Dead Space Review

Welcome to the final review in this year’s Halloween Horror Extravaganza. This one has been a long time coming. I wanted to cover it last year, but found that reviewing games takes a while. So, here we are… the Dead Space review.

Unlike Alien, I have a much better childhood relationship with this game. I must have been 14 or 15 when I first played it. By then, I’d gotten more into horror and really enjoyed this game. Now that I’m older, have played many more games, and studied storytelling to a far greater extent, I can gladly say I still hold that opinion.

If all you were looking for was info on whether you might like it or not, here you go. If you like horror, space science fiction, third person shooters, and solid storytelling, you’ve got 2 great games to explore.

Yes, 2 games. I might talk about the bad game someday. Today, I discuss a good game.

Some of this I’m taking from an interview by Ars Technica with Glen Schofield, the creator/director of Dead Space. The full interview is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ3iqq49Ew8.

The developers of Dead Space started around 2005. Utilizing the dev kit of the Xbox 360, the developers built 3 rooms with spinning lights and fans to see what it looked like. Thanks to a total coincidence, the engineers knew exactly what they needed to do for the engine. They accidentally found an easy way to communicate concept to execution. That type of thing carries a lot over into the development.

Schofield set out to make the scariest game ever. He also wanted to do something for himself. He’d been making games for others for many years. This time, he’d make a game he wanted rather than what his bosses wanted.

Another easy way of communicating what they were making was by saying it was Resident Evil in space. RE4 came out during the development time and it just clicked. Other large influences were The Thing and Alien.

Anyway…

I played Dead Space a lot on my Playstation 3. It’s been a few years and I got it for PC a while back, so I decided to play the PC version for this year’s Halloween Horror Extravaganza.

As soon as I booted the first chapter, I came across a technical problem. Apparently, the game was designed with a controller in mind, rather than mouse and keyboard. It uses acceleration in its mouse input processing. The issue manifested into a serious problem. When aiming with a weapon, you can hardly look around at all. It’s so slow you have to drag the mouse half way across the pad to make a slight adjustment. Not a viable option when a Necromorph is sprinting at you on Hard difficulty.

I found a workaround that fixed the problem. I disabled V-sync inside the game settings and locked the frame rate to 30 frames per second (fps). Now, I’ve never been one who minds low frame rate. If I could do 100 fps instead, I’d be happier, but 30 will do. I had an Xbox 360 and still have a PS3. So I’m used to that. It’s an unfortunate problem that seems to be an issue with the way the game was designed. Once I got past that bug, I was able to continue with the game and the aiming was comfortable. Here’s my recent experience as well as my long-term feelings about this epic survival horror game.

Now for the actual game

I’ve never played this game on hard difficulty. I know, “filthy casual.” But I get stressed out, okay? It’s a horror game for a reason. Horror games are the only real horror media that get me freaked out like horror is supposed to. I can read horror or watch it and feel more intrigued by what’s happening than actually scared. Games are a different matter for me.

I found myself without any ammo in the first chapter. I had to run away twice. I had no shots left and multiple Necromorphs were sprinting at me. It was rather scary, and it was interesting to try to not run out of the resource that kept me alive.

First rule of playing this game on a high difficulty, sell everything. Sell all your ammo, health packs, and stasis packs. Basically, run around with no resources at all and still survive. You do this so you can consistently buy Power Nodes, the game’s upgrade currency. With so many Nodes, you can fully upgrade your guns within a couple of chapters. I needed a bit more of a safety net than that, so I didn’t sell my health packs or ammo, but I sold stasis. Almost all the resources I picked up were spent on Nodes.

I had very little ammo for most of the game. Enough shots to get me through the next fight. Everything else got picked up along the way. This is how survival horror is supposed to feel. That dread of not being able to fight off the next monster that’s probably around the next corner is rough.

Enough about the playing for now. If you haven’t played this game before, I should probably start telling you what this is all about.

