I love Dead Space. I said it. It must be a surprise, I’m sure. There’s been too many references here on the site for me to hide this secret any longer; I’ve brought it up in numerous forum posts, I called the games' force gun one of my personal favourite shotguns in @RanmyakuIchi 's video game shotgun article; and the very nice fellow @G78 even made an article on the forgotten iOS port that I also had forgotten about. Well, here we go; Dead Space time.
Developed by Visceral Games, an EA owned studio, the game was released to an unexpecting populace in 2008. It came out of nowhere, really; Visceral (known as EA Redwood Shores back then) had done very little to that point save for some decent James Bond titles and a whole lot of PGA branded golf games, along with Freekstyle, a moto racing game that could not be more early 2000s. Dead Space was their first big project, and they pulled off a hell of a hail mary on it. What’s happened to Visceral since?
I don’t want to talk about it. **** you, EA.
In Dead Space, you are space engineer Isaac Clarke, a portmanteau of inspirational authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke (it's a very subtle homage, you see). You, your standard issue skeleton-inspired protective ‘RIG’ bodysuit, information officer Kendra, government military security officer Hammond and a small supporting crew are sent to investigate and potentially repair the USG Ishimura, an unresponsive ‘planet cracker’ ship out in deep space. The far flung space future’s way of harvesting minerals is to now blow up entire unused planets for material. Capitalism, am I right? The mission is also a little personal for Clarke; his recently ex-girlfriend Nicole is a medical officer aboard the Ishimura, and he’d received some strange vid messages from her previously. This is the set up for a storyline that's very much Aliens, very much Event Horizon and a whole lot of Resident Evil 4 DNA.
The game's story is entirely basic of a setup, but this is an advantage; I've said before and I will say it again but simple is often better for stories, and particularly for horror. By keeping it free of too many moving parts the game can focus on what it does best; atmosphere, and sheer intensity. This isn't to say that the story is forgettable by any means of course, as I think it is near perfect for what it's trying to be. There’s twists and turns a plenty. I’m not going to discuss any specific spoilers in this article, even if I think Dead Space is pretty safe to spoil now as it's become one of the better known gaming twists (and is about 17 years old now); but I figure I still should do my due diligence, just in case anyone wants to check the game out if they haven’t already from reading this article.
Very quickly on, you are separated from your coworkers once you all discover the newly moved-in denizens of the Ishimura; the necromorphs. Part alien infection and part zombie, these are grotesque alien creatures that are recomposed dead corpses, mutated and twisted into some really ****ed up forms. Bones jut out of their limbs that they wield as massive scythes, and their shambling gait really sells these things as barely held together monstrosities of nature. The development team have said in numerous previews and interviews about the game that the biggest inspiration for the look of the necromorphs was car crash victims, and yeah that definitely checks out; again, they are ****ed up. They are, to me, a master class of horror monster design honestly. There's an enemy introduced fairly early in the game that's always stood out to me; I won't spoil what they are, but they’re very small ranged enemies that can climb walls and bombard you with spikes from their back tentacles. What these things are is so revoltingly amazing and terrible that I'm honestly surprised the devs got away with it; if you know what I'm talking about, you know what I mean. The necromorphs are disgusting, terrifying, and more importantly; they reinvent what every other game has taught you about how to deal with uppity monster infestations.
Here’s a large part of what made Dead Space so fresh upon its release, and it’s really simple; headshots do nothing to necromorphs. It’s a fundamental rule of basic action game design that’s been entirely negated, and the first time I discovered that it was definitely a rude awakening. It makes sense, after all. What’s left of the human head some of them have has been reduced to a tiny, vestigial sack of flesh; why would shooting it do anything to them? Instead, the game is designed around something that feels so visceral and nightmarish, and something I think that has definitely been inspired by the Evil Dead movies. You have to cut and/or shoot off their limbs.
