I finally finished the System Shock Remake and I was surprised how much this game already got right in its original installment in sense of story progression and open world level design, but also how much they improved the general gameplay and graphics with the remake.
The new lightning effects and graphics in general are of course much better than the 20+ years old original, only downside there is that they made everything bright enough, that you never need the vision enhancements.
Sadly the last level in the remake is standard “evil tyrant SciFi” optics over the surreal Giger-like textures in the original due to time constraints.
The cyber space “hacking” is a 6 degree of freedom shooting mini game, same as in the original, but much better to conceptualize now. Now everything has textures and proper 3d models instead of being some polygon clusters with edges but no surfaces.
The story is unchanged in the big moments, but some smaller changes in the details. The beginning has you explore your apartment on planet now instead of only being a cutscene.
So if you were always interested in the birth of the immersive sims genre, but don’t want to play a very difficult to control game with sprites pixely enough to make Minecraft look HiRes, I would recommend this game version over the original.
You geht a minimap which is not easy to read BUT you can make notes for yourself on the map. Which was huge, since you dont get a quest log or anything that tracks password and such stuff.
And yes the level design is labyrinthian and not exactly realistic, but I enjoyed the flow of exploring it and circling back to a known region with a newly opened shortcut. (that was the part I loved most about Dark Souls)