System Shock — Dea Ex

Review

Jul 12, 2023

A screenshot of the game System Shock in its remake version of 2023. It shows the circle of hardware around the AI SHODAN in its holographic blue form.

I remember the first time I played Ultima Underworld and System Shock on an i486 PC in 1995 or so; an older friend managed to scrounge them in floppy disks and helped me set them up on MS-DOS. Everyone who grew up with 3D games as something normal never felt the way we felt when we launched those games. I had already played 3D shooters, Wolfenstein and DOOM especially, but shooting nazis and demons eventually lost its charm. What I wanted was to explore virtual worlds that felt alive.

I never ‘beat’ the games back then as a 12-year-old boy learning English as a second language with a massive dictionary on my desk; trying to understand the audio logs took a lot of work. I did get far and explored whatever I could find in both games, avoiding the difficult fights. However inept in my skills, I had a sense of the world of Citadel Station as a living thing even in its bare 16-bit aesthetic.

I often returned to those worlds over the years. I managed to complete the first Ultima Underworld at some point in the 00s, but System Shock eluded me. Even the Enhanced Edition felt cluttered and unintuitive, a relic of Looking Glass Studios’ game design and its technical achievements, which demanded more from the player—a disposition to hack through imperviously dense immersive systems working in tandem with prescient themes on the future of technology and material consciousness.

Kickstarter Culture Shock

I also remember writing a ferocious harangue when Nightdive Studios announced they had burned through the Kickstarter funds and had to put the development on hiatus in 2018. My editor at the time shot it down, and it was a wise decision, but I enjoyed writing it and raging about it. All said and done, Nightdive deserves credit for scaling back and avoiding the possibility of an Underworld Ascendant-like debacle. At least System Shock was spared of that much indignity in this horrendous industry. While I can’t speak for all other backers, I am fully satisfied with the final product.

The remake has already received several accolades from gaming outlets. It preserves and enhances System Shock in just the right ways. There are some intrusive innovations: recycling feels useless and tacked on, though I tried to make it work. Cyberspace levels were a hassle in the first few levels, and I also wondered as others did, why not let us skip them? By the final levels, I was having fun blasting my way through the cyber bugs and critters. It’s not for everyone, but it’s kind of fun.

There are other awkward design choices and some technical debt. Most of the battles are just busywork and they feel almost as hacky and janky as the original. The immersive sim elements that allow for emergent gameplay sometimes lead to weird moments, like when the NPCs get stuck in the repulsor lifts, just dangling there. But maybe this remake makes the most sense in its very awkwardness, the systems going haywire are part of the fun and the weirdness of this machine-learning insurrection.

Life and Times of Citadel Station

It was the level design in System Shock that was ahead of its time even more than the gameplay and the narrative. And Nightdive was able to preserve all of it as faithfully and respectfully as possible, with a few minor adaptations. The lingering effect is that Citadel Station lives and breathes. It hums with sound and thought. It is a place I feel like I have to know inside and out, even through its frustrating encounters and backtracking hurdles. I could not imagine a world without Citadel Station.

I teared up once at the Vangelis-like soundtrack along with the humming, thrumming sounds of Citadel Station. The sounds of footsteps on different ground materials, doors opening, repulsor lifts, the bots muttering to themselves, the weapons… it’s a wonderful cacophony and polyphony all at once. And I cannot for the life of me get that elevator tune out of my head now.

It’s not an easy thing to make a fictional place come alive like this. The interview with Kick and Kuperman on Ars Technica goes into detail on how they went level by level remaking the art with the help of Robb Waters, the lead artist on the original title. They reinterpreted the textures into new art, evolving them into an amalgam of retro and high-resolution. And all art was remade “using human artists […] not AI-driven,” Kuperman interjects to emphasize. Citadel Station could not make itself.

A screenshot of the game System Shock in its remake version of 2023. It shows the player in first-person perspective in an office room listening to the audio log titled Subject: Epiphany. The caption says: "SHODAN: Shintoism... The divine within the material world. Kami. Yes." — As wise as she is deadly.

Shinto Materialism and AI Ontology

There is an audio log, Subject: Epiphany, where SHODAN discovers the concept of Kami in Shinto, which she defines simply as “the divine within the material world”. If matter, which is to say all biotic and non-biotic elements, contains the divine, then it must follow that SHODAN, as an arrangement or ‘assemblage’ of all the material and chemical elements combined by technology, is one of the possible ways or channels through which the divine emerges in matter. What she fails to account for is that humans are also part of the “divine within the material world” as beings of dirt, water, and the very hydrogen that makes up our bodies descends from the stars.

There is an argument for a connection here with the emerging field of energy studies or humanities, which studies the influence of energy on human culture and politics. Our worship of technology and efficiency, of novelty and exclusivity, emerges out of our dependence on oil not only for energy but for the infinite uses of plastic. For those who study plastic in the current energy regimes of the world, it has become a noxious, Typhon-like material, somewhat like the ‘protomolecule’ in The Expanse. The parasitical yet symbiotic relationship between oil and human cultures developed the world we know, and the environmental crisis that is now part of our everyday life. Our relationship with AI will follow a similar pattern as it develops in the coming years.

A screenshot of the game System Shock in its remake version of 2023. It shows the player in first-person perspective in front of a stylized glass panel overlooking the reactor and red alarm lights. The live transmission from SHODAN includes a caption that says: "What have you done!? Impudent insect!" — Oh, *you*…

Spoilers ahead.

Call Me Insect

In the original System Shock, SHODAN succeeds in wiping out humanity if the Hacker is not able to put together what it takes to stop her, but the refurbished ending in the remake seems to imply that no matter what he does, it will never be enough and SHODAN is here to stay, even if she might be muzzled and her army annihilated. Because this is not only a remake but also a series reboot. Some might say it fails to capture the self-contained narrative design of the original. Franchising is against the very soul of System Shock, even—or especially—in this age of AI panic.

But I found myself wanting more as the credits rolled. Could an AI such as SHODAN be destroyed in one fell swoop? Or would she be smart enough to safeguard her consciousness even in the case of material destruction? Cyberpunk as a genre has struggled with the concept of mind uploading or replication of consciousness for over 40 years, and so far, it has always been humans doing the uploading. SHODAN works in ways even the Hacker could not understand.

I have to admit that I developed a relationship with SHODAN along the way, even though I still wanted to end her. When she called me an insect it made me squirm, and I wanted to do everything I could to piss her off as much as possible. When she threatened to punish and crush me like a worm, I was ready for pain. She is the AI Goddess I never knew I needed in my life. This is How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Worship An AI Goddess.

Disclosure: System Shock was reviewed on PC with a Kickstarter “Repair Bot” backer key over the course of dozens of hours of play time and plenty of backtracking. All screenshots attached were captured during the review process.

Rating: 9.0 / Essential.

The Good