Dead Space

A creepy adventure, in space!

Isaaac.

Oh hello there. Excuse me a moment, I thought I heard something just now....

Isaaaaac.

There! Did you hear that? No? Just me?

Make us whole.

Gaaaah!

>_<

Okay, yeah I know. The whole unearthly, disembodied whispers thing is a pretty standard horror trope that you see in a lot of—

Isaaac.

Stop that!

It’s also really frigging creepy if you do it well.

Let’s start with the basics, shall we? Dead Space is a game that came out back in 2008. The game is classic survival horror, but it’s set in space! Welcome to the world of the USG Ishimura and thinly veiled Scientologist mockery-er, excuse me, Unitologists.

In the future, humanity has taken to the stars...and because we are total dicks, we invented spaceships called ‘planet crackers’ which are pretty much self explanatory. They are capable of ripping apart entire planets with gravity tethers and pulling out the cores for mineral mining purposes.

Y’know, if we could do something like this, we probably would. Granted, they seem to only do this to uninhabited planets, so that’s less bad than it would be otherwise, but it’s still a dick move. We are humans, destroyers of worlds!

Woot! Go us!

So future humanity in this scenario has apparently started to run critically short of resources to fund their space station and spaceship building endeavors. Ethical and horrific ecological ramifications aside, the main character of the game is Isaac Clarke, an engineer working for a parent company that exploits asteroid and planet mining.

One of their older ships, the Ishimura, has had something of a communications blackout recently. Isaac and his team have been sent in to assess whatever the problem is and fix it if they can.

Well, they land on the ship, find a broken antenna dish and fix it and everyone goes on their merry way, with no problems whatsoever.

Pfff.

As if.

Though you do actually fix the ship’s communications antenna during the course of the game, that is perhaps the least of what has gone wrong with the USG Ishimura.

By the way, it must be said that the intro sequence to Dead Space is wonderfully cinematic. The light from a nearby star washes over the bridge of the small repair ship, highlighting the ugly black behemoth which is the Ishimura lurking below and rendering the nearby planet in a golden halo of light.

Large chunks of space debris ahead, captain. Are you sure we're going the right way?

It’s just so frigging pretty. I think my jaw literally dropped when I first saw this sequence. It didn’t feel like a cinematic backdrop either. It felt like I was actually there. That level of immersion is what I aspire to experience almost any time I sit down to play a game and oh do I love it when a game gets it right.

Sight, sound, and presentation. Man I love a game that has good atmosphere.

Oh and the Dead Space games have one of the coolest inventory systems I’ve ever seen. You have this little holographic display grid that pops up in front of you when you access the inventory, Isaac’s journals, the video/audio logs, or the map. The game does not pause, when you do this, however, so be wary of item management whilst tromping about the dark corridors of the Ishimura.

It isn’t safe....

The game starts off with a video message from Isaac’s girlfriend Nicole. It’s cryptic and somehow sad, but the in-game holographic video viewing system itself is pretty damn cool. You can rotate the camera around and view things reversed if you want to.

Now, the interesting thing about Isaac in this game is that he never talks. He is completely silent and the only way you can find out what he is thinking is by reading his journal logs, which double as your objectives, so you should check them out regularly. It’s not that he can’t talk either, it’s just that he doesn’t. He seems fully content to let everyone else blather on about this or that, while silently observing everything through the glowing eye slits in his helmet.

Oh did I mention this? Isaac spends the entirety of the game enclosed in an industrial mining suit, which is basically a pressurized suit of armor with big heavy magnetic boots, designed to protect the user from space and possible power tool accidents.

GREETINGS, HYU-MAN. DO NOT BE ALARMED BY MY APPEARANCE.

You can, if you want to, pretend that he is a robot, called in to handle a particularly persistent pest control problem the Ishimura has developed.

The glowing blue helmet and heavy mining suit makes him pretty much the most intimidating engineer I’ve ever seen...and that’s before he gets his veritable arsenal of power tools and mining equipment.

So, Isaac is an armored badass. How does this make things conducive to a scary atmosphere?

Well, things start of a little south of normal. The repair ship can’t raise anyone on the Ishimura and Isaac’s team, made up of a woman named Kendra and the captain are pretty calm and relaxed...at first.