You play as Isaac Clark, engineer with the CEC (Concordance Extraction Corporation). The USG Ishimura, a Planet Cracker class ship, has sent a distress call. Planet cracker is self-explanatory, and she’s the biggest cracker in her class. Earth has been stripped of all its resources. There’s nothing left. Civilization couldn’t maintain itself anymore. So, planet cracking became the biggest industry in the solar system.

Now, we can planet crack in other star systems using a Jump Drive, this universe’s way of doing FTL (faster than light). Aegis VII is a metal-rich planet. After “popping the cork” with a huge chunk of the planet ripped into orbit, the Ishimura sent for help.

Your girlfriend was stationed on the Ishimura. You’re going on the emergency ship sent to investigate. As you arrive, the ship’s dark. No running lights, no angry com chatter from the thousand people on board.

A docking system malfunction has the shuttle crash into the docking bay. Still, lights off and no-one there to greet you. Working your way into the waiting room and behind a security room to activate a system diagnostic, you find the tram to be offline and a lot of damage already sustained.

A claxon sounds. Quarantine lockdown in effect. You’re separated from the rest of your crew now that a door shut between you. A crashing from the roof beyond the glass. What is that? That guy’s going for one of the crew with swords! No, not swords. Its arms have blades attached where the hands should be. It just stabbed him in the chest. He’s dead. Guns firing.

“Isaac, get the hell out of there,” shouts Hammond.”

“The door’s unlocked, run,” warns Kendra.

You move. You start sprinting into the hallway behind you. Something crashes through the vent above.

Some people complain about how the tension doesn’t last long. You’re attacked within the first seven minutes of the game. I love it. It doesn’t fuck around. It shows you exactly what you’re in for at the very start.

Doesn’t that sound like a fun time?

Dead Space

I’ll just say that things get worse from there. Much worse. They get so bad that Isaac will have PTSD for the rest of his life. Then again, his life might end in the next few seconds. That’s the Dead Space experience. Alone. Isolated on the Ishimura. I’d guess that 80 to 90% of the crew was already dead before Isaac even showed up. It’s bad.

We get my favorite zombies ever. They are amazing. The entire way the Necromorphs work is fascinating. I love the creativity of it all. Basically, when someone dies, they don’t just wake up again hungry for flesh. No, no, no. Their body twists and morphs into something far more grotesque, armored, and bladed than any other zombie. Their flesh is quite durable. Where they once had hands, they now have three foot long bone swords which can cut a person in half with one swing. These things are powerful and carry razer sharp hardware. These things are built to kill anything still alive that might be around them.

As the chapters go on, we get different Necro variants. We get crawlers, ones who only have their arms left. Their legs have morphed into a whip tail with a giant barb on the end. The cloning vats (filled with gestating fetuses grown for tissue replacement) plus there were several babies on board. Those have become projectile throwers called Lurkers. They can shoot darts at you with their three large tentacles, which can also attack you. They’re quite nimble and can hang from walls and ceilings. If that wasn’t dark enough, with many bodies all together in one place, they’ll melt together into a matting which helps other Necromorph variants to start terra forming the atmosphere into something toxic for living things.

If anyone could be dropped into the depths of hell, it was Isaac Clark. The poor bastard and the player have about 7 to 15 hours of that kind of stuff.

I haven’t even mentioned the death cult who worships the Marker that started all this.

Oh yes. The Church of Unitology are followers of the great martyr Michael Altman. 200 years ago, Altman, a geophysicist, found something in the Yucatan Peninsula that changed civilization. It was an alien artifact he dubbed “the Marker.” According to the Unitologists, this Marker was a holy relic left by the gods. It is a divine object which holds the key to immortality through convergence. Once convergence is underway, all living things will become one body, one mind, one soul. Sound familiar?

You probably get where this is going. This is where the body horror becomes lovecraftian.

