It’d been a while since I had sat down with either of the Dead Space games. A few days ago I was struck by the urge to head back onto the USG Ishimura and blast apart some Necromorphs. In retrospect, it’s odd that what I remembered about the game was its action element, because that’s not its most striking aspect by far.
After a couple of hours running protagonist Isaac Clarke around his outer-space haunted house, it was clear why this game had struck such a chord with me the first time through:
This game is terrifying.
At first glance, the game is a bit of a splatterfest. But, like film, gore without reason isn’t frightening. Thankfully, developer Visceral Games put just as much effort into their story, art direction, sound and level design as they did into their controls and combat mechanics.
Cramped quarters
As I navigated the cramped corridors of the Ishimura, I still felt the same sense of dreadful claustrophobia that I had during my first playthrough. I remember having originally faulted the game for what I thought was a small environment that had me constantly backtracking through the ship.
This time through I tried to understand how the game was telling its story instead just going along for the ride. The cramped size of this dead space ship isn’t a cop-out on the part of developers—it’s a conscious choice.
The constant backtracking through this ruined ship needs to happen. It’s supposed to be frustrating. It’s easy to tell a player that they’re trapped on a spaceship with no way out and monsters closing in. But this is how you make the player feel it. If the team at Visceral had wanted to make the Ishimura bigger, they would have. The fact that Dead Space’s final section takes Isaac off the Ishimura shows that there was room in the development period to build more than just the few decks Isaac sees.
No one can hear you scream
Space is silent, but the decks of this dead ship groan and creak with every step. The sound design of this game deserves massive praise. Some enemies are just telegraphed enough, with the sound of a scream or a crash coming a second before some bladed monstrosity appears. While at other times, the atmosphere is deepened considerably by the infrequent whispers of hidden speakers, or the lonely ringing of some tool knocked off a workbench by ... something.
The Music pulls its fair share of weight in this game as well. While not as overbearing or memorable as some games' scores (i.e. zelda, mario, etc.), Dead Space's score is subtle, but strong. Underpinning some incredibly harrowing moments, the music swells with strings and horns, pushing you to even greater heights of mashing the A button to get whatever bladed, undead monster is about to eat your face. However, the music also works also stays low and tense, building atmosphere as you move through certain sections.
All the players on stage
Claustrophobic levels, nightmarish enemies, and doom-laden sound-design lay a solid foundation for Dead Space's general atmosphere of horror. However, the pre-scripted, set pieces raise that level of horror. Visceral clearly did their homework, mining a broad spectrum of horror films for a number of "jump-scares." While a number of these are your typical "something pops out of an airvent/floor grate/whatever," enough of them are pretty original that they really hit home. The first time I saw a live (?) crew-member smashing his head into obliteration against a bulkhead I actually had to put the controller down for a minute. These are the moments that not only help break up what could be 8 hours of hear-tearing tension, but help give Dead Space an individual kind of horror.
It's fair to say that Dead Space does borrow heavily from other "space horror" works, mainly Alien and Event Horizon. However, it does an adequate job of carving out its own place through narrative. While you can point to certain aspects of the game and cry "plagiarism!", I'm sure the designers would argue the game as more homage. Honestly, the game does a good enough job of standing on its own two feet, and to nitpick its obvious influences seems a little nitpicky.
Summing up
I love this game. 4 years later and Dead Space still holds up. The scares still scare, the environments still make you feel trapped, and the combat still gets the heart rate up. On top of all that, the story the Visceral started here is still compelling. Although in this first outing Isaac is more a carte blanche, his story is still effecting.
I didn't think that I would still enjoy Dead Space, having been spoiled rotten by last year's sequel. But, this game is still fantastic. More than that, this might be the only really successful horror/survival-horror game on the current generation of consoles.
I figured that this article would be a bit of a one-off, but expect an update after I've made my way through Dead Space 2 in the next couple of months.
Those necromorphs won't dismember themselves.
#Dead_Space
The Music pulls its fair share of weight in this game as well. While not as overbearing or memorable as some games' scores (i.e. zelda, mario, etc.), Dead Space's score is subtle, but strong. Underpinning some incredibly harrowing moments, the music swells with strings and horns, pushing you to even greater heights of mashing the A button to get whatever bladed, undead monster is about to eat your face. However, the music also works also stays low and tense, building atmosphere as you move through certain sections.
All the players on stage
Claustrophobic levels, nightmarish enemies, and doom-laden sound-design lay a solid foundation for Dead Space's general atmosphere of horror. However, the pre-scripted, set pieces raise that level of horror. Visceral clearly did their homework, mining a broad spectrum of horror films for a number of "jump-scares." While a number of these are your typical "something pops out of an airvent/floor grate/whatever," enough of them are pretty original that they really hit home. The first time I saw a live (?) crew-member smashing his head into obliteration against a bulkhead I actually had to put the controller down for a minute. These are the moments that not only help break up what could be 8 hours of hear-tearing tension, but help give Dead Space an individual kind of horror.
It's fair to say that Dead Space does borrow heavily from other "space horror" works, mainly Alien and Event Horizon. However, it does an adequate job of carving out its own place through narrative. While you can point to certain aspects of the game and cry "plagiarism!", I'm sure the designers would argue the game as more homage. Honestly, the game does a good enough job of standing on its own two feet, and to nitpick its obvious influences seems a little nitpicky.
Summing up
I love this game. 4 years later and Dead Space still holds up. The scares still scare, the environments still make you feel trapped, and the combat still gets the heart rate up. On top of all that, the story the Visceral started here is still compelling. Although in this first outing Isaac is more a carte blanche, his story is still effecting.
I didn't think that I would still enjoy Dead Space, having been spoiled rotten by last year's sequel. But, this game is still fantastic. More than that, this might be the only really successful horror/survival-horror game on the current generation of consoles.
I figured that this article would be a bit of a one-off, but expect an update after I've made my way through Dead Space 2 in the next couple of months.
Those necromorphs won't dismember themselves.
#Dead_Space
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