It gives you a chance to walk around your own apartment for the first time, opening fridges and flushing the toilet - the kinds of things that used to excite people in the 90s when interactivity like this was new - before sitting down to hack a computer and be caught by the authorities. That old cutscene where you see yourself being tracked down to an apartment and then being apprehended: you now play that sequence. There's a whole new section at the beginning, in the introduction, that wasn't there before. And now you're probably thinking, 'What's the point then? I'll play the original.' But don't there's a load of other stuff going on here that should change your mind. It says don't get carried away and expect too much - this is still the original System Shock game. The lighting in particular makes a massive difference to the atmosphere.Īnd I think that's a really clever, and sensitive, way to both honour the original game and to check people's expectations a bit, about what's possible here.

This vid gives a good montage of the game in motion. You can see it on objects, on enemies - everywhere. It's almost as if there's a pixelated layer applied to everything in order to do it. But the more I play, the more I'm convinced it's a deliberate thing, that the game wants to evoke old. This might seem like a misstep, like the developer hasn't been able to live up to remake a game with this legacy deserves, and maybe that will still prove true - this is only a demo I'm playing. And yet, somehow, the game still looks old.

The lighting makes a massive difference to the mood, and there are clearly decades of technological advancement on show. And as you can see, the difference is dramatic. To them, I'd hold up images of the original, which I've included in this piece from a quick playthrough earlier. This System Shock remake is an attempt at the answer, and an intriguing one, because I think if you showed it to someone unaware of the original, who was judging it purely in a 2023 context, they'd look at it and wonder what the fuss was about. Coming to PC first in March 2023, Nightdive told me, and consoles will follow later Availability: Demo still available on Steam.

If you build it completely anew and reimagine everything, then how much of the original game do you still actually have? Then again, if you don't change enough, how much of a remake is it? System Shock (remake) There's a dilemma to remaking a 30-year-old game, and it's how much do you remake.

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