Here's what you need to know; during a planet-cracking operation on Aegis VII, communication is lost with the mining ship, USG Ishimura and a crew of engineers is sent out to fix the problem and get the ship running again. But the crippled, seemingly abandoned wreck of the Ishimura harbours something far more sinister than they were prepared for as they discover the nightmarish fate of the ship and her crew, who now scuttle around in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to rip them apart. And when Isaac Clarke and the rest of the doomed repair crew find themselves trapped on the ship, it becomes a fight for survival against the Ishimura's mutated, zombified crew and the horrific forces that created them.
This wasn't part of the plan, the plan is usually eight reviews for the spooky season, but I suck at scheduling and am easily distracted, case in point, I should have been finishing up my review of ParaNorman and starting on the next film of my ritualistic line up, but then I got recommended a Dead Space 3 review on Youtube. I've been meaning to replay Dead Space for quite a while, given it's my favourite Horror video game series. A Halloween or two ago, I considered playing and reviewing it, but I never did so I just thought fuck it, I'll fire up Dead Space and guess what, no regrets because Dead Space is awesome.
Dead Space is a game that knows how to make a great first impression, as the repair ship drops out of lightspeed into a field of debris from the planet-crack, and then into view floats the Ishimura. There is something beautiful about this opening, the Ishimura is such an intriguing and ominous thing to look at; a dark, silent mass of steel floating above a barren looking planet, backlit by the sun, sure there are characters talking on the repair ship, but it's hard to take notice of them with the foreboding vista in front of you. But the game doesn't take long to get into the shit as you very quickly crash into the Ishimura, what follows is a very brief, and I mean very brief, section of build up before shit hits the fan. Walking through the Ishimura's flight lounge, it's quiet and dingy, giving the impression that the ship's as dead on the inside as it looks from the outside, but then something drops from the ceiling and slaughters one of the repair crew, in the ensuing panic, Isaac is told to run for his life, which is exactly what you do as hideous monsters burst from the walls around you and give chase. After a pretty weak ten seconds of panic and running, you're safe on the lift, the monsters can't get you, or so you think until one of them pries open the lift door, screaming its inhuman scream at you before the door slams again, crushing it. I've played this sequence enough times for it to have no effect on me, but I still remember my first time playing Dead Space and how utterly panicked I was in that ten seconds, it's a sequence that sums up the strengths of Dead Space, as well as some of the weaknesses, but we'll get to them.
Keep in mind this is all in the first five minutes of the game, meaning that the game really doesn't give itself the time to build any serious tension, you go from nervous to panicked in a flash, and while it's undeniably effective, it is kind of cheap. The game is about as quick at giving you a weapon, the Plasma Cutter, along with about nineteen prompts to aim for their limbs. One of Dead Space's strengths is actually its weapons, because your tools of the trade are literally tools. Your main weapon is an industrial Plasma Cutter which functions like a pistol; single shot, decent damage and plentiful ammo, and it can also be rotated ninety degrees to cut either horizontally or vertically. As fun as the rest of the weapons can be, this one is really the only one you need, especially when you upgrade it; the fully upgraded Plasma Cutter is absolutely unstoppable, that being said, Dead Space's other weapons are a lot of fun to play with. The game's gimmick of tools being used as weapons continues with the Line Gun, which is like the Plasma Cutter but big, the Ripper, a weapon that fires telekinetic buzz saw blades, a Flamethrower, obviously, the Contact Beam, which is basically a railgun, and the Pulse Rifle, a standard assault rifle and the only proper gun in the game. These weapons are cool, there's no denying that; blowing off both a Necromorph's legs with a shot from the Line Gun never gets old, nor does tearing one apart with the Ripper, and all of these weapons have secondary fire modes, some more useful than others.
The plasma cutter's rotating barrel is crucial for cutting off different body parts and the Line Gun's mine can shred a small group of Necromorphs with ease, whereas the Pulse Rifle's alt fire; firing randomly in a horizontal circle, while half decent for crowd control and tight pinches, isn't really all that practical. Making the weapons tools is part of Dead Space's excellent world building, as is the rest of your tools. You have magnetic boots for leapfrogging around in the game's zero gravity environments, and you have Telekinesis to help you move heavy objects, useful for environmental puzzles and unblocking doorways, and throwing shit at the Necromorphs, you also have a Stasis Module that lets you freeze things, useful again for doorways and environmental puzzles, and for putting the brakes on a charging Necromorph. Your Stasis requires energy however so like your weapons, you'll need to keep track of how many Stasis packs you have in your appropriately small backpack. You can also stay supplied through the game's Stores, which are scattered around the ship and let you buy, sell and store items from ammo, health kits and suit upgrades that you unlock after downloading schematics found on the ship, to power nodes for upgrading your weapons and rig. Your upgrades are bought at the Benches that also litter the ship, and in addition to buying nodes from the Store, they can also be found around the ship in blue wall boxes or on heavy enemies, though there aren't that many, so you'll have to spend them wisely. Upgrades are your standard fair, increased damage, reload speed and ammo capacity for weapons, and character and equipment upgrades like increased health and Stasis duration and energy.