You may be able to tell by now, The Marker isn’t divine, not by any standard we might use. Unfortunately, the Unitologists don’t know what they’re getting into. The history around Altman is shrouded in classified documents and misinformation. In fact, Aegis VII was under a 200 year quarantine until the CEC, infiltrated using many fanatical Unitologists who decided to go check the planet out.

More unfortunate still, one of the main doctors on the Ishimura, Challus Mercer, is a true believer. Seeing the Necromorphs and the horrors they bring, he’s filled with religious zeal and begins experiments to make these monsters even more powerful than they already are. He kills one member of the crew and transforms him into a Necromorph which cannot be killed. It’s an almost immortal monstrosity which hunts Isaac through much of the game.

Through text logs scattered in the ship and some you gain access to only after beating the game, we find out the Marker emits microwaves, radio waves, and even the alpha, beta, and theta waves of the human brain. The Marker causes hallucinations and heightened aggression. People start seeing and talking to their dead loved-ones and attacking others or mutilating themselves. We see this happen through the game as the story progresses, but you have to search for why.

Things go from bad to worse for Isaac Clark as he travels through the ship, fixing each problem as its found. He has to fix the tram system, get the Ishimura out of its decaying orbit above Aegis VII then get the defense canons online because of the debris field after the planet crack, kill a leviathan of flesh and tentacles which houses itself in food storage and begins transforming the atmosphere. Many trials like that take place over the whole game.

Life on the Ishimura

Do you remember Kendra and Hammond from earlier? Well, they’re with you on this journey. At the beginning of the game, you get separated from the crew. Two men die, but Kendra and Hammond escape, meeting up with Isaac later.

Kendra Davis is the resident IT specialist. Early on, she gets separated from Hammond and locks herself in a control room with access to all the major ship systems. She helps Isaac know where to go and what to fix. She’s a great help.

Zach Hammond was the captain of the Kellion before it crashed and tries to remain the mission leader even once the Necromorphs start killing people. Kendra doesn’t trust him. She thinks he knew far more about The Marker than they’d been told. All the same, he goes around trying to fix things too, more often than not ending up stuck somewhere, waiting for Isaac to get out there and do the dirty work.

There’s a very good reason both Kendra and Hammond rely on Isaac so much. One, he’s a brilliant engineer who can come up with makeshift fixes with very little equipment. Also, Isaac Clark starts off in an armored EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) suit, an armored space suit. He never takes it off. Not once. Isaac is always armored up and ready for the vacuum of space or the bladed horrors sprinting at him. He’s the only one who can survive most of what’s going on.

There’s a regular loop to the missions. Get off the tram, go fix something, try not to die, find out something else is broken, get on the tram to fix the next issue.

As with Bloodborne and the souls games, a lot of the story is uncovered in environmental storytelling and in text logs/audio logs. It’s not to the same extent. It’s easy to know everything that’s going on, unlike Bloodborne where people write entire hundred plus page essays on their interpretation on the story. But it utilizes the same methods. Half of the story is what Isaac goes through while the other is you finding out what happened in the years and hours leading up to the Kellion crashing and trapping Isaac in this hell.

After upgrading a crap ton of armor, weapons, and still just scraping by in the hallways of the Ishimura, you find Nicole, the girlfriend Isaac came here looking for. She’s still okay, though clearly affected by what’s going on. She’s sheepish and seems to be affected by the psychosis the Marker causes. Or she just has PTSD from what’s going on. I can’t blame her there.

With her help, Kendra the IT specialist, Hammond the leader, and Dr. Kyne, another survivor and a Unitolygist who wants to stop all of this before it’s too late; Isaac pushes on through the depths of the Ishimura and the vacuum of space surrounding them.

If you still haven’t played the game yet and intend to, skip to the “Gameplay” section in bold. I implore you not to spoil yourself with the ending. It’s good. You should experience it first. If you’ve played already or don’t care about spoilers, read on.

A military vessel crashes into the Ishimura because a Necromorph makes it aboard. Yet another thing to fix. They need to steal the jump-drive to make one of the shuttles capable of escaping the system. Hammond gets cornered and brutally ripped apart, leg torn off, then beaten to pulp, before Isaac has to kill the mini-boss that killed him. It’s brutal. No one deserves to die like that. You will be remembered, my friend.

