Before Deus Ex, Bioshock, or Prey (2017), there was the grandaddy of the sci-fi FPS immersive sim, System Shock. First released in 1994, the game is renowned for its massive influence on PC gaming. That said, even the most nostalgic of gamers can acknowledge that the original has not especially aged well in the visuals or gameplay departments. Fortunately, Nightdive shares that sentiment, and has come out with a remake funded by Kickstarter that gives System Shock a much-needed update in many areas, while leaving the core experience mostly untouched – for better or for worse.

Set in the far future on a space station orbiting Saturn, you play as a nameless hacker who has been manipulated into releasing the ethical constraints on the station’s AI, SHODAN. Waking up on the station with only audio logs and SHODAN’s taunts as a guide, you must venture through the station, level by level, to disable SHODAN’s defences and prevent her from escaping and threatening humanity.

As a horror experience, System Shock was revolutionary in its day, and the remake provides some crucial updates to maintain that atmosphere. Bringing back SHODAN’s original voice actor, Terri Brosius, to record new lines was an excellent decision, and SHODAN remains a menacing villain to this day. Taking advantage of graphical improvements in the last 30 years, the darker lighting heightens the sense of isolation and threat as you crawl through the station, with danger around every corner. The audio logs of the station’s crew lamenting the destruction as SHODAN took over still remain a haunting example of sterling worldbuilding, which future games inspired by System Shock would go on to iterate further.

While the gameplay and controls have been updated, the general structure of System Shock is largely unchanged. I feel like much more could have been done to streamline some of the original game’s more frustrating or obtuse elements. As soon as you wake up on the station, you’re largely left to your own devices, with a rather vague notion of where to go next based on clues pieced together from logs scattered around the place.

System Shock is the sort of game where you can get three-quarters through the experience before learning you were supposed to be writing down on a physical scrap of paper a string of numbers placed in every previous level. System Shock provides no way of recording this kind of crucial data in-game or even hint to the player that this information is crucial to record. Certain valuable pieces of equipment are hidden away in innocuous areas, necessitating a considerable amount of backtracking if you accidentally missed them. One late-game door that I had unlocked with a switch kept re-locking whenever I entered it via a particular direction, requiring a frustrating return trip to reset it. That last one might have been a bug, but it added to the overall slow pace of the game and monotonous backtracking.

Furthermore, many doors to required areas are locked unless you have lowered the floor’s security level. This must be done by combing through the level shooting every security camera you come across. This is made more annoying due to many of them blending in with the ceiling or being otherwise located in unintuitive locations. Games from this era are known for that degree of freedom and lack of handholding. However, modern games such as Bioshock or Prey (2017) have done a marvelous job of balancing a sense of danger and isolation with providing adequate guidance to the player through their user interface and minimising repetitive busywork, maintaining the desired pacing and preventing the player from wasting their time.

There is also a notable lack of feedback when you are injured, leading to many times that I would take damage or just flat out die when entering a room, with no clue of what caused it until it was too late. Much of the time, it was either one of those kamikaze Roomba robots or the cyborg soldiers who would occasionally drop proximity mines when they die, just to spite me. On other occasions, enemies would hide on platforms or in corners taking potshots at me, without any visual indication of where this new source of damage was coming from. In short, the experience of playing System Shock largely feels like a strange hybrid of new and old which doesn’t quite work together: a competent 21st-century FPS featuring enemies and in a setting from the genre’s infancy, largely unchanged.