And I think they were pretty spot on with this approach: the parts of System Shock 2 that are truly great, the level design, the environmental storytelling, the incidental characterisation, the unique and strangeness of how the game asks you to interact with it that’s all here pretty much as fully formed as it was in System Shock 2. At pretty regular intervals, I would do something by accident and wonder, “Jesus, they didn’t tutorialise that?” Nightdive made the call in their updating that Looking Glass’s original ideas still held water, irradiated though it might be, and that their job was to allow a new generation to see it, nothing more.
The environments are wonderfully updated without a beautiful voxel fidelity that feels foreign and tactile and industrial, and the interface is snappy and easy to navigate with the solidified 30 years of reinforced key-mapping schema and necessity - but, the design? The encounters? The puzzles? That’s all 1994 vintage, baby. NOPE! System Shock is a remake of the 1994, but it has not been remade. When the remake for System Shock was announced though, I figured I could get the context without the homework I would be able to cruise through The Citadel as The Hacker as easily as Alpha and Delta could through Rapture. So despite the immensely rewarding sense of place and possibility offered on that cold and hostile station, when I saw that what laid the track to get there was more archaic, more artifacted, more mystifying, and more unforthcoming, I thought that I could just play Dishonored instead. Even going back and playing System Shock 2 a decade ago required one session of bouncing off and readjusting my expectations appropriately.
I knew that much of what was to become become solidified in 0451 games originated in System Shock, but by the time I first encountered those elements in Bioshock, much of that piquantness had been watered down to a highly palatable bitterness, necessary for tent-pole games that hit several consoles simultaneously, from the highly acquired flavour of PC jank, when being able to play console or PC really meant a lot, of the Shock name-makers. Despite the fact that System Shock 2 is probably my favourite FPS (dogshit ending and all), I’d never made a real concerted effort to go back and play the game that preceded it.
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