System Shock Remake proves that immersive sims are brilliant, and everyone that dislikes them is wrong

This is the most exciting and vibrant time for immersive sims since the golden days of Looking Glass and Ion Storm. Not only are there more indie games about crawling through air vents and reading email than ever before, but emerging design sensibilities and a focus on gameplay are starting to show up in triple-A titles to an extent we haven’t seen before. seen in a long time.

The genre has a disparate history and many competing definitions, and System Shock’s excellent remake brings it all back to basics, providing a perfect opportunity to experience the core appeal as well as provide a solid foundation for the future.

Playing the excellent System Shock remake helped me realize why I always prefer the original to the much more praised sequel to the game. While System Shock 2 inarguably has the strongest ambient storytelling and atmosphere, it also had a lot more video games going on it. It had skill points and upgrades, just like a real RPG.

To be honest, I’ve always found that those cold, visible mechanisms of numbers and dice rolls go against the “immersive” side of immersive simulation. What was your favorite part of Deus Ex? Was he looking at a display of digits and putting points into the Environmental Training skill? No, it was not. do not lie

RPG mechanics were always a crutch, a holdover from the Ultima Underworld days, a necessary evil during a time when more natural ways of expressing action and reaction in virtual spaces weren’t yet technically feasible. Of course, the nostalgic affectations and the fact that immsim fans tend to be big nerds in general meant that as the genre developed and people who grew up with it started creating their own, they kept all the trees of skills and experience points.

Arkane Studios’ Prey was touted as the closest thing to System Shock 3 we’ve ever had: a game set on a sprawling space station filled with dangerous enemies where you have to solve maintenance problems and use all the tools and tricks you can. gather to survive. It was ok! Very good! It had a lot of room for experimentation, it had an amazing atmosphere. There was a glue gun. But it was also packed with skill trees and upgrades, damage numbers, and enemy health bars, elements that were already starting to feel redundant in 2017.

Fortunately, there’s a recent game that really embraces the idea of ​​using systems and physics in an intuitive way, with little to no traditional RPG mechanics visible. It would have been unthinkable when the games were about a polygonal youngster working linear puzzle dungeons, but Zelda’s latest mainline is arguably much more of a genuine immersive sim than any of the Looking Glass games.

Tears of the Kingdom is such a blessedly physical and tactile RPG, absent of almost all of the behind-the-scenes stat-based whims of most of the genre. It has a lot more in common with something like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic than it does with Ocarina of Time: it’s a physics-based playground about killing goblins in the most comical ways possible, about using their various tools, and the environment in ways that make immediate sense and produce natural results as you would expect in the real world.

The possibilities for the kinds of spaces video games can take place in and what they can be filled with are exponentially greater than they were in 1994, when System Shock defined an entire genre: making hallways, making emails, making space stations, levers, and Air vents. standard for decades to come.

Playing the new version helped me realize that all of these elements were never the core appeal of immsim; was to explore a unique environment that has been fully realized and makes immediate physical sense, where wandering and interacting produces the results you would expect from the real world, as opposed to the more over-the-top and abstract mechanics of traditional RPGs.

The fact that so many immsims in the last few decades stuck to industrial or urban sci-fi settings was always mainly due to technical limitations or a feeling of nostalgia, making those who dare to try something else all the more memorable and memorable. interesting. Games like Arx Fatalis dared to imagine a world of caves, instead of metal. Some would argue that the caves are just stone corridors, but they don’t realize the spiritual difference. Most notable is the recent spiritual successor to Arx Fatalis, Weird West, a western that shows that immsims are not only absolutely possible in more varied settings, but don’t even necessarily have to be first-person.

At the other end of the spectrum is the riveting Shadows of Doubt, a first-person detective immsim that thinks endless apartments, endless emails, and endless air vents are what the genre needs. Such a genuinely immersive game, simulating every facet of its randomly generated city blocks so perfectly, that it really surprised me when the first thing I did was take the elevator to the top floor of my building at 2am, I knocked on a door random. and got a grumpy guy in his underpants who wanted to know why he woke him up.

It doesn’t matter if you think of immsims as networks of guard-filled corridors or sprawling open-world adventures where you push monsters off cliffs, there’s never been a more exciting time if you’re someone who enjoys the idea of ​​immsims video games are developed intuitively. systems and interactions instead of cold mechanics. There are plenty of exciting interpretations and evolutions out there right now, from games like Void Bastards that seamlessly blend System Shock lore with contemporary roguelikes to brain-expanding projects like Ctrl Alt Ego, the game that casts you as a disembodied consciousness in a chaotic world. of poseable robots and machinery.

There are so many places to visit, and if you’re getting tired of linear adventures and limited combat, any of these big tricky games about finding your own way out could be exactly what you need right now. It’s what video games in general need right now.