It’s down to 2 Kellion survivors now. Just Isaac and Kendra.

Once Dr. Terrence Kyne comes into the picture, the proper objective comes to light. Rather than flailing in the darkness trying to get the ship to work, he pleads with Isaac to help him get the Marker back to the planet. When the crew brought it aboard, it awakened something called the Hivemind deep within the crust.

Isaac agrees to do this.

Just as you’re about to get on the shuttle and escape to the surface, Kendra, who’s been helping you through your whole journey, shoots Kyne and steals the ship before you can get aboard.

She explains that she’s actually a government operative, and the Marker wasn’t another alien artifact. No, it was a replica of the one found on Earth, built 200 years ago. The reason there’s been a quarantine was because they were doing testing on Aegis VII when all of this started happening. But the CEC couldn’t stay away. Now she’s going to take the Marker somewhere else and leave you to die.

I didn’t see this coming when I first played it. I was floored. I’d liked Kendra until that point. She played her part well, both the character and her role in the story. I’m sure some saw it coming, but I didn’t and I consider it a pretty good plot twist.

Angered, betrayed, Isaac finds Nicole up in the docking control area and forces the shuttle, carrying Kendra and the Marker, to crash on Aegis VII. In another shuttle, Isaac and Nicole head down for the final showdown.

After a very hard chapter, Isaac places the Marker near the hole where the mass of land that’s now in orbit once sat. Nicole steps out, thanking him for making them whole once again. Then she vanishes as the Marker lets out a horn call and the winds pick up.

Kendra traps Isaac once again and shows him the full version of the video Nicole sent him. The one which he’d been obsessing over. She killed herself on camera via injection. Nicole was dead before we even arrived on the Ishimura.

Yet another outstanding plot twist. This one is foreshadowed a bit more and many people talk as though they saw it coming. Again, 15-year-old me didn’t know, and I loved it. Well, it hurt, but the twist was just great.

In fact, if you take the first letter of each chapter, it spells “NICOLE IS DEAD.”

In a rush to escape, Kendra having the Marker again. All is chaos. Kendra runs up to the shuttle entrance. Then a giant tentacle of twisted flesh smashes into her and twists like she’s an annoying bug. The Hivemind is here and Isaac’s all alone.

The Dead Space final boss is massive. It’s well over 100 feet tall. It’s a massive howling monster with tentacles, many bulging puss sacks, and an intent to destroy.

After an intense battle, Isaac indeed escapes on the shuttle, drifting away as the massive rock crashes back onto the planet, destroying the marker and any remaining necromorphs on the surface.

Isaac sits back, removing his helmet for the first time since he got on the Ishimura. He looks to his right- Nicole leaps at him, eyes glowing bright, screaming as Marker symbols flash. Then the credits roll.

I love Dead Space. I love the story and all the characters. They’re fairly simple. Most of them serve one or two tropes. But they feel real at the same time.

There are two real issues I have with this game and they both come down to the ending. One, Kendra says that Isaac “couldn’t bear to watch it to the end,” referring to the video of Nicole. That means he had the full version and must have either stopped watching half-way through every time he watched it, or he knew and had oppressed it so hard that he forgot. Neither make much sense at all. Now, if Kendra sent him the full video and Earth Gov had censored the whole thing and only sent him part of it, then I’d understand. I’d get why that happened. But it’s not properly explained, so I have to either call it a plot hole or negate Kendra’s words and say he never had access to the full version.

Two, and the larger issue I have. How the hell does Isaac Clark kill the Hivemind? That thing is gargantuan. He should have been squashed instantly, like Kendra was. Then again, we wouldn’t have gotten an ending that was satisfying, nor got Dead Space 2.

