For the past decade something has been lurking amid the vast electronic tangle of cyberspace: a name whispered with a strange mixture of fondness and fear by those who remember it; a creation that reigned supreme at the tail end of the last Millennium, and then almost completely disappeared. Just a few days ago, however, it suddenly came back , determined to regain its former glory. I’m here to tell you why you should be afraid and delighted in equal measure.

The alluring monster in question is, of course, System Shock 2 , often referred to as the spiritual predecessor to Bioshock, the game that earned Ken Levine a place in the virtual hall of fame. For more thirteen years, legal problems have kept it locked in cyberspace, inaccessible to anyone who didn't buy it in 1999. But now, finally, that's all be resolved, and Good Old Games has released a version of it optimised for modern PCs.Bioshock and System Shock 2 are linked by far more than spirit. In both form and function, so much was carried over from the harrowing hallways of SS2’s Von Braun to the underwater dystopia of Rapture. The spacecraft is divided into a sequence of open environments, each with its own particular flavour. The story is largely told through recordings made by the ship’s inhabitants. Most of the crew have been infected by a hive-minded alien organism known as the Many, and are less extroverted, more unsettling versions of Bioshock’s Splicers. The tools at your disposal range from conventional weapons to hacking abilities to psionic powers analogous to Bioshock’s plasmids. It even has creepy vending machines.

“ Bioshock is a cataclysm within a circus, all action and spectacle, whereas System Shock 2 is about survival.

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“ It’s a challenge intended specifically to provoke defiance, for the player to demonstrate their freedom.

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“ System Shock 2 was probably the last great game of the twentieth century.

Artificial Intelligence is a massive component of System Shock 2 on both narrative and mechanical levels. Built with Looking Glass’ famous Dark engine, it utilised the same tech that powered Thief, and the standout feature of the Dark Engine was how its sound system was interwoven with its AI system. Consequently, AI could locate and respond to sounds made by the player, and even sounds made by other AI. This in turn influenced another major theme of the game: horror.System Shock 2 is frequently cited as one of the scariest games ever made. Despite the suggestive title, however, it never really tries to shock you. Enemies patrol freely through the Von Braun’s metal halls, and you frequently hear them before you see them. Nothing leaps out of vents making weird gargling noises a-la Dead Space. Instead of cheap thrills there is a constant sensation of dread, upheld by the knowledge that you are being perpetually hunted, that something might attack at any moment. Worse, the longer you hang around, the more desperate the own situation becomes as ammo, health and psionic energy are expended with each encounter.Pervading this oppressive atmosphere throughout is a deep underlying sense of wrongness. The ship’s infected crewmembers apologise to you as they try to kill you. Escaped lab monkeys, their brains exposed through scientific experimentation, chatter pleasantly when unaware of your presence, but shriek with rage the moment they spot you. The Cyborg Midwives are the antithesis of birth and life, their womanhood replaced with cold, bloody steel. And the game is obsessed with worms, hiding them under every shelf and table, sometimes in huge writhing piles. Unlike most survival horror games, where you gradually numb to the unpleasant surroundings, the Von Braun becomes more unnerving the longer you spend trapped beneath its metal hull. challenges the player directly , and in a few brief sentences demonstrates everything which makes her so abhorrent and compelling, her vanity, her god-complex and her and contempt for any being seemingly less intelligent than herself. It’s a challenge intended specifically to provoke defiance, for the player to demonstrate their freedom to act against her.Only when SHODAN finally reveals herself does the significance of this become apparent. From that moment, the player is subject to her every whim, and knowingly so. She proposes an alliance to defeat the Many (and of course to regain the powers she lost in the first game). It’s an alliance in which you have no choice, and so you follow her orders and complete her objectives while she taunts and belittles you. It’s this complete control SHODAN appears to have over you, contradicting the game’s own apparent freedom, that makes her such a memorable adversary.Fourteen years on, System Shock 2 feels remarkably fresh. The Dark Engine holds up far better here than it does in the original Thief. The clean lines, angles and surfaces of the Von Braun are well matched with late nineties 3D rendering, although character models look rather like the developers beat the polygons into shape with a tenderising mallet. The eerie, pulsating musical score from Eric Brosius also helps to keep things lively. The skills system shows its age in places – distinguishing between repairing weapons and maintaining them seems completely arbitrary, and the ending is weaker than a McDonald’s coffee. The game is so strong otherwise though, that these issues can be easily forgiven.Nevertheless, it’s wonderful to be able to play it again; and more importantly for newcomers to access it for the first time. Night Dive deserve a lot of respect for sifting through the rights wrangle between EA and Meadowbrook insurance group and rescuing it from legal limbo. System Shock 2 has been lost in the wild for too long, we should all be glad to see it finally shepherded from the darkness.

Rick Lane provides shocks to the system for a variety of websites and magazines. You can follow this pathetic creature of meat and bone on Twitter