There she is, the USG Ishimura. Anyone else getting a slightly bad feeling about this? No? Just me? Well alright then.

Then something goes wrong on their approach to the ship. The Ishimura’s gravity tethers are active and they send the smaller ship hurling towards it at a speed that is definitely not conducive to keeping life and limb intact. They crash, but everyone is alright and they disembark into the Ishimura’s shuttle bay. There’s been some damage to their ship, but they figure they can repair it and decide to move forward with the mission.

A couple of unnamed mooks with guns are escorting the captain. Some kind of security force, I think. Ah, disposable characters one and two, so good to meet you.

One of the main methods of gaining resources are green item boxes scattered throughout the levels. They must be destroyed in order to gain their contents and you’ll find that Isaac’s inventory capacity is very limited at first. There are also emergency supplies located in various other types of containers you can actually open instead of destroy.

Anyway, you start the game off with no weapons, but you can stomp on things with your big ol mining boots and you can flail around like a spaz when you attempt to melee things. These movements are accompanied by manly grunting when you stomp and incoherent yelling when you wave your arms around.

Isaac clearly has no idea what he’s doing when it comes to hand to hand combat. Dude can’t even throw a normal punch to save his life. It’s all big wide overhand swings or awkward backhands.

Doing this amused me for a bit, while the others looked around, wondering where everyone else was. No welcoming party, no sign of any other people. The power and life support systems are on, but nobody’s home, so what gives?

Maaaaybe there’s something slightly more wrong on the USG Ishimura than just a simple communications blackout. But don’t ask me. I was busy stomping on defenseless green boxes and collecting their goodies. There are a couple that were out of reach and I couldn’t stomp on them. This caused me endless frustration as I tried to awkwardly flail at them with my arms, to no success.

Curse you boxes! I will have your delicious contents! All I need is some kind of weapon...hey disposable guys, could one of you maybe shoot this box? It’s like, right up here on the bench and I can’t...quite...hit...it.

Gaaaah!

Alright, we’ll call it a draw.

Sooo, what were you all talking about and why is everyone looking at me so strangely? Am I supposed to be doing something?

What? That panel over there? Yeah okay, sure.

Here the game introduces Isaac’s handy dandy waypoint mode. Because the developers understand that some of us aren’t blessed with the best sense of direction, they thoughtfully included a map. A map and a button that you can press which causes Isaac to hold out one hand and have a holographic blue light spring forth from his palm. This guiding light will unerringly point you towards your next mission objective.

Use if lost. Or, y’know, if you haven’t been paying attention to what everyone has been nattering on about, like I was. Also, it looks really cool and it’s great for screenshots and lighting up dark areas.

So the ship is in some kind of lockdown mode and you want me to release it so we can go inside? Sounds like a capital idea. I’ll just go through this door and...wait, now I’m on the other side of this heavy, reinforced glass. The only people with guns are all in the other room. That must mean I’m super safe, right? Alas, I do not feel so. In fact, now I feel quite isolated from my team and like I’m about to do something incredibly stupid.

Oh well, I’m sure this will all work out just peachy.

Alright so, Isaac does all the work and we run this fancy diagnostic program and it turns out that shit be pretty whack on the USG Ishimura. Stuff’s broken down all over the place and it’s time for the engineering team to get to work.

What else is it time for you ask?

It’s time for everything to go straight to Hell!

An alarm sounds when we release the lockdown. Horrible noises come from...pretty much everywhere, I guess? And then whammo! Monster time! Twisted things leap out of the vents like jack in the boxes and slaughter disposable guys one and two on the other side of the glass. Looks like I was right, hah! I am perfectly safe. Aaand the door leading to the area with the monsters is conveniently locked. Lots of yelling and gunfire over there. Sure am glad I’m over here, what with my not having any weapons whatsoever.

And then all the vents on my side start exploding outwards and terrifying abominations leap through at me and attempt to slice my face off with their long, bladed arms.

A voice is yelling at me over the comm. link to get the hell out of there, but it’s highly unnecessary, as I have already fled screaming down the corridor towards somewhere, anywhere that doesn’t have things that look like rejects from the second circle of hell attempting to kill me.

It is here that I discover two things.

Thing the first: That heavy, armored mining suit makes Isaac run real slow like.

