Game of the Week: System Shock and the deep pleasures of immersive sims

Is there a more tantalising genre name than "immersive sim"? It's not just a genre, it's an invitation. Get into this! It's deep and rewarding and filled with systems to understand and - perhaps - subvert. It's brainy and difficult but the attendant highs are as high as you can make them.

Anyway, System Shock is our game of the week this Friday, and with good reason. This is, to many eyes, where the genre began, a genre that, as Kaan put it beautifully in his review, inspires "consistent creative problem solving." Four words to live by, I reckon.

System Shock has aged pretty well, I gather, partly because the remake has been handled with real delicacy, based on an understanding of what needs to be updated for modern tastes and what would be cutting into the bone a little too deeply. It's also aged pretty well, though, because the genre itself has aged well. We ask a lot of games these days, and one of the things we ask most willingly is that they ask more of us. This is the kind of request that makes an immersive sim shine.