Dead Space

I just finished playing through the whole campaign for the second time. My second impression of “Dead space” is even more positive than my original reaction.

During the first playthrough I noticed how well designed the game world is. As a science fiction setting, it is very credible. The space ships and the surface of the colony planet appear to have been lived in, with signs of daily use everywhere. There’s dirt, there’s clutter, there’s junk. The detail sells the scenario. Even the “user interface” of the of the game protagonist’s space suit is designed not to break the illusion of the game’s reality.

Once you are sold on the credibility of the game world, the survival horror elements of the game become really effective. To survive in the game, you have to defend yourself against a cast of disfigured human mutants. It’s not just the challenge that your weaponry is somewhat underpowered to deal with the threats that will get under your skin, it’s also in how the mutants are ghastly familiar. During my second playthrough I noticed how well the mutant attacks are paced. The game goes to great lengths not to overuse specific enemy types, it also varies how the enemies are deployed: jump scares, or cases in which you realize long before an attack happens that there is going to be trouble ahead are very rare. The game design also works hard to vary the gameplay elements. You are not always running through dimly lit corridors, shooting at mutants. The game’s storyline strings you along solving various problems in different parts of the ship, in zero gravity, in hard vacuum, etc.

The game mechanics and the scenario are bound to be familiar for anybody who has ever seen movies such as “Alien” or John Carpenter’s “The thing”. “Dead Space” draws heavily upon the scenarios of both these movies and combines them to great effect. The result works quite well, though it is certainly not original. You could make a list of all the effective “Alien” and “The thing” movie elements, and you would find each and every one adapted in this game. Contagious alien, mutating disease? Check. Gory monsters with flaying tentacles? Check. Double-crossing crew member instructed by some shadowy group to exploit the threat? Check. And so on. . .

How scary is “Dead Space”? The game design avoids cheap scares and tries, often really hard, to play against your expectations. This effort almost always pays off. The whole gamut between creepy, shocking, revolting and gory is present in the game design. Whenever it’s creepy, the game really does work well. Personally, I was less convinced by the gory aspects. They get old very quickly, whereas the creepiness lingers on and is always done very well. Here’s hoping that in the inevitable sequel the designers will go more for the creepy parts.

The game’s sound design is very effective, as it should be for the horror genre. I would even go so far as saying that the sound is responsible for more than half of what makes this game work so well.

The game’s music, however, I found far less effective. It became annoying very quickly, and when I turned it off, the game became scarier because the environment sound design really started to shine. For all the ideas “Dead Space” borrowed from the movies “Alien” and “The thing”, I wish they had borrowed from these movie scores. Unlike the “Dead Space” game music, which is almost always very “on the nose”, the scores for “Alien” and “The thing” enhanced the movies by countering expectations.
Rating: 4 / 5