You may be wondering, why did Isaac see Nicole and why did it want to be placed back on Aegis VII? Well, as we learn in the later games, the Marker isn’t just a machine that causes madness and mutation. It’s sentient and sadistic. It’s the lovecraftian element of this game. The Necromorphs are far more like the Flood than regular zombies.

Gameplay

Since this is a video game and not a movie, I can’t just talk about the production and story. There’s a whole other aspect to the experience that I’d be remiss if I skipped over the game play.

I mentioned the suit earlier. It’s a great story thread, I think. But it also makes the situation more realistic. Of course, everyone else is dead or dies as soon as one of those things gets close enough; they weren’t smart enough or didn’t have time to put on an armored EVA suit. Or a RIG, as the game calls it. As the game progresses, you can upgrade it, placing more pieces of metal onto it and hardening the exoskeleton, keeping your soft flesh safe from everything around you.

Dead Space is a third person shooter, meaning we have a camera over Isaac’s right shoulder and we have a variety of guns at our disposal.

A brilliant aspect is that you don’t have a UI. All of what you get is in-universe. Your health bar is a series of lights running up your spine (I saw one speculation that it’s literally the liquid used in health packs. It’s however much free-healing you have before you’re just you again). Otherwise, I’m not sure how the logic of an in-world health meter can work. Be that as it may, you’ll be looking at Isaac’s spine a lot.

The ammo count pops up on the weapons themselves.

Even your menu is integrated into the environment with a holographic projector attached to your chest. So going into the menu doesn’t pause the game.

All of these elements are utilized to bring you into the moment, to keep the immersion there. You aren’t playing a game. Even in the menu, you’re just looking at something built into your suit. I love it and even 14 years later, not enough games try to do this.

I won’t talk long about the atmosphere, but oh boy, is it fantastic. The Ishimura is filled with long corridors without properly working lights. The ship is silent but for clanking of metal in the distance. As the game progresses, you start hearing whispered voices all around you, calling Isaac’s name as the fear and the Marker begin taking hold of his mind. You’ll go several long minutes before anything attacks you, but when you’re under attack, it’s sheer chaos. Things are screaming at you. Things are sprinting full-tilt. The music transforms into a blast of chaotic energy overwhelm you and causes you to panic, shoot wide, and give the Necro’s a chance to kill you.

I must clarify something; you aren’t technically using guns in this game. They’re mining tools. The first weapon you find is the Plasma Cutter. It’s a handheld device with a tall front piece projecting three lasers. You’re able to rotate the front 90 degrees with the alternate fire button, giving you a vertical and horizontal line perfect for dismemberment. You also get stuff like the line gun. It’s basically a far larger plasma cutter that is only ever horizontal. It can launch a timed mine with the alt fire.

A weapon I’d never played with until this playthrough is the force gun. It is what it sounds like. The normal fire shoots a blast of energy in close proximity, killing anything small coming at you and knocking back everything else. The alt fire is a charge attack which fires at range. I’m kind of sad I never messed around with it until now because wow is it fun to use.

I’ve only used a few of the engineering tools provided to the player but each has been fun in its own way and none of them feel the same. Each one is viable as a main weapon. Plus, since there’s an alt fire for every one of them, it gives even greater veriety.

There’s a simple innovation which completely changes this game’s play style from any other shooter. You cannot kill the enemy by shooting them in the head. Rather, you must dismember them. Go for the limbs. The mining tools are perfect for that. The reason you must do this is because the Necromorphs don’t need their brains anymore. In fact, you don’t ever technically kill any of them, you just incapacitate them. Center mass does almost nothing and they’re just as deadly without their head.

I love it. The name of the game is strategic dismemberment. Take out a Necro’s legs before it gets too close because another one’s already sprinting at you, full speed, from the other direction. You have to be fast and accurate. For most of the enemies, I go right for the legs. It slows them down and then I have time to take off one of the bladed arms. Then again, some enemies have armored legs, or their bodies are shaped in such a way where they either don’t present their legs to you or don’t have any at all.