One tree I was particularly compelled to invest in was the rig as in addition to health, you can also upgrade the suit's air capacity, and I've never liked working against the clock so the more air I have, the better. All of this though, the gear, the upgrades, plays into one of Dead Space's biggest strengths; its presentation, because in this area, Dead Space is one of a kind. Dead Space is an over the shoulder third person shooter, but what's beautiful about it is that the game as no hud, instead all the information the player needs to know is displayed to you in the game world. Your health bar for example is on Isaac's back, right next to his stasis meter, when in a menu or watching video logs, said menu or log is displayed on a holographic screen in front of Isaac, and instead of an ammo counter and crosshairs, your weapon displays its ammo count and projects targeting lasers. It sounds small and insignificant, but in a horror game like Dead Space, it makes all the difference. You may not consciously be aware of it while you play, but with all your information being delivered to you in such a natural way and without any visual distractions, it completely immerses you in the game's world. Further immersing you is that everything is going on in real-time; while you're in a menu, things are still happening around you and you leave yourself vulnerable to attack. This even applies to stores and benches and the game will try on many occasions to fuck with you in this way, adding to the feeling the game clearly wants you to feel; jumpy.
Inevitably, a big part of this is the environment, and the USG Ishimura is a breath-taking setting to explore. This is not a clean, futuristic sci fi setting, this comes from the Alien school of sci fi visual aesthetics; it's dirty, it's dingy, it's well-worn and industrial. Several of the decks are scattered with dangerous pieces of machinery whose grinding and humming echo through the narrow, dimly lit corridors. You get the sense that the Ishimura was always a creepy place, but scattered around is evidence that the ship wasn't always a monster infested hellhole; you'll explore cushy luxury suites and the comparatively cramped and nasty crew's quarters with tiny bunks stacked on top of each other. You'll go to the hydroponics deck and see small, climate-controlled gardens growing tomatoes and melons, and at one point you find yourself in a zero gravity basketball court where you can actually play. Adverts for fictional products and services litter the walls, as well as vending machines, and linking the ship's various areas is a tram system. The USG Ishimura is such a well realised setting that it's kind of hard not to get sucked in, it's Bioshock levels of good and like the game's lack of a hud, it's an almost negligible quality that makes the game far more enjoyable and memorable. For what the Ishimura essentially is; a haunted house in space, it's impressive just how much thought and love went into its design and presentation, and it makes the game's backtracking and recycling of environments less annoying, yes, Dead Space has backtracking, but it's a claustrophobic, crippled starship and the setting of a survival horror game, it should be expected.
Naturally though, Dead Space is a horror game and a horror game needs some horror, and Dead Space is a bit of an oddball when it comes to that. The game's monsters, the Necromorphs are amazing, they take the basic concept of a zombie and make it something really, really nasty; with an alien infection that doesn't just reanimate cells, it reprograms and reconfigures them into nightmarish forms. Necromorphs are uncanny, fleshy things with massive claws jutting out of their hands and creepy baby arms growing out of their open, leaking abdominal cavities, they will creep up on you or charge at you like complete maniacs, roaring and screaming from their jawless mouths all the while. And naturally there are different types of Necromorph on top of the Slashers, each offering their own challenge; the Lurkers for example are creepy little baby fuckers that shoot at you with barbed tentacles, while the Leapers hop around and swipe and stab at you with their tails. Exploders will shuffle towards you, dragging glowing, explosive sacks on their arms that they will try to blow you up with. The Pregnants work like the slashers, but they're slower and have a belly full of Swarmers, little bug monsters that, you guessed it, swarm you, eating away at your health and leaving you wide open to attack from more dangerous foes. Infectors will skulk around looking for bodies to infect, making them priority targets when they show up, and every once in a while you'll run into the Brutes, massive armoured Necromorphs that will pulverise you if given the chance. All of these enemies are disgusting to look at and I love them, taking clear inspiration from classic horror films, most obviously The Thing, and like the Thing, they are hard to kill, which is where the game's excellent combat comes in.
