System Shock Review (YhofChaerkh)
Very accomplished remake of the 1990s game, with numerous QOL improvements.
Cons: the remake is still faithful to the old game's reliance on cryptic clue-giving. Several times you have an element of the environment or level design which is easily overlooked, and which will block off entire levels of the game if you're unlucky and don't notice them.
Places where I got stuck enough to refer to a walkthrough:
1. Putting the sample into the shield activation computer. This one was on me, I had literally stood in front of the interface, but I guess I just didn't mouseover the right part of the environment. I kept playing after this.
2. The Cyberspace challenge in Maintenance. This one was different from earlier ones because this one does NOT require all enemies to be killed, whereas earlier ones did. The game never tells you this.
3. In Maintenance level, there's a fairly easily-missed button on the wall that opens an elevator to two additional levels. I had to refer to a walkthrough to find it.
4. In Flight Deck level, I met a miniboss and could not beat it normally. It turns out there is a somewhat-contrived "drugs and melee" approach that will kill it quickly. I had heard hints about this and found a clue in discussion of the game.
5. Worst of all, I reached a general abstract point in the game, where about three separate channels of inquiry and exploration were all dead ends. As often happens in Zelda games and Outer Wilds, I abandoned one path to try to explore another, thinking that I would need more clues there. In SS1, this can result in you becoming very underpowered for an unintended environment and overpowered for later ones. I got stuck and confused, and attempted to complete Reactor and Storage levels before the intended preparatory level of Flight Deck, which made for about 12 hours of very difficult "die and respawn" attrition-based progress in those two levels. When I finally got back to other levels, they were trivially easy.
I finally got completely stuck trying to solve several blocked mysteries, including how to lower the reactor locked area, how to deactivate the mining laser beam since its area was locked off, and how to access the Executive suite level since the elevator wouldn't take me up there. By this time, I was 28 hours into the game, and had already had to refer to walkthroughs about 3 or 4 times to get out of a single roadblock rut. I realized that I had sequence-broken a few parts of the game by accident, and even referring to a walkthrough was going to be a logical challenge in finding the thread itself.
I eventually watched a glitch-free speed run video, and that was much more satisfying that trying to read the designers' minds about what cryptic clues they thought I should have noticed.
The game's interior environment is littered with NPC corpses with guns nearby and bullet wounds to their heads. Clearly, the game narrative emphasizes how hopeless and frustrating the game world is. The designers' dedication to recreating this same hopeless frustration for the gamer is rather impressive.
Along with Far Cry 1 and Baldur's Gate 1, this game is the first of a series that spawned a phenomenon. But in each case, I can confidently say if I had tried to start the series with the first game, I would absolutely have refused to play any later game in the series.
This may suit folks who can dedicate very intense or sustained focus on a game's internal environment. Many clues are very lightly emphasized, and failure to notice them will literally make the game unwinnable.
A technically slick modern remake of a very old "classic". But in my negative experience: I guess you just had to be there.