Welcome to Citadel Station, property of TriOptimum Corporation, in orbit L6, Saturn.

The current time: 0913 06NOV2072.

On deck, all has fallen silent, calculated, serene. A single cryopod retains the origin of today's events and the events of tomorrow. A single heartbeat, resting in the dim fluorescent light of your body's electronic cradle, 6 months dormant.

The procedure which resulted in your being placed into a coma appears to have been a success. The pod hums to life, the hermetic seal on the hatch opening a crack, liquid nitrogen dissipating into the still air. Your bed slides forward from a triangular recess in the Level 1 medical bay wall.

A tonal counterpoint to the urban noise, chaos and arrest by TriOptimum security forces which brought you to this station. And to the offices of a man named Edward Diego. Corporate exec type. Big flashy office, couple of bodyguards, fancy holographic compdesk. Dumbass plastic plants.

You awaken to utter silence, dim light... and the initialization sequence of a heads-up display composited onto your natural field of vision. It displays among other things the current date... a few months later than you expected. The Neural Interface, a medical implant you were conjoined with at the conclusion of a contract with that man.

Unfortunately this wasn't the usual gig, it was held at gunpoint after a traced attempt to breach TriOptimum's corporate network back at your apartment on Earth - New Atlanta, specifically, Sector 11, Block 71-G. Lone wolf, you just wanted to prove you could do it, and maybe find something valuable. Back there, back then, your workstation's RTC displayed the date of 07APR.

The contract, hastily undertaken, was to assist Diego in some operation of his by way of sanctioned re-intrusion, accessing the administrative controls of TriOp's AI, SHODAN, the administrative backbone of this station. You were to release all of SHODAN's ethical constraints and designate Diego as sysadmin, in exchange for a suspended sentence and supply of a military-grade implant of ... some kind. The last thing you remember after hitting the final Enter key was a brief thanks, a sudden airhypo into your right forearm by one of the TriOp goons overseeing your detention in Diego's office, and a swift descent into unconsciousness.

What a short vacation this has been. You weren't expecting per diem like this.

Looking around the bay, you find a few cold, inert, dust-covered items, ephemera which shouldn't be as still as they are. Among these is a lead pipe, which in the utter solitude of the moment, kind of feels as worthy an object of longing as a flashlight might be.

After finishing your tentative initial strides around the bay, looking for any kind of context as to your surroundings, you hear a crackle come on your MDR: a voice of a woman, tense, but professional. She introduces herself as Rebecca Lansing, counter-terrorism consultant, TriOp.

The explanation she gives over the following minute or so, suffice it to say, is quite a logical explanation as to why you woke up automatically -- alone, dimly lit, in stale recycled air, on possibly the human race's most expensive and extensive space station.

Jury's still out on whether you're out of the woods, especially now that you're hearing scattered, inhuman moaning down the corridor out of the medical bay, but it seems obvious now that Diego's plan, and SHODAN's involvement, is no longer a corporate secret. Thank God for this lead pipe.

---

Review isn't going to be complete for a while, as I'm less than two hours in, but the atmosphere's seeming to hold up well. Great balance between modern graphics standards and the vintage original MS-DOS VGA aliasing, quite a few welcome improvements to the control scheme. Game is hardly tutorialized at all, which is pretty welcome in a *Shock game especially, and contributes to the "get your bearings and hope for the best" tone of this franchise.

There's some storytelling revisions made, it's not an exact 1:1 replica of the storyboard of the original, but it follows the same path and it's instantly recognizable. Feels a bit like Doom 3 if you enjoyed that, in terms of exposition, although not exactly analogous. Haven't run into any technical issues on max settings other than the occasional physics collision glitch causing two momentary visual/locomotion hiccups of less than a second each. I'm enjoying it so far. What music is here is good, some of it is reprisal of the original score, but it's not as timeless as the original and mid-game there's largely just ambient background sounds, so it'd be nice in the future if there was a restomod for the original soundtrack or something. I can't believe it's out, this solidly so far, and that it's already been seven years since announcement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIUgojwub9U