System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Edition is the absolute gold standard of remasters

You ever watch those art restoration YouTube channels? The guys who have some bristling kit of arcane brushes, tweezers, spudgers and sponges, and who put them to use painstakingly removing a fine layer of yellow—origin indeterminate—from the surface of masterpiece after masterpiece?

It’s a process of subtraction: some schmutz removed here, some cruft excised there. By the end of the job—which could take days, months, years—what you’re left with is… the original piece, its glory unobscured by the detritus of centuries. If you sent it through a wormhole back to the day its creator first finished painting it, odds are they wouldn’t notice anything had changed.

(Image credit: Nightdive Studios, Looking Glass Studios, Irrational Games)

You see where I’m going with this. System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Edition was not some sweeping overhaul, despite how long Nightdive had it in the oven. It did not add ray tracing or a thick Unreal Engine 5 wrapper to the bones of the original game from 1999. It just… subtracted cruft.

Blurry textures? Subtly uprezzed. Iffy animations? Quietly smoothed. Its additions were sanded to seamlessness. If you’d not touched SS2 in a decade or two, you’d be forgiven for not noticing you weren’t playing the original. Though you might be shocked at how easy it was to boot in 4K on Windows 11. That would be a hint, sure.

(Image credit: Nightdive)

Compare the year’s other big remaster—The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, which transplanted its original game’s rickety bones into a shiny new UE5 frame. Don’t get me wrong, I think Bethesda and Virtuos did a great job on their revival of perhaps the funniest game ever made, but Nightdive’s philosophy just works better for my archive-minded sensibilities.

Playing the Oblivion remaster, I find myself ooh’ing and aah’ing over the new gewgaws and doodads: the way shafts of evening light peek through the boughs of a forest, the way NPCs’ lips seem to actually sync to what they’re saying (to sometimes hilarious effect).

(Image credit: Nightdive)

In other words, I find myself appreciating the things that are new. With System Shock 2, Nightdive gives me the space to appreciate what’s old, the things that were already great about the original imsim without bad textures, low resolutions, or a lack of controller support to get in the way. It feels like a remaster created by a team that understands what was so excellent—what remains so excellent—about System Shock 2 and wants to clear a path for that excellence to express itself, rather than to gild the lily.

Plus, Nightdive reached out to a bunch of the popular modding projects that have been doing the work of keeping SS2 gleaming all these years and incorporated their work, and I just appreciate that on a philosophical level. Get your plaudits, modders. You earned ’em.

(Image credit: Nightdive)

Anyway, guess what—System Shock 2? Still an absolute banger. It was during my playthrough this year that I began to think, really think, that I might actually prefer Irrational’s eerie space horror to Deus Ex, though it feels blasphemous to say it. SHODAN is such a perfect villain, and the experience of hunting through the Von Braun’s corridors for any advantage I can get is so narcotic, that if I had to only play one of the pair for the rest of my days it might genuinely be SS2.

Then again, perhaps all I’d need is a Nightdive remaster of Deus Ex to change my mind all over again. Alas, that’s not the world we live in.