It’s genius, frankly. It makes you relearn whatever bit of muscle memory you have from other shooters, and it’s also frankly quite difficult sometimes considering you’re shooting at generally hard to hit areas of the body, particularly when said limb is attempting to remove your outsides from your insides. Once you lock-in, though, it feels so immensely satisfying to blast off warped hands and spindly knees and it makes the combat feel so brutal.
Speaking of combat; let’s talk about that. The combat in this game is an example of the beautiful peak of ‘action horror’ gameplay. The enemies can be numerous, they're fast and they have a very peculiar ability to always spawn behind you. You're trying to take their limbs off as they close in on you but it's not so simple to hit the leg of a fast moving target, especially when there's half a dozen and they’re coming down on you like you're the last piece of meat at a butchery. It's also the way the game combines its enemy types and how they all work together; the previously mentioned tiny ranged enemies hang out behind the chargers for protection while they shoot you while the legless leapers ambush you from different angles as they jump around the room.
On top of the just mentioned de-limbing mechanic as the focus of the intense combat, there’s a few other things that deserve mentioning. The first thing that I have to talk about, and the most satisfying thing to do in the game; the goddamn stomp.
Throughout the halls of the Ishimura, across the vast reaches of blood and gore soaked hallways, every necromorph came to fear but one thing; the stomp.
Isaac has a normal melee that you can use to push away necromorphs as a last ditch effort, but the real good stuff is in the stomp. Isaac can bring his massive metal covered work boot down to utterly crush anything below him to death in a few good blows; this desperate move is very important to the game for two reasons. One is mechanical in saving ammo on de-legged enemies crawling on the ground, and two because it just conveys so much about the game from an atmospheric and ‘vibe’ perspective. It's the way that Isaac desperately cries out as he does it, one of the only times you'd ever actually hear him speak, and the voice actor does such an impressive job at putting so much into each grunt. You really feel the desperation coming off of the poor engineer as he's forced to finish off some utter abomination in such a brutal, visceral way. The stomp feels so powerful too, due to a very tasteful application of screen shake and the loud crack of his boot on the floor. Beautiful. Chef's kiss.
The game is also entirely unafraid to show off some real disgusting feeling gore, which was very impressive tech for when the game came out. Limbs are flying everywhere from you shooting them off, and you’ll frequently find some nice blood and guts piles around the ship’s many hallways and rooms. Isaac himself also experiences some of this first hand, as the game has some legendarily memorable death scenes for our poor main character.
“Get a job in the space trades, they said. You’ll never get dragged around a hard metal floor by a flesh tentacle in the space trades, they said.” Poor Isaac; he gets it pretty rough in this game.
Isaac himself really brings in some great elements into the game, actually. Even without speaking, just the vibe he brings adds a little bit to the horror. He’s not a gung-ho military guy like Hammond, or the protagonist of countless other action-horror games; he’s just a regular guy with a trade certification and the willingness to combat alien monsters with repurposed work equipment (more on that next). Even though he doesn’t speak, he conveys just enough with his occasional grunt or breathing to show just enough that he is probably realistically a little spooked without becoming disabled with fear; he’s still the protagonist, after all. It’s the subtle touches that sell his characterization rather than any big specific scene, and a weaker game probably would have had some silly canned set piece where he’s overwhelmed with fear and you’re forced to crawl or squeeze through wreckage at a snail's pace or something, because how else would you know he’s human?
He may just be an engineer, but the man has a wicked ***** slap when it’s needed.
Another memorable thing about the combat are the weapons themselves for once again two reasons. They are pretty unique in the sense that they are, with the exception of one, all repurposed engineering or industrial equipment that Isaac is now using to much different effect. They still fill the conventional weaponry roles and some of them are perhaps a little questionable in why they're used for mining or whatever, but it's nice that they're tied to the ‘lore’ so to speak, and it gives them a great vibe. You have the line gun that launches wide lines of plasma to slice off limbs and is allegedly used in mining minerals (don't question it), the force gun that shoots concentrated blasts of concussive waves to apparently push around asteroid chunks in zero-g (and necromorphs), and my personal favorite; the ripper, which is a gun that shoots and holds a telekinetically tethered industrial saw blade in front of it for a few good seconds, letting you rip and tear anything in front of you. I don't know what purpose shooting a saw blade in front of you holds for repairing a spaceship, but who cares, **** yeah, saw blade go brrrrrr.
