Dead Space

Dead Space, the new horror offering by EA, has hostile necrophilia alien mutant “the Thing” infection monsters, buckets of blood and gore and giblets and stuff, dark and twisty corridors that each go one place and one place only, evisceration, bumps in the dark, psychosis, a dismemberment quota for which only Dead Alive can compare… but the truly frightening thing in playing the game is the main character’s inexplicable predilection to do whatever anyone tells him to do, no matter how bad a suggestion it is. Welcome to “your friendly neighborhood repairman Isaac meets the Nightmare Ship Ishimura.”

First Impressions by Tanx
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Dead Space
Platform: XBOX 360
Played For: 15 hours


I’m being completely serious here about Isaac’s unfortunately affable nature. “Isaac, there’s a monster the size of a small moon attached to the hull. Go negotiate with it.” Check. “Hey Isaac, I’ll wait here in the perfectly safe computer room while you go check the ship’s engines, which seem to be exploding at the moment.” Check. “Isaac, don’t get on the escape shuttle you just fixed… I’ll take it for a spin and come pick you up later.” Check. I know that heroes in horror situations are supposed to come up with dumb reasons to go down to the basement or whatever other sinister locale is available, but Isaac brings this concept to a whole new level.

The game reminds me of that Cloverfield movie, where the audience was forced to tag along with the world’s stupidest Manhattanites, forced to see only what they pay attention to. Dead Space is a very linear game. Isaac never has the chance to think for himself or negotiate with the few remaining survivors. Throughout the game there is only one way to get to any given place on the Ishimura (literally “stone village” in Japanese) which must have led to terrible congestion in the corridors when crew members needed a bathroom break. Dead Space is like one of those carnival ride haunted mansions where you sit in the little cart and follow the tracks from one gory scene to another, the occasional paid actor springing out at you just when you were about to eat a jelly bean, and now you’re choking and your date thinks you were scared and is rolling her eyes and… man, actually this does bring up some scary memories.

But linearity aside, Dead Space is a pretty awesome haunted mansion in its own right. I found the first few hours of the game to be quite affecting, although you do have to be willing to play along to be on edge. The Ishimura is a major disaster, with blood and madness painted in loving detail and with gorgeous graphics on every surface of every room. The ship has a number of distinct looks as you wander around, each one disturbing and unfriendly in its own right. Like in the movie Event Horizon, the mining ship Ishimura has been designed by a team of engineers who went for the simplest solutions to solve each structural challenge… big blades on the walls in this corridor as heat sinks, metal spikes over there as anti-grav gizmos… they just sort of forgot that making the entire interior hull resemble a meat grinder may not be conducive to actually having a crew.

As to the monsters, I say bravo. There is a good variety and excellent grodiness value to the monsters you’ll face in this game. You’ve got big skinny ones, bloated fat ones, weird little baby monsters that are supposed to be infected babies… not sure why this mining ship had such a large supply of babies to zombify. The iconic spindly critters with the bony blade arms and gawky missing lower jaws were a great base to build from. The game requires you to dismember your opponents rather than hitting them square, which added an excellent sense of desperation as these guys, waving their arms erratically, would inevitably charge straight at you just as you had lined up your shot. Lucky no one told Isaac that the monsters just wanted a hug…

I also liked your time slowing gizmo, a particularly ripe double-edged gift. Sure, it is a tremendous help when several monsters are on your case at once… but it also gave the designers a carte-blanche to experiment with super-fast baddies that you may need to artificially slow down. There is still a great deal of room for this particular mechanic to be explored if we achieve a sequel.

So you go around fixing up the ship, piecing together the sordid fate of the crew from video and audio logs and ghastly tableaus, and going slowly nuts from the hallucinations and apparitions the telepathic alien presence inspires. It is here that I have to make a final complaint that I never thought I would have to make. I actually think there were too many save points available in this game. Usually I’m all for being able to save your game whenever you damn please, but in a horror game like this one, I found that the only times I was especially nervous was when it had been a long time since I last saved. This was especially true later in the game, as Isaac has bulked up with a variety of powerful meat-carving weapons and other advantages. I was always too aware that if I died, I could just go right back to that save point from 5 minutes previous… for survival horror this kind of takes the edge off of things.

Dead Space was both visually stunning and competent in terms of game play and invention. It is certainly trying to be a new generation’s System Shock 2, and the reasons that is doesn’t quite succeed are more subtle than most other attempts. Without randomly spawning monsters or multiple paths to get from point A to point B, too often you feel safe once you’ve cleared a room of baddies. And somehow the characters in this game don’t achieve the same level of interest that even the already dead ones do in its spiritual predecessor. But I enjoyed Dead Space for what it is, and consider it essential play for any fans of the horror genre in video game form.

Will I play it more: Enough impromptu surgery for the moment!