Nightdive's smart remake proves System Shock has still got it

There’s a dilemma to remaking a 30-year-old game, and it’s how much do you remake. 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)Developer: Nightdive StudiosPublisher: Prime MatterPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Demo still available on Steam. Coming to PC first in March 2023, Nightdive told me, and consoles will follow later

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.

To them, I’d hold up images of the original, which I’ve included in this piece from a quick playthrough earlier. And as you can see, the difference is dramatic. The lighting makes a massive difference to the mood, and there are clearly decades of technological advancement on show. And yet, somehow, the game still looks 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. But the more I play, the more I’m convinced it’s a deliberate thing, that the game wants to evoke old. It’s almost as if there’s a pixelated layer applied to everything in order to do it. You can see it on objects, on enemies – everywhere.

And 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. It says don’t get carried away and expect too much – this is still the original System Shock game. 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.