Dead Space - A 10 Year Retrospective

Dead Space hