The story is predominantly conveyed via audio logs from deceased members of the station’s personnel, as well as announcements from SHODAN, as she makes her displeasure clear the more you impede her plans. It’s up to you to try to stop her nefarious plot to fire the tachyon mining laser towards Earth, as well as releasing a mutagenic virus.Ī lot of Citadel Station is dark and foreboding. In the intervening time the central AI, SHODAN, has gone rogue, killing most of the station’s crew and transforming those who remain into mutants or cyborgs. You’re given a deal by Vice President Edward Diego in exchange for hacking into Citadel Station and disabling the central AI’s ethical subroutines, all charges would be dropped and you’d be given a free military-grade neural interface upgrade.Īfter doing so, you’re placed in suspended animation for six months, awaking in the Healing Suites aboard Citadel Station in orbit around Saturn. You play as an unnamed hacker, arrested after trying to break into the mainframe of the TriOptimum Corporation, the company which owns the space station. It is set aboard Citadel Station in the year 2072. System Shock is a surprisingly faithful remake of the original game, taking the same story, same setting and a lot of the same level layouts, although with considerable other updates and improvements. Seven years later, the game is finally here on PC. Remaking this complex and somewhat clunky game was quite the undertaking from Nightdive Studios, especially given the lengthy development, having been Kickstarted in 2016. In the time since though and particularly after the release of spiritual successor BioShock in 2007, System Shock took on the mantle of being a seminal sci-fi classic, acting as the inspiration for a whole genre of games which came after it the rather poorly defined and poorly named category of “immersive sim”.

System Shock original only sold 170,000 copies at launch in 1994, so the number of people who actually played the predecessor was relatively small. Featured in System Shock 2 released in 1999, this small bit of worldbuilding probably passed a lot of players by at the time, perhaps unaware it referred to Citadel Station, the setting of the first game.

REMEMBER CITADEL is scrawled in blood red lettering on the metallic wall of the Von Braun, humanity’s first faster-than-light starship.

System shock remake]