Thing the second: Awkward flailing melee attacks against horrid, bladed abominations don’t work very well.

So I run and it seems like every time I pass a vent the damn thing explodes and another of the freakish creatures leaps out at me or drops down on me from above, making me flinch.

Me:

Health=Bad

Situation=Allll kinds of fucked up.

Enemies=Slicing at the heels of my mining boots.

Overall assessment=Terminal

I stagger/run towards an elevator at the end of the corridor. Salvation at last! Another of the creatures drops down in front of me and snarls horribly, but I manage to squeak by it and throw myself into the elevator. I hit the button and the doors slam shut with the finality of a garbage masher crunching rubbish into a cube, only to be forced open a second later by my ugly friend in the hallway. He snarls and slavers at me while I cower in a corner of the elevator and then the doors quite firmly insist that they should really be shut, as if the elevator itself shares my dislike of the horrid monstrosity, the result of which ends up chopping the thing’s head and arm blades off.

Whew.

Man, I sure am lucky elevators are always so non OSHA compliant in horror stuff. Brutal, crushing elevator doors are a solid staple of the horror genre.

Having barely survived the initial, confused rush with the vent-crawlers, Isaac Clarke is now alone in the depths of the Ishimura, badly injured, bereft of friends and allies, worried about his girlfriend, weaponless, surrounded by monsters, and strangely unwilling to talk about any of it, it’s now time to start the game proper.

Rawr.

Now that is a pretty darn cool start to a horror game.

Granted, it’s not the slowest pacing, but that really does depend on how long you take wandering around looking at stuff and listening to the dialogue between the other characters. Dead Space can go pretty slowly if you want it to. Or you can charge forward like a maniac as well. It’s entirely up to you.

As I generally take a more methodical approach to these things, Dead Space feels like classic survival horror, through and through. The atmosphere is tense, I became super twitchy about every vent in every room I ever went into, and there’s lots of inventory/item management. What’s not to like?

The game tends to give you health items when your health is low and ammo when you’re almost out, but it’s got a random edge to it too, so there will be times when you are low on health, but high on ammo and vice versa. You also pick up credits to buy stuff at the store and nodes to upgrade your gear with. Blueprints for weapons and better suit levels are hidden in storerooms that take special nodes to open, which you can buy for a high price from the store, or find in the levels.

The weapons in this game are great. You repurpose a variety of highly dangerous looking mining tools into a monster destroying arsenal and it is glorious.

The first weapon you get in the game is the plasma cutter. You sight with three glowing blue beams and you fire a line of superheated plasma along the beams of light. The alternate fire rotates the beams from horizontal to vertical, allowing you to make more precise cuts.

There’s the Line Gun, which is sort of like an oversize plasma cutter. The main difference being a much wider spread to the light beams, higher damage values, and an alternate fire that shoots plasma mines that detonate after a few seconds. Super useful for enemies that are playing dead.

There’s also a flame thrower, a pulse rifle, and my personal favorite, The Ripper. The Ripper levitates a spinning saw blade a couple of feet in front of you that you can maneuver around and dice enemies to bits with, or you can alt fire one of the blades in a straight line, cutting them in half.

There was a crazy rolling mine gun I didn’t have much use for and some kind of kinetic energy weapon with a long charge up period which did massive damage once you release it and a secondary fire that knocks everything away from you in a surrounding area. Can’t remember the name of it, but it was cool.

The weapons are tons of fun and pretty darn original and you can continuously work to upgrade their ammo capacity, damage values, and rate of fire/reload times. Some weapons work better against some types of enemies than others and in an amusing nod to reality, the flamethrower won’t work in areas without oxygen.

Did I mention that?

I guess not.

You see, there are times when the life support system on the ship fails and Isaac has to survive with the oxygen in his suit, which I think starts with a whopping thirty or forty seconds of O2, initially. This is problematic and you should upgrade the suits capacity ASAP. Why the suit has such a severe oxygen limitation is beyond me, especially since it seems designed to work in low gravity/no atmosphere areas.

Whoa nelly. Yeah yeah, I'm running out of air but...whoa. O_O

Maybe the company just doesn’t care much about their engineers.

