System Shock (2023) – Zero Punctuation

You play as Archibald Hacker, esquire, but thankfully you’re a full on cyberpunk future-style hacker in a biker vest and green mohawk, not the contemporary image of a hacker, a pale sweaty dude ordering too many pizzas to someone’s house because they aren’t intellectual enough to appreciate Rick and Morty. After getting caught hacking into the Trioptimum Corporation, about which all one needs to know is that it’s a corporation in the future that sounds like the title of a Kraftwerk album, a corrupt executive forces you to hack into a space station overseer AI, take all its subroutines for ethics and niceness and organizing company picnics and redirect them into the box labelled “genocide, violence, horror,” then you wake up six months later in the station’s depths and things have worked out about as well as one could expect. As the lone survivor you must wrest control back from the insane AI the only way a tech nerd knows how: by running back and forth across a cereal box maze puzzle touching all the computers. Ah, but in what order do you touch the computers? Therein lies the game, my friend.

Visually, the System Shock remake is a rather schizophrenic experience. On the one hand they cleaned all that useless bullshit off your spectacles that the original had – early PC first person games couldn’t render much of the environment so they all had interfaces like your dude was wearing a novelty Microsoft Access-themed mailbox on their head – and the character animation’s actually really good. I never knew watching my hands field strip and cock a newly acquired weapon could be so charged with eroticism. But on the other… hand, the level design is very faithful to the original, no doubt because if Nightdive ever found a creative thought in their heads they’d probably immediately get themselves scanned for tumours, and since that game came out at a time when full 3D environments weren’t so much a matter of aesthetic construction as it was getting the engine to do a lot of very complicated maths homework, the grid-based terrain of Citadel Station with its artfully fudged sector over sector physics feels like exploring the interior of a disassembled Rubik’s Cube. And there’s a weird insistence on using pixelly low-resolution textures everywhere. If you’re angling for a deliberately retro look then go the distance or not at all; it clashes with the great character animation and makes my stiffy go in a very confused angle.

And another area where I assume Nightdive didn’t want to tread upon the creators’ perfect original vision is the enemy AI. You see a dude, you duck behind a wall, the dude shoots the wall for a while, then when they pause to calculate how to factor this new “wall” concept into their worldview, you pop out and shoot them back, and that’s basically how every combat encounter goes. Even the bosses are trivial as long as there’s at least one solid object to play ring-a-rosey around. Yeah, that’s a real superior master race you’ve made there, Shodan mate, have you taught them not to shit in the house, yet? I guess it doesn’t work in melee combat, but I stopped carrying a melee weapon after a certain point ‘cos basically every enemy dropped ammo and it was just a matter of constantly switching to whatever gun I wasn’t cripplingly low on. I’d never played System Shock 1 for more than an hour or so and what surprised me is how uncomplicated it is once you can play it with an interface that isn’t like trying to order Drive-Thru with Morse code, at least compared to System Shock 2, probably because of the complete lack of RPG elements that mean you can just pick up any random Q-tip and use it without having sunk any points into ear hygiene.

Well, the primary gameplay’s uncomplicated, at any rate, the part where you figure out where to go and what the constipated Jesus you’re supposed to do next is whatever the opposite of uncomplicated is. I’d say the main thing that recommends System Shock is that it offers a refreshingly unpatronizing experience, which is a nice way of saying it doesn’t tell you shit. No objective markers brighten up the labyrinthine maps of Citadel Station like wet marshmallows dripping down the cereal box maze puzzle, you just have to explore every corner and deduce where to go from the five million audio logs that all end with a gunshot and a scream. Which aren’t always phrased clearly. “I left my key in the computer room BANG AAAH” one might say. What computer room? Every room’s got computers! I assume the decorators didn’t want their budget cut next year so they installed them instead of waste paper baskets! But since most modern games interpret “challenging” as “enemies that spazz out like an arachnophobe in a halloween shop” it offers a rarer kind of challenge that tests your reasoning, memory, observation and reading comprehension skills, and I feel quite pleased with myself when I do figure it out.

Although that’s a big “when.” One late game moment that made me go “Bugger off with that shit, Warren Spector,” was when my momentum hit a brick wall in the form of a retinal scanner. I deduced instantly I needed someone’s severed head, but since decapitation was the station’s third most popular activity at that point after recording audio logs and badminton, tracking down every headless corpse on the level didn’t feel worth the shoe leather, so I went to a walkthrough, which was disappointing. As was the ending, frankly. Which put a bit of a sour note on a game I’d nevertheless found rather absorbing for its faults. See, the game has this recurring cyberspace minigame that plays a bit like Descent meets Space Invaders and is a little out of place, but whatever, it’s a break from playing wall peekaboo with the mutant cyborgs. But then the whole final boss fight is just an extended session of it while SHODAN watches you in sulky silence, and SHODAN’s main distinguishing trait is her constant articulate mouthing off calling me a lowly insect. And most of the women I know charge me for that service.