System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Edition sets the definitive benchmark for what a remaster should be.

Personal Pick

(Image credit: Future)

Alongside our main Game of the Year coverage, members of the PC Gamer team are each highlighting one game that resonated with them most in 2025. These personal selections aren’t about consensus or rankings—they’re about the games that stuck with us long after the credits rolled.

Have you ever watched those art restoration videos online? The ones where specialists use an array of curious tools—tiny brushes, sponges, scalpels—to carefully remove decades or even centuries of yellowed varnish and accumulated grime from a famous painting?

What makes those videos so compelling is that the process isn’t about addition. It’s about subtraction. A layer removed here, a blemish cleaned there. Eventually, what remains is the original artwork, revealed rather than reimagined. If you could send it back through time to the moment it was first completed, its creator might not even notice a difference.

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

That’s the approach Nightdive took with System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Edition. Despite years of development, it isn’t a dramatic reinvention. There’s no ray tracing overhaul, no Unreal Engine 5 makeover grafted onto a 1999 skeleton. Instead, Nightdive focused on carefully removing the friction that time had layered onto the original.

Textures have been gently sharpened. Animations smoothed just enough to feel natural. Quality-of-life improvements fade into the background rather than calling attention to themselves. If you hadn’t touched System Shock 2 in years, you might not immediately realize you weren’t playing the original—until you noticed how effortlessly it boots at 4K on a modern Windows system.

(Image credit: Nightdive)

Contrast that with another major remaster this year: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. That project rebuilt the original inside a glossy modern engine, and while it’s undeniably impressive, it takes a very different philosophical approach. I found myself constantly admiring what was new—the lighting, the animations, the spectacle.

With System Shock 2, Nightdive gives you space to appreciate what was always there. The oppressive atmosphere, the careful level design, the tension of scraping together resources aboard the Von Braun. There are no muddy textures or technical limitations pulling focus away from the core experience. It feels like a remaster created by people who understand why the original mattered, and who trusted it enough not to smother it with embellishment.

(Image credit: Nightdive)

I also appreciated Nightdive’s decision to collaborate with long-running community modders, folding years of fan-driven improvements into the official release. It’s a small gesture that speaks volumes. Those projects kept System Shock 2 alive when official support had long faded, and it’s fitting that their work lives on here.

(Image credit: Nightdive)

And the thing is—System Shock 2 is still incredible. Playing it again this year made me seriously question long-held allegiances. As much as I love Deus Ex, there were moments where I found myself thinking I might actually prefer Irrational’s suffocating space horror. SHODAN remains one of the medium’s greatest villains, and the slow, methodical struggle to survive aboard the Von Braun is as intoxicating now as it ever was.

If I had to choose just one immersive sim to replay for the rest of my life, it might genuinely be System Shock 2. That feels almost sacrilegious to admit—but it’s true.

Of course, all it might take to change my mind again is a similarly restrained Nightdive remaster of Deus Ex. Unfortunately, that’s not the timeline we’re currently living in.