Not only did Dead Space wind up with three main titles, with 2 and 3 coming out in 20, respectively, but there are the spin-off titles Extraction and Ignition, a mobile title, animations, comic books and novels. The problem is that Dead Space doesn’t just refer to the title of the initial 2008 release, but the entire franchise. Dead Space is quietly competent, offering an amazingly polished take on a familiar scenario. The developers were fine with leaving you alone with the ship, past when you might expect the jump scare to wind up, and letting your imagination do the work before winding back for another hit. There are long stretches of quiet tension, where it’s just you and the USG Ishimura, which is a character in its own right.
The game was so confident with the environment and tools it gave you. Even as I powered up, I’d stop at every corpse that seemed dead and empty a clip into it. To this day, I still remember the terror I felt throughout the entire game. The sci-fi engineer element was a super fun hook, letting you take powers meant to make Isaac’s day a little easier on the job and use them to hurl crates around and desperately try to save ammo. The Zero Gravity sections, where you face the same threats in a silent void, are still memorable and deeply unsettling.
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It’s not as though the game is free of surprises.
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The terror of having a cluster of Slashers rush at you, shrieking and flailing could be mastered, and Isaac slowly grew more powerful (and you grew more capable at figuring out which Necromorphs to take out, how to rotate Stasis and your plasma cutter, and how to sever limbs right quick). The engineer suit, with its iconic HUD, and the way its mundane, utilitarian shell contrasted with the visceral unpleasantness of hearing Isaac gasp and pant felt amazing. Isaac’s initial, panicked run as the team docks on the Ishimura and it becomes clear something has gone horribly wrong starts the game off right. It just took a game genre that hadn’t received a lot of love and it polished the hell out of each individual element. When it comes to the brass tacks of the story, characters, basic mechanics and environment, Dead Space didn’t do anything unprecedented and wild.
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A small cast of supporting characters who are trying to guide you through this nightmare by giving you a series of missions over voice comms? Dead Space had that. A Resident Evil 4-style over-the-shoulder camera that gives players agency enough to aim, maneuver, and flee? There’s that too, along with the new “strategic dismemberment” mechanic and some sci-fi gadgets. Messages smeared in blood from survivors, or breathless diary entries recorded in someone’s last moments, warning an unlucky protagonist about critical plot or gameplay elements? Dead Space has those aplenty. It was a survival horror game at a time when the genre wasn’t in vogue.ĭead Space was more than happy to borrow a page from previous titles in the same genre. Dead Space came from a studio that hadn’t made an original IP yet, EA Redwood Studios. A massive space opera RPG with romance and danger like Mass Effect or a musical party game for the gang like Rock Band was easy to sum up and easier to market. These were new titles and games that took interesting balls and ran with them in wonderful directions. A Dead Space surpriseĭead Space came out of Electronic Arts at an unexpected time, alongside titles like Mirror’s Edge and Mass Effect.
The setting’s horror worked best on the USG Ishimura, with a silent protagonist and a small supporting cast. It wasn’t the Necromorphs or the Unitologists that doomed the world of Dead Space it was the inexorable scope creep that marched forward. or maybe with the expectation that there be a franchise at all. While Dead Space 3 famously fell apart, the franchise’s problems started with Dead Space 2. A light flickers, you pause, and just when you finally feel close to safe, there’s a noise - the rattle of a vent, the sound of bone and flesh scraping against floor - and you remember you’re not safe, and you never were.Įven as you graduate to deadlier weapons and larger, more horrific enemies, the best settings in Dead Space are intimate, quiet and carefully balanced to provide the right amount of detail while still allowing the player to project themselves into that heavy, slow-moving engineer suit. His spinal indicator shows your health, which is often as comforting a light as you can get, and you can hear his breath rasping inside his helmet. The tensest moments of the Dead Space trilogy are usually centered around a very simple image: Isaac Clarke, in his bulky engineer suit, stands in a narrow, dark corridor of an abandoned spaceship.