Like the Flood from Halo, or the demons from Doom, each Necromorph type serves a purpose. Different types combined make for different encounters. First, we have the slashers, the regular enemies. I described them a bit in the story section. But they’re the common fodder. Not very tanky but they’re fast as hell and will sprint at you and take a swinging leap with their giant blades once they’re close enough. The Lurkers (baby/embryonic clones), often stay at range, shooting their quills. There are many types and each one does something specific and you have to learn that variant’s tactics if you want to survive.

There are two other weapons at your disposal which are still unique for Dead Space and serve great versatile roles.

The first one you get is Stasis. Appearing as a semi-circle meter to the right of your health bar, you see how many charges you can use. Stasis allows you, when aiming, to launch a white, whispy cloud that slows time on anything it hits, be it malfunctioning slamming doors, giant spinning fans, or the Necromorph leaping at your face. It adds a whole other element to the combat, allowing you to slow down an enemy and kill it fast, or to slow it down so you can focus on another one before it becomes dangerous again. I’m sure players far better than myself have come up with some crazy strategies with it. It’s an invaluable tool, especially against mini-bosses or large hoards.

The second tech tool is Kenisis. This one is the offensive sibling to Stasis. Kanisis allows you to pick up heavy or bladed objects. In-universe, it’s essentially a tractor beam. If something’s in range, you aim at it, then grab it. It will fly toard you and float about 3 or 4 feet in front of you. Then, you can either drop it, or launch it forward at high speed. A great example of its combat use is when there’s scattered fuel canisters in an area. You can grab one and launch it forward. It will explode on impact, killing whatever you shot it at, and saving you the ammo. On higher difficulties, especially, you’ll want to make as much use of Kenisis as possible. The ability became much more powerful in Dead space 2, being more versatile. But I’ll talk about that in the DS2 review, probably next year.

I talked about it a bit earlier, but you really want to get your upgrades. You can find Power Nodes throughout the game and buy them at the automated kiosk stores for 10,000 credits. They’re expensive, but they’re your greatest resource.

With them, you can upgrade you suit’s armor, air capacity (for sections in vacuum), as well as your Kenisis, Stasis, and guns. This is not an RPG but the upgrade system is pretty fun and straight forward. I’ll sometimes agonize over what to upgrade next for several minutes at a time. Unless you’re selling almost everything, you will not have enough Nodes to upgrade everything. I would recommend sticking with three guns and focusing on getting them upgraded before much else. You only have four guns slots, and you should probably stay with that many. Any more and you’ll stretch yourself thin and end up making the game much harder than it has to be.

Wrap up

I’ve gone on for quite some time but Dead Space deserves it. It’s an amazing game that still holds up 14 years after it came out. I know we’re getting a remake soon, but I have no trust in EA. Until I see great reviews, I’ll be sticking with the original. It still looks great. The art style works and will continue to. I have a feeling it’s going to be a timeless graphic style.

The game’s story may be somewhat simple. Some would call it generic, but it’s what the developers did with it that makes it special to me and so many others. The Necromorph threat is horrifying. I’d much rather go up against a Xenomorph hive than a Necromorph infestation. Either way, I’m probably dead, but with Xeno’s, I at least wouldn’t have to deal with seeing my dead loved-ones, losing my grasp on reality, or with everyone around me trying to kill me.

There’s a reason we’re getting a remake and why people still mourn the loss of Visceral Games. Rest in peace, you are missed… Dead Space is one hell of a game, unlike any other experience I’ve had. There are no other games like it. If there are, they’re probably poor copies.

I love Dead Space. It’s a classic that I’ve played several times already and I’ll be returning to for many years to come. If you’ve played it, let me know your thoughts. I’d love to get into a discussion. If you haven’t played it, and my review is something informing your decision to play or not, do it. It will frighten you, terrify, disgust you. But that’s why we go to horror, to experience the worst in life in a controlled environment. Plus, the setting is amazing and one of my favorites in both horror and science fiction.