Later in my door opening saga, I encountered one that needed a keycode, so I circled the same few rooms endlessly, until I found the note containing said keycode and disappeared it into the depths of my inventory. It really does capture the feeling that you're trapped in the bowels of a ship controlled by an unhinged AI, and ensures it looks the part too. The colour palette is awash with neons and CRT greens, with pixellated building blocks when you inspect things up close. The atmosphere was spot on, it being all hisses of torn cables and the patter of your footsteps on cold, iron grates. As a newcomer to System Shock, it seemed like a strong start as I pressed green buttons to open sliding doors and plopped discarded crisp packets in my inventory to stave off the oppression.

Later I found myself in a claustrophobic space station populated by rotund robots, corpses, and sad aliens. It may only be a short rummage around your digs, but it's a neat step towards making an iconic immersive sim all the more immersive without harming the integrity of the original. In the original, you'd have a cutscene of your main character (referred to simply as the 'hacker') pottering around their apartment block, but in the remake the devs have turned it into a playable intro where you're actually able to stroll about and soak in the atmosphere.

The demo kicked off right at the beginning of the game and immediately showcased one of Nightdive's licks of modern paint. For nostalgic fans it should make for an exciting revisit to cyberspace, but I'm unsure whether it'll land quite as well for newcomers seeking a showdown with Shodan. Having gone hands-on with a short 20-minute-ish demo of the game at this year's Gamescom, I can confirm that the remake is real and seems faithful to the original despite some heavy tinkers in the modernisation station. Nightdive's remake of 1994 classic System Shock hasn't had the smoothest development run, first having some money issues in its Kickstarter a while back, then having to reboot itself with twenty-twenty-something release dates chucked out there more as hopeful concepts than assurances.

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