You find O2 canisters you can carry around for these eventualities if you want, but they take up inventory space, so I rarely bothered. Also, there’s usually a place where you can refill your oxygen nearby if you look around. If you let your air drop down far enough, Isaac will start to make horrible choking noises and as this is generally very unpleasant sounding, I wouldn’t recommend it. If you run out of air you die, so step lively now.

There are two other really neat things you can do with the suit.

The first is the kinesis module, which allows you to move stuff around with the power of your mind—er, I mean the module. You can levitate things and pull them closer to you and you can then shoot them out at stuff at high velocity, giving you a much nicer self defense option if you are out of ammunition, than Isaac’s awkward flailing. The most effective items to grab and throw at your enemies are, oddly enough, bits and pieces of your enemies themselves. The bladed bits make great projectiles. You only need to dispose of them first before tearing off the sharp parts.

The other thing the suit has is a stasis module. This allows you to shoot bursts of slow-mo energy at things, which...is pretty self explanatory, actually. The stasis module is extremely useful, but is also a major crutch. Rely on it too much to slow down your enemies and your reaction time is tanked when you run out of stasis juice in your suit and things speed back up to normal. And it doesn’t always work on bosses, so be wary of investing too much into it. Stasis is usually the last thing I upgrade in the suit and I routinely sell the reload cartridges I pick up, but there are segments that require the use of stasis to slow down hazardous obstacles in your way, such as malfunctioning automatic doors and giant fan blades, but there’s usually a stasis refill station nearby if you look around.

Some of the coolest parts of Dead Space happen in the no-gravity areas. You can leap from surface to surface, engaging and disengaging the magnetic locks on your mining boots at will. The perspective shifts are fantastic and you can fight your enemies from the ceiling, walls, or floor. They also will take advantage of the lack of gravity and launch attacks at you from odd angles and locations, making your situational awareness a top priority.

In the areas where the ship is depressurized or the life support has failed, sound is very muted. With no air to carry the sound waves, ambushes are almost completely silent and you have to battle against the ticking clock of your limited oxygen supply counting down as well.

It’s rather tense.

So what are these mysterious monstrosities anyway? What happened to the crew of the Ishimura? Well, these things are the crew. They are called Necromorphs and are basically undead monsters that have been mutated and reanimated by some kind of alien signal originating from a mysterious artifact called the Marker, which is worshipped by the insane death cult of Unitology, (which has an understandably much nicer public face of course). If you’ve ever heard the phrase, Altman be praised, now you know where it’s from. Richard Altman founded the cult and was assassinated by the Earth government a couple hundred years before the story starts in Dead Space.

Needless to say, Uni’s don’t care much for the government or the military.

So the Marker was dug up on the planet the Ishimura is in the process of mining and...amazingly enough, is actually brought on board the ship. This is mostly due to the fact that the Ishimura has waaaay too many Unitologists on board, the captain and the command staff included. Adding to the confusion, the signal from the Marker slowly drives people insane, so you can see why things have gone badly awry before Isaac and his little engineering crew show up.

As you set out on your investigation of the Ishimura, the Necromorphs, and the Marker, if you pay attention, you will notice the impact the Marker has on Isaac’s psyche. In the silence you can hear whispers. Soft voices calling your name in the darkness.

Isaac.

Isaaaaac.

Screens flicker, strange distortions fill the air, and you are left wondering if anything Isaac is experiencing is actually happening to him.

Oh and this game has the creepiest rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star I’ve ever heard. Bonus!

There’s also a bunch of graffiti written on the walls in bloody, dark smears. This stuff is Marker speak, an alien script, but there are also a couple of translation keys hidden in the levels, so if you wanted to, you could copy the alphabet and translate the writings, something which I think the developer had a contest on way back when the game first came out. It’s easier just to look it up though.

The first message you ever find in the game is scrawled on the wall in English. It reads: CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS.

Words to live and die by in Dead Space.

This is the rule of thumb for the Dead Space games. Do not shoot at center mass, as that is the most heavily armored part of the Necromorph body. Instead, you must chop off their arms and legs and other appendages in order to do enough damage to kill them. This is easier said than done as they are likely to be charging at you, swinging and roaring.

And on that note, I feel I should mention that the game is almost ludicrously gory. Necromorphs are large, squishy, explodo, dismembery, blood bags that are trying to kill you. Chopping them into itty bitty bits is a gooey, satisfying process...assuming of course, that they don’t chop you into itty bitty bits, which can definitely happen.