Forget what you know about zombies because shooting a Necromorph in the head won't kill it, in fact it'll just piss it off, your only effective means of killing them is dismemberment, which is such a simple and yet brilliant gimmick, it defies all video game logic by expecting you not to aim for their heads and bodies, but instead for their arms and legs. And like everything else in the game, it makes a weird kind of sense as the Necromorphs will stop at literally nothing to kill you, dragging themselves with a single limb if they need to, and there is something sadistically satisfying about cutting them up. Every now and again though, you'll encounter something to give you a headache, like the Divider, an enemy that breaks apart into a pack of little octopus monsters when killed, or the Hunter, an indestructible Necromorph you encounter twice in the game who will grow back any part of it you shoot off. The former is an imposing, lanky bastard who throws a spanner in the game's combat gimmick of dismemberment, while the latter exists purely to put pressure on you as your only means of dealing with it is to slow it down as best you can and run for your life. I hate the Hunters, at first I hated the Marauders from Doom Eternal, but as I played that game again and again and again, I got more confident in fighting him and eventually started mopping the floor with him, but this enemy, in the nine years since I first played this game, I've never stopped hating him. The Necromorphs have a lot of bark but are pretty mild on the bite once you start getting good at dismembering them, but this guy just doesn't die, you can render him a quadruple amputee and in thirty seconds he'll be back on your arse again, only stopping when you freeze him in your first encounter and incinerate him with a rocket booster in your second.
Him and the ADS cannon sequence are the two parts of this game that I dread every time I boot it up, a relic of another time when I didn't have real stresses in my life. But back on point, Dead Space's enemies are fantastic, their scary appearance is neutered somewhat by how squishy they are, but they are nonetheless threatening and intriguing things, and very fun to fight. But I said Dead Space's horror was an oddball, and now I shall explain why. Dead Space is a masterpiece of sound design; you hear all the creaks and hums of the Ishimura around you, you'll hear Necromorphs in the distance and occasionally the scream of an ill-fated survivor, and the Necromorphs themselves sound amazing, be it the screaming of the Slasher, the pained crying of the Guardians, the creepily human snarling and muttering of the Exploders or the more otherworldly wails of the Dividers. In addition to the groans of the ship and her mutated crew, you will constantly be hearing Isaac breathing, with the breathing changing depending on how low on health and or air you are, which does a really good job of piling on the pressure and the unease. But I'm not the first person to say something to this effect, Dead Space seemingly has two different tones; when nothing's happening and you're just walking around the ship, it's really creepy, you can hear Isaac's breathing and the distant sounds of machinery and Necromorphs creeping around, its a marvel of atmosphere, but then a Necromorph will attack you and suddenly the game becomes jarringly loud.
A Necromorph will explode out of a nearby wall vent and immediately start screaming at you, the music will immediately become really aggressive and intense, and this has a very odd effect. The game will switch from creepy and atmospheric to ear rape in literally seconds and the contrast is almost disorientating, which may have been the idea, or may have been an accidental side effect of the the game just not really knowing how to build tension, or how to do payoff without going way, way over the top with it. You may expect me to complain about this but to be honest, I kind of like it; the fact that the game can't go five minutes without trying to make you jump does get very predictable, but the sudden escalation from quiet and creepy to absolute madness is kind of fun in it's own way, and as predictable as these sequences are, you almost look forward to them at a point because it means you can shoot shit, which is really fun to do in this game, cutty cutty, slicy slicy. There are, however, moments where the game really got me and more often than not, it's when it wasn't trying, example; you'll often see Necromorphs just doing their own shit around you, you'll see them crawling in and out of the vents, scuttling around in the corner of your eye, and one time a Slasher just sprinted round a corner and attacked me, no screaming or sudden prompt or music, and it scared the shit out of me. How about the first time you encounter the Divider when it just slowly lurches around a corner and walks towards you, that shit creepy, or how about another time when you're being chased by a Hunter and you think you're safe in a narrow, short corridor with a save station, only for the Hunter to drop from the ceiling right in front of you and now you're trapped in this tiny space with it.
I feel like there is a much scarier game in here somewhere, somewhere between Dead Space as it is and Alien: Isolation, but the combat is so much fun that I don't care, and the game's constant, repetitive attempts to make you jump do have a charm of their own, giving the game a haunted house kind of feeling, and unlike a lot of recent horror games that seemingly only exist to be streamed on Twitch and Youtube by people with facecams, Dead Space is actually fun. The game isn't all jumpscares and fodder enemies though, there are also occasional battles with bigger, meaner foes like the Brute and the Hunter, and then some impressive boss battles. Every once in a while, a tentacle will appear out of nowhere and start dragging you away and you have to shoot the obvious glowing weak point to break free, and the game's boss fights work the same way, shoot the glowy bits until it dies. But there is something spectacular about these boss fights and each one is unique and has it's own twist; the Leviathan is a creature you fight in a zero gravity environment, forcing you to leapfrog around to avoid its attacks, and another boss battle has you shooting at a similarly big and nasty thing clinging to the hull of the ship with an ADS cannon, which is certainly more enjoyable than shooting rocks with it. But nothing quite compares to the game's finale in which you take on the Hive Mind, which is far from the most intense or challenging end boss battle, but holy shit is it cool, it's a giant monster that you fight against the backdrop of a falling continent, it's ridiculous and I love it, and it sounds awesome, seriously, the Hive Mind makes the coolest noises.
