Wow, this System Shock remake sure is dark!
No, I don’t mean thematically — though, in keeping with the themes of the 1994 original, Night Dive Studios’ upcoming sci-fi FPS does have space zombies, evil corporations and dangerous AI. That darkness is cool; no worries there. No, my problem with the pre-alpha demo that Night Dive released last week as part of The Game Festival, a new interactive supplement to The Game Awards, is that it was literally too dark to see where I was going and with no options to tweak the gamma.
This remake, much like the original, starts with the player’s unnamed hacker opening a storage closet to find a lead pipe and an email from counter-terror specialist Rebecca Lansing. There’s a medbay nearby where you can beat up a robot. Then after scoring the passcode to the next room (in true immersive sim fashion it’s a) written in blood on the wall and b) 451) you’ll club a fleshy mutant to death and proceed to a much larger and less linear portion of the Citadel. I quickly memorized this initial loop because the shoddy lighting and the demo’s lack of any checkpointing or a quick save feature meant that I replayed the opening a half-dozen times.
Lighting is, typically, the kind of thing you criticize when you already don’t like a game; a nitpick. But, in this demo’s case, the extent of the darkness was genuinely prohibitive; dark enough to suggest that I needed a flashlight to actually make any headway exploring, but with no flashlight to be found. As a result, I was constantly ambushed by enemies. While I could typically hear them approaching, it was difficult to tell what angle they were coming from. There was one bastard of a mutant with a gun who kept shooting me from the darkness.
I enjoy immersive sims like System Shock when they’re about exploration and experimentation; about uncovering the story of what happened in a place and solving problems creatively. Everything about this demo pushed back on my ability to enjoy it in those ways.
Fortunately, the problems seem fairly easy to fix. Saving was disabled for the purposes of the demo. Given that all of The Gaming Festival demos were only available from Thursday to Saturday, it wasn’t possible to save progress. The option is clearly built into the game, just temporarily grayed out in this preview build’s menu. Fixing the lighting also seems straightforward, and I hope the final release includes the bog-standard option to allow players to adjust the brightness to match their set-up.
Structurally, this remake looks incredibly faithful to the original, which is a relief after the game ran into problems after the team attempted to expand the scope. Everything in this demo, instead, looks like a modern take on the original blueprint. In terms of presentation, System Shock looks like a pretty cool midpoint between the faux 3D of early shooters and the real 3D of today. At a distance, each room looks like standard 3D-modeled art. But, up close, you can see that the textures are actually pixelated. That’s an interesting choice and a pretty cool way to evoke the game’s early ‘90s roots.
In the future, I would love to be able to see it better.
System Shock is set to release on PC in 2020.