Hunt: SHODAN
FORMAT PS5 / ETA 20 SEP / PUB PRIME MATTER DEV NIGHTDIVE STUDIOS / PLAYERS 1
Nightdive Studios’ swanky, ground-up remake of 1994’s genre-launching classic System Shock is finally heading to PlayStation – which should make you very excited if you have any interest in crawling through vents or bonking cyborg mutants on the head with blunt objects. Which, let’s face it, as a PLAY reader, is pretty much a given.
System Shock casts you as a nameless hacker, blackmailed with the threat of prison by a megacorp executive into the incredibly sensible act of disengaging the ethical safety locks of SHODAN – the artificial intelligence governing the corporation’s space station dedicated to all kinds of shady biological and technological research. Believe it or not, things go very wrong very quickly and you awaken on the medical level some time later to discover that SHODAN has declared herself a machine god and reduced most of the station’s inhabitants to gibbering cyber-horrors.
CYBER SNOOPER
From there matters are left more or less up to you to figure out. You’ll be carrying out a lot of the activities beloved by the developers of PC immersive sims in the ’90s and ’00s: snooping through people’s private emails for locker and door codes; constantly managing your inventory of various types of grenades; and sneaking up behind robots to drop big mines in their paths. You’ll also occasionally hop into cyberspace, turning the game into a simplistic shoot-’em-up that frankly always lasts a little longer than it should.
As you pick your way through the ruined, labyrinthine levels of Citadel Station you’ll piece together the details of what went down, while also working out how to fix your colossal mistake. As we creep through the mutant-haunted corridors of the opening medical level, it becomes clear that Nightdive Studios is pulling off something few devs manage when it comes to remakes - tricking your brain into believing this is what one of your favourite games always looked like. Of course, it never looked like this. The original System Shock is 30 years old, built for PC systems that could barely handle the concept of 3D space.
Here, all the possibilities of modern technology are on display, but they’re being used to render details that perfectly fit the overall vibe an
