

One of the first enemies you see is a surgical bot, cheerfully offering healing services as he carves up a corpse in front of you. After that, The Hacker gets six months in the freezer and wakes up with a brand new implant and a front-row seat to the localised apocalypse, with Citadel Station now filled not with people but with cyborgs, mutants and a host of corpses. Your character – the Hacker – starts my hands-on by being forced to remove SHODAN’s ethical blocks at gunpoint.

To a returning player, you know SHODAN is bad news. 1994’s System Shock was a UI-heavy point and click adventure, while this remake plays out like the games that it inspired: this plays like out like Bioshockor Prey, as I tote a woefully small gun with too few bullets and try to survive the various horrors of the space station. Honestly, System Shock looks more like how I remember System Shock 2 looking. Then, Nightdive Studios surrounded it with the most atmospheric space station you could imagine dying on. So, how do you follow up one of the most terrifying video game villains of all time? Well, developer Nightdive Studios decided to work with Terri Brosius, the original voice of SHODAN, to make her just as scary as the original.

READ MORE: The 8 best PC games you need to play in 2022.The primary antagonist of both 1994’s System Shock and 1999’s System Shock 2. For a certain generation of gamers, the mere mention of rogue AI SHODAN introduces an involuntary shudder.