I like to imagine Isaac is manically laughing like a crazy person under his helmet whenever he guts things with the ripper. It just has ‘unhinged person weapon’ written all over it. Maybe that’s why I like it so much…
The second thing about the weapons is that they all have an ‘alt-fire’ mode, giving them a different way to repaint the walls of the Ishimura with necromorph ooze. They almost all have some very handy applications like the ripper’s shooting the saw blade out to bounce around instead of holding it in place, or the plasma cutter, the games workhorse weapon, being able to swap the alignment of it’s three shots horizontally or vertically to let you shoot limbs easier. The only bad one I can think of is the flamethrower, but that’s because the flamethrower is essentially useless to begin with.
Never forget the tactical applications of mag dumping your military grade pulse rifle in a 360-degree circle around you. Some of the alt-fires get pretty wild.
The last gameplay aspect I'm going to talk about is another big one. In the far future of Dead Space, every RIG suit comes with a telekinesis module, letting you grab objects from a decent distance. Isaac holds whatever you've grabbed in front of him until you either let go or hit the right trigger to launch it forward at high speed. This is used both to solve many of the game's repair jobs (read: simple puzzles), and also in combat. Cutting off the scythe arm of an enemy both disarms (heh) them, and also gives you another's weapon; grab that bone blade and launch it at something. On top of this, engineers are also apparently capable of either freezing things in place or slowing them down through some science words using your stasis module. You can use this on enemies to slow them down for a few seconds to give you some breathing room, and it's also again used in the puzzles of the game to do things such as freeze malfunctioning doors in place or spinning fan turbines. There's no limit to how many times you can use your telekinesis, but your stasis does have limited energy that you use up and replenish with a consumable item.
Or, instead of the enemies own removed natural weapons, how about tossing around the many convenient explosive canisters that are lying around?
There's also zero-g rooms to contend with, making you have to use Isaac's mag boots to lumber around or through adorable little jumps across the room. There's also vacuums where the ship's oxygen support is no longer functioning, and you have to worry about finding air before Isaac’s supply runs out. These areas frequently mix with both necromorphs and zero-g environments (or all three) of course, and it makes the already intense fights that much more chaotic.
The gameplay follows a simple progression; you’re tasked with repairing an area of the ship in order to prevent some catastrophe and to eventually, hopefully, get the everloving hell out. Said thing you need to repair is on the other side of a swath of really ugly monsters of course, and you also always have to take the ship’s tram system to get there for some reason. It’s a tried-and-true formula, and to the game’s credit, there are quite a few events that shake this up once you’ve been doing it for a good amount of chapters to freshen it up again. Like I said earlier, simple is always better for these types of games. In keeping this tight progression, you get to experience more of the good stuff without getting bogged down by too much dialogue and plot. Kendra and Hammond are always calling you still of course, and getting increasingly more desperate as everything seems to go wrong.
Even after 17 or whatever years and despite being a 7th gen game, this game can still impress with the lighting and level art design. They pulled off some technical magic on this game.
The game's greatest strength, outside of its truly intense combat, is said atmosphere. The Ishimura is utterly dripping with it, leaking off of every door and gore soaked floor. The ship feels so absolutely oppressive and isolated, and its entirely industrial design of hard metal grates and stark, sharp lights gives the game a really consistent and impactful visual design. The atmosphere is both in the game's level design but also its audio design as well, employing liberal uses of creaking doors, blaring alarms and the screech of bone blades on metal to really get under your skin. It's small, ambient touches that add up here; the way the sound fades out and becomes distant when you enter a vacuum, being able to hear Isaac’s sporadic breathing at times even through his protective suit, the guns (and the stomp) all sounding so beefy and the identifiable audio cue that each type of necromorph has when it appears in a fight.