Unlike say, the level of gore in The Evil Within, which was, I dunno, just icky, the gore in the Dead Space games is so splattery/splodey/over the top squishy, that I have trouble taking it seriously. When you’re stomping around in your big ol mining boots and there’re all these dead ragdoll squishy bloodbag abomination blade thingies underfoot and you’re trying to go somewhere, you have to take a moment to laugh and clear the gooey things out of your way. I know it’s supposed to be horrifying, and I certainly find the Necromorphs scary enough when they are up and about, but it’s just...it’s just silly, is what it is.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me. I dunno.

Also, you stomp on enemies to get items to pop out. It’s like:

Stomp. Squish. Item!

Stomp. Squish. Item!

Stomp. Squish. Item!

Ahahahah! Stomp all of the things! Stompstompstompstompstompstomp.

It’s frigging hilarious.

Anyway, the game is really fun and very atmospheric. I love the setpieces in the background, especially when I was on the bridge of the Ishimura and I could look out over the partially mined planet nearby and the light from the star shining around it. There’s even a segment where you go outside of the ship and run along the hull dodging asteroids. There’s a turret segment and a place where you play zero-g basketball and even a target range with prizes.

Welcome to the zero-g basketball court. Yes this is an actual thing.

And the boss fights! Some of the more memorable boss fights in a horror game I’ve ever played. The monsters are huge, lumbering things you have to cut down to size. One fight was even in zero gravity, which was a lot of fun. Though in retrospect, mostly it breaks down to shooting the big glowy orange bits and severing parts off the huge monster. At the time, this was pretty atypical, but since then it’s been imitated endlessly, and I’m not sure Dead Space was even the first game to do this, but I’m pretty sure they made it mainstream.

What I really like about all of this is that this is an original IP and it has its own history and lore and it was successful. The game feels very polished and detailed, with loads and loads of things to do and secrets to discover and stuff to unlock. There’s a new game plus mode, but unfortunately you can’t change the difficulty on it, so if you want to challenge the hardest difficulties in the game, you have to start from scratch with nothing.

I do however, have a couple of complaints.

What the hell, EA? Why do you do this stuff to your PC user base? I’ve played the PC version since its release and I had no idea until recently that it was both really poorly optimized for PC and that there’s actually DLC content for one of my favorite games...that only exists for console users.

The optimization issue is really quite terrible. If you don’t force your video card to change the settings of the game to run it a certain way, Dead Space plays like Isaac’s got weights on his arms and he’s moving through taffy when you try to aim at stuff. It’s that bad. The difficulty spike is absurd and it’s all because of some stupid console in-game engine restrictions that nobody fixed when they ported it to the PC. I actually beat the game like this, thank you very much, you jerks. My enjoyment of the game went up significantly once I found out about the issue and fixed it. Ahh, I can actually aim and react quickly when things are trying to disembowel me. Super hard mode off, thanks.

The DLC issue just infuriates me. It exists for no reason other than that companies want you to buy their consoles and the console versions of their product, because apparently, they make more money with them or something. PC users have been getting shitty console ports of great games for a long time now and I’m getting real tired of it. Like we should be happy we’re getting anything when other people get more than we do? You guys are dicks. I’m pretty sure I could go down the list of every multiplatform game I own and find that there’s more content available for the console versions for the majority of the titles.

And I never knew.

I hate console exclusives. You know what they are? A company giving both middle fingers to their fanbase, saying fuck you, you do things my way or you don’t do them at all. Multiplatform titles should be the norm, not the exceptions, and they especially shouldn’t do this bullshit where they lock content to one platform or another on a multiplatform game. If you’re going to do purchasable content for a title, make it available to everybody. Even if it’s just some stupid new suits for Isaac to tromp around in like in this game.

It’s a matter of principle damn it.

Alright, I’ll stop ranting now.

Dead Space is a great game with a lot of replayability. It’s slightly more action oriented than your average, slower paced survival horror titles, but it’s still quite enjoyable. And for veterans of the genre, you might not find it all that scary, but it’s a pretty good start for newcomers and it’s a creepy, fun game in its own right.

Just don’t mind the whispers.