System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Edition Is The Absolute Gold...

In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.

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.

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.

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).

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 und

Source: PC Gamer