There is also no arbitrary or typical video game HUD to speak of in Dead Space; everything is communicated to you as part of the environment and are all ‘in-universe’ so to speak. Your health bar is the lights on the spine of Isaac's standard issue protective engineering ‘RIG’ suit; it makes complete sense for a health indicator to be in a visible area for safety and ease of communication with other engineers when working in hazardous conditions, which are most likely pretty frequent in industrial space ships. Your remaining stasis energy is on Isaac’s shoulder and the ammo counters for your guns are a holographic projection that displays when you aim them, presented as the gun syncing with Isaac's helmet and displaying it in his visor. Even the way you aim is grounded in the atmosphere here; there's no reticle or crosshair and instead all aiming is done through projected laser sights, again framed as the display that Isaac is seeing in his visor helmet.
I was trying to come up with a complaint I have about the game here for a good half hour. Maybe there's some details here and there about the story that I could pick holes in, but they’d be minor points and I'm also not trying to spoil specific details. The only thing I could think of is some of the repair puzzles being either really simple to a negative extent, or sometimes frustrating due to having some gimmick to them. There’s a certain section that sees you have to take control of the ships’ asteroid defence turrets to break up pieces of a planet that are about to turn you into space junk that I always dread. The turret is a little awkward to control, and the debris is coming at you fast enough where you can almost never keep up with them. It's not impossible and never feels unfair or anything, but it wasn't a particularly fun diversion all the same. Sometimes the game also drops some exposition on you that is perhaps a little on the ‘obvious’ side; the game spells out the whole ‘you have to shoot their limbs’ thing to you like four separate times in the beginning of the game, for example. It’s a relatively minor complaint, at least, but it’s there.
Hmm, I wonder where I’m supposed to place this power cell to turn the door on. Dead Space has some real headscratchers.
There you go; my complaints are that you have to blow up space rocks at one point, deal with some occasionally silly puzzles, and sometimes the exposition is a little obvious. Luckily, they are forgivable issues in the grand scheme of things due to how great everything else in the game is.
All these parts mix to form one glorious horror concoction. I'm a hard guy generally to scare through movies and video games, because years as a jaded old man have left me unable to stop analyzing things and getting taken out of the experience. That being said, Dead Space still gets me routinely. It's my go-to for getting spooked. It’s the combination of stellar atmosphere, level and sound design combined with some truly brutal combat that brings the whole thing together. Plenty of other action horror games have the same intensity to their minute-to-minute gameplay, but then they don't quite capture that same frantic feeling of isolation that this game does. That feeling as you cautiously walk down a lonely industrial hallway, filled with scattered lights that glitter like stardust off the coolant mist filling the room as metal screeches somewhere behind you. The next door ahead could have some grotesque alien flesh zombies behind it, or even worse; it could be another decontamination room filled with multiple alien flesh zombies.
Dead Space has perfected both halves of the ‘action horror’ equation in a way that is hard to capture, I think, and I think everyone should experience this game at least once, especially if you’re a horror game fan, or a fan of watching a likely underpaid blue collar tradesman get absolutely brutalized every 10 minutes or so.
Get a job in the space trades, they said…
The Remake
Before we close this out, I want to talk a little bit about the recent remake. It was actually handled by some of the original dev team under the studio EA Motive, and as such feels very genuine to the original experience. It is a fantastic game in its own right, and really captured what I think a good remake should do; keep the overall journey the same, but change some of the points around to keep it fresh. It expands on quite a few things, and changes up enough to feel new even for someone who's played the hell out of the original.One of the biggest changes the remake made was giving a voice to Isaac this time around. In the original, he never spoke as we’ve discussed. I wasn't as wary as others were when I first heard this (people apparently forgot that he spoke in Dead Space 2, and that game's atmosphere was fine) but I was maybe a little cautious, concerned over the trend in more modern games to have the protagonist never stop talking. Luckily, this was not the case for the remake and Isaac really only speaks when he's talking to other characters which entirely makes sense. The writing for Isaac is perfectly done; he still comes off as a completely out of his element blue collar worker, which is what he is. He has a consistent theme of being a normal, well meaning guy who’s slowly getting worn down over the course of the game; he’s at first optimistic and trying to keep everything together, but slowly starts coming apart with every setback. The performance is subtle rather than big which helps him feel real and relatable.
