelming, but the single biggest flaw of the game is the hacking minigame. All the intrinsic gameplay loop about exploration, choosing weaponry and upgrades and learning the layout of your prison means nothing for the hacking minigame. You fly a little drone through a colourful mini dungeon, shoot up enemies with annoying movement patterns and unlock some doors. There is little challenge, mostly tedium. The less you have to deal with it, the better, so set it to Easy and just rush through the nonsense.
But apart from that the game offers an amazing survival experience without ever becoming bogged down in tedium (outside of hacking) that I have not seen in many other games of the genre. The demo containing the first floor can be downloaded for free and I recommend giving it a try if any of the above felt even vaguely appealing.
Also **** beta grove.

This game can be kind of unbearable sometimes, but that’s alright.
It’s a lovingly faithful remake, for better or for worse. Hardcore fans of the original must be so happy for it to be this way; legends say you can almost complete it using ancient 1994 walkthroughs - that’s how faithful it is.
Unfortunately, that means the rest of us have to navigate through a painful level of obtuseness, with Pipe Dream puzzles that were already tired beyond reason back in 2007 when we were playing the first BioShock, and boring white noise that is cyberspace hacking minigames. This game demands a lot of patience, let me tell you. If you don’t want to deal with constant tedious "where-the-hell-do-I-go" moments, you better play it on easy, and I tend to recommend that. There is a fine line between challenge and wasting the player’s time for no reason, and System Shock has crossed it - an unfortunate side effect of the game's age.
I swear, I still overall liked it, but mostly due to historical interest and SHODAN. I don’t regret playing it, but I will probably never touch it again.
Can’t wait for the remaster of the sequel, though!

After playing it for around 35 hours, I can definitely say that it's a damn good game. Would I call it fun? Not exactly, because sometimes I would get lost after performing a task as I don't have a clue of what I'm supposed to do next. However, I must say that this game gives you hell lotta satisfaction each time you use your peanut brain to solve a puzzle or a task, as this game has no quest log like most games. You have to do a lot of reading, listening and need to be attentive to the surroundings in order to progress through the game because your tasks and security codes are written in emails and audio logs.
The things that I loved about this game are it's guns, sound design and the art direction that developers went to give it the original look. The look, feel and sound of the guns are soo fantastic that each time I fire my magnum, it's activates my neurons.
The only critique that I'm gonna make is about the glitches that you witness in character models after you kill them. It looks like the models are either having a stroke or a drug overdose when I backtrack to previous floors.
Overall, a pretty fun immersive sim game that we got in recent times as Prey from Arkane Studios was the last such game that released 7-8 years ago. If you're a first timer in this genre of games, I think this would be a great start for you.
Edit: The final boss fight was turbo ass.

The elevator pitch here is:
Take System Shock, one of the first games ever made in the FPS genre and originator of an entire subgenre, and repackage it in modern graphics, changing only the extremely outdated control scheme out with a modern FPS scheme and leaving most everything else regarding gameplay and art style intact.
The result is something that succeeds in the elevator pitch and so is worth your money.
It is not, however, a substantial gaming experience and is suspended purely in the realms of nostalgia and content tourism - sightseeing the past of video gaming in a modern package.
The game design is all very loose, with a lot of things present that do not serve to add any function to the gameplay loop. One of the first things you'll likely learn is that there is really no good reason to hoard a lot of junk to later turn into scrap metal, for example - then, as an extention to such a design, you'll also learn that there is really no need to be hauling a diverse array of weaponry either, as everything will kill the game's enemies all the same.
On that note, the enemies themselves don't ever offer very much excitement. Their biggest feature of note is that the space station's rogue AI, Shodan, can repopulate the level's enemies with some frequency. Respawning enemies are usually unwelcome for my tastes but I find that it doesn't break any fun factor in System Shock. It is lamentable that the sentient and rogue Artificial Intelligence themeing is paired with a very rudimentary enemy AI.
The game's biggest positive is the level design, as it is a sprawling semi-maze, with multiple rooms connecting to multiple other rooms on every floor. Therein lie multiple pockets of Resident Evil "take x item to y location" micro designs worked into the greater macro spread of interconnected rooms. Positional awareness, along with a set of pretty good power puzzles serve as the game's only ability to engage the player's senses, as the combat and gunplay are of a very stock affair.
Lastly, on the visuals. They are too faithful to the original for my liking. The space station is full of goofy neon lights and blocky metal panels. Most areas to be explored simply do not give off any kind of "lived in" sensation, which is - I think - one of the best qualities of the Shock genre. On a related note, the story serves a means to an end but is merely a prologue to the iconic plot of System Shock 2.
Overall, it's a fair purchase and far from the waste of time that millions of other games would be, but it only barely registers as a classic on the technicality of originating something substantial.

Phenomenal remake to a legendary game.
Updating System Shock to a modern immersive sim executed extremely well.
Absolutely worth the wait.
A must play.