This was eight or nine hours in when I played the game for this review, and upon completion, you get all kinds of fun stuff like a new suit and money and power nodes to spend in your second run, which gives you an opportunity to really experiment with the weapons and their upgrades in a way you couldn't on a first run, but once you have that new suit and those upgrades, the combat does become trivial, not that it's a bad thing to go from an underpowered engineer to an arse kicking monster hunter, and once you've maxed out a weapon and really started destroying them, the game is a complete blast. But as I established before, Dead Space's world building is breath-taking and that's not just in its level and sound design, Dead Space's universe is one of those that you can get seriously carried away with. There is a rich history behind this game's world and story, with shady corporations like the CEC and the Church of Unitology; a cult that fanatically worships the Markers, and then there's the Markers themselves, which are beyond cool. You see, the mining colony on Aegis VII found a Marker, an alien artefact that is very important to the Church of Unitology who are either unaware or accepting of the fact that it is seriously dangerous to any living thing that goes near it. It's never explained where the Markers come from or how they work, just that this particular Marker is a man-made copy and that its presence inevitably leads to a Necromorph outbreak, first by scrambling the minds of the living, then further scrambling the flesh of the dead.
The origin and purpose of the Markers is explored in later games and in books and comics, because obviously this game has them, but this game gives you enough to know that they are far more than just glowing space rocks. When you see the Marker for the first time, it's hard to deny that it's a creepy looking thing, an ominous double helix monolith, faintly glowing a sinister red and covered in mysterious alien symbols. The physical presence of the Marker alone makes it a memorable antagonist, yes, you read that right, but it's how the Marker influences the story that's really interesting. In Dead Space, you play as Isaac Clarke, an engineer sent by the CEC to find and repair the Ishimura, but who is also here in search of Nicole, his girlfriend/ex girlfriend, it's not that clear which, who was serving aboard the ship. And at the start of the game, that's the mission; find Nicole, repair the Ishimura and survive the Nercomorph outbreak. But as you explore the ship, you uncover text and audio logs that flesh out the events prior to your arrival, and you'll really want to dig these things out if you're a lore hound like me. As the story unfolds, you eventually find that the mining operation on Aegis VII was illegal and that the obviously shady CEC have ties to the even more shady Church of Unitology. The web only gets bigger with the arrival of another ship, the Valor, who at first seemed to be coming to the rescue, but is later revealed to have its own, more sinister mission.
This is a very twisty turny story filled with intrigue, uneasy alliances and betrayals as Isaac attempts to repair the ship with Hammond and Kendra, the other survivors from the repair crew, while having occasional run-ins with some of the Ishimura's surviving crew. It's not the most complex story in the world, and its characters aren't exactly complex either; Isaac is a silent protagonist, Hammond is a no-bullshit, level-headed leader while Kendra's the more whiny, confrontational computer chick. Dr. Kyne, one of your allies, is a scientist and ex Unitologist who's obsessed with the Marker and wants Isaac's help to stop it while Mercer, an insane Unitologist zealot tries to convince Isaac to accept his fate and embrace the will of the Marker. Muddled up in there is Nicole, who's role in the story is best left unspoiled, assuming of course that you don't see the twist coming from a mile away. It's a simple story made complex by intrigue and world building, which isn't a bad thing at all, Halo: Combat Evolved and the last three Doom games are the same and they're all brilliant, and like those games, Dead Space is carried far more by that excellent world building and intrigue than by its simple story, and that story ultimately has a very satisfying payoff with a climactic finale and a cliff hanger ending. Also like those games, Dead Space is just great to play; it's intense and spooky when it wants to be, it's incredibly violent and satisfying, and it strikes a good balance between fun and stress, like any good survival horror game should.
Isaac, Make Us Whole Again
Dead Space rocks, I could leave it there because I think I've said more than enough. It tells a serviceable and decently fun story, and its horror elements are certainly interesting, but it's in the game's world building, presentation, combat and immersion that it really shines. The Ishimura is one of the coolest and best realised video game settings I've ever seen, going far beyond just a spooky old wreck and being filled to the brim with personality and detail, I don't even care that the game recycles levels because I love exploring this ship. Then there's the Necromorphs, who aren't as scary as they could be but are more than repulsive enough and fun to fight to fault them for what they aren't, and the same goes for the game's horror in general, whose apparent identity crisis ends up being more fun and charming than it has the right to be. And at the end of the day, shooting Necromorphs is fun; the simple gimmick of dismemberment makes Dead Space so much fun to play, and goes a long way to distinguish it and its monsters from similar games and stories, along with its masterful and unique presentation and immersion. Is it not obvious what I'm going to say yet; I love Dead Space and it's absolutely a must play.
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