There’s even some dialogue and moments where he speaks that actively add to the experience, such as an amazing line he says to the final boss right before the fight. It’s a line, delivered with just enough oomph without going too far and being uncharacteristic of him, that made me pause the game the first time just to take its impact in. It conveys the perfect mix of character development and the desperate vibe of the whole game.
The remake does add some unnecessary (to me at least) background connections between him and a particular religious faction that plays a part in the original, but it's relegated to really only some text logs and doesn't detract from the experience ultimately.
The remake also adds in some ‘side quests' for lack of a better term, and the ability to return to previously explored areas of the ship at will as opposed to the originals’ entirely linear progression. These side objectives aren’t so in depth that they distract from the main plot, and aren't necessary to finish the game, but have just enough pay off that they always seem worth it. Two of these quests stand out in particular, with both fleshing out two certain characters that are major contributors to the plot.
It also changes up the gameplay in two very important ways. The first is a new mechanic to the necromorphs, and the immediate combat; the flesh of the necromorphs now resists damage. This means that they are all a little tougher, but you can counteract this by shooting off their skin to make them vulnerable. Certain weapons are more suited to ‘softening up’ enemies in this way, such as the flamethrower which has been buffed from being borderline unusable in the original to godlike in this remake because of this.
The game also has what's referred to as a “director” pulling the strings behind the scenes. This game director is just a fancy word for dynamic difficulty, and randomized modifiers and ambient effects. I don't mean to downplay its impact by saying that, however, as the director does a really good job. You could walk through the same hallway 5 times and something different will happen, randomly spawned in. The enemy spawns are now essentially randomized as well, with a little bit of input from how you've been playing in the last few encounters. The dynamic ambient effects are a nice touch too; sometimes you can find yourself walking into fog filled rooms that are so intense your aiming laser is obscured, with enemies reduced to hazy outlines until they get close enough to you. Sometimes the room is just absolutely shrieking with machinery and it's harder to hear enemies telltale audio cues. It's a really great system, even if the whole “game director AI” description is a little overdone.
The remake even changes up some pivotal moments in ways that only people who have played the original will even notice, which I think is a great idea. There's one particular fake out with a specific enemy that got me the first time around, where the game changes up where a particularly ‘brutish’ enemy spawns to purposefully subvert those who were already reloading their weapons in preparation (I was that person). You got me, Dead Space remake.
There are some complaints I have with the remake that aren't present in the original, but they are impossible to talk about without spoiling both games unfortunately as they are entirely storyline related. Suffice to say some of the changes the game makes to some of the story elements and characters I don't quite agree with. I can overlook them due to the net positives the remake pulls off, but I still can’t help but wrinkle my nose at them.
In conclusion; play Dead Space. It's a fantastic goddamn game, and the epitome of action horror to me. So what are you waiting for? Play it then come back and talk about it; I'd be more willing to get into spoilers in the comment section, away from the virgin eyes of those reading the article.
What’s happened to the series since the remake?
I don’t want to talk about it. **** you, EA.
Until next time. And remember; you always have Peng. Peng won’t reconstitute your dead body into a monstrosity against nature.
The Ishimura crew had a hell of a time, but luckily they still have Peng. There's always Peng.
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Dead Space is one of those rare games that makes you truly appreciate silence, because every suspicious creaky door or strange rustle means something is already sneaking up on your liver. You either save ammo and start kicking enemies like a madman, or waste everything at once and desperately hope to find at least one more clip. The atmosphere is top-notch-dark, eerie, and Isaac silently suffers along with you
until the next horror ride kicks in at the worst possible moment, making you nearly jump out of your chair.
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