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.