These things were people once.ĭead Space is still worth playing today. There are lots of small stories to discover about normal people's lives on the ship, which humanises the crew and adds an extra layer of uneasy horror to having to slice their heads off with your plasma cutter. Dead Space always knows when to slow down, hold back, and let you just soak in the atmosphere.
Similar to BioShock's Rapture, there's a constant feeling that the Ishimura was once a place teeming with life-which makes the fact it's so eerie and silent when you arrive even more unsettling. It's the kind of grounded, lo-fi science fiction that really works in horror, giving you a sense that there's no shiny, advanced piece of tech that's going to save you-just some old maintenance equipment. The Alien-inspired industrial aesthetic is incredibly well done, with atmospheric lighting, malfunctioning holographic screens, and gaping holes in the hull sucking the gravity from some areas. This labyrinth of oppressive metal corridors still looks fantastic 13 years later. It's the Ishimura itself that most sticks in my mind. It's not a scary game, but it is scarily good at keeping your heart rate constantly high. A dramatic Shining-inspired score only adds to the tension. Being rushed by hordes of necromorphs in dark, claustrophobic corridors partially illuminated by flickering lights, and having to carefully line up a shot to take off their head or legs, is wonderfully nerve-racking. The plasma cutter is one of the most satisfying weapons in video game history, letting you precisely slice chunks off enemies, leaving a trail of twitching arm-and-leg-things in your wake. As that famous bloody graffiti says: CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS! They're incredibly resilient, but can be permanently killed by severing their limbs with Isaac's arsenal of heavy duty industrial tools, which forms the basis of the game's combat. These grotesque reanimated corpses are flailing, screeching, shapeless things: like a heap of severed limbs squished horribly together. The creatures infesting the Ishimura, called necromorphs, are straight out of the Stan Winston school of monster design-particularly his work with John Carpenter on The Thing. You learn about life aboard the ship before everything went to shit, and uncover clues about a larger mystery that would be expanded upon in the sequels. As Clarke works to restore power to the ship and activate a distress call, he move through different parts of the ship: from engineering through to medical, up to the crew quarters and the bridge. Like some of the best sci-fi horror stories, it's a simple but evocative premise.ĭead Space is an over-the-shoulder shooter that blends slow, atmospheric horror with frantic, bloody action-and sustains a masterful balance of the two for the entirety of its 11-hour runtime. Worse still, the crew have somehow mutated into gruesome monsters with a powerful hunger for human flesh. The ship has been plunged into darkness and is in a serious state of disrepair. Creator Glen Schofield, who's now making a spiritual successor called The Callisto Protocol, wanted to create "the most frightening horror game possible", borrowing elements from influential sci-fi horror movies and video games including Alien, The Thing, and System Shock.Īfter contact is suddenly lost with the USG Ishimura, a colossal 'planet cracker' mining ship, a small rescue crew is sent in to investigate-including protagonist Isaac Clarke, an engineer. It was heavily inspired by Resident Evil 4, which launched three years earlier and raised the bar for action horror games.
Related: In This Sci-Fi Game You're Not A Hero, Just A Regular Working Stiff, And That's Why It's Greatīut Dead Space, one of the few games the developer made that wasn't based on an existing IP, is the highlight of its 19-year lifespan.
Before it was dissolved and merged into EA Vancouver and EA Montreal in 2017, Visceral made a huge number of games including a wild adaptation of Dante's Inferno, morally dubious Battlefield spin-off Hardline, a couple of games based on The Godafther, and classic Bond shooter Agent Under Fire. It was developed by EA Redwood Shores, which would later rename itself Visceral Games.
#DEAD SPACE MOVIES PS3#
"What the hell is Dead Space?" But moments after sliding the disc into our debug PS3, I knew this was a game worth paying attention to.ĭead Space launched for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 on October 13, tactically deployed in the run-up to Halloween. But Dead Space had next to no fanfare, and I remember the day a preview version was dropped on my desk back when I was a writer for a PlayStation magazine. At the time, most games-especially ones published by behemoths like EA-would be relentlessly pre-hyped through previews, cover features, and trailers on early video sites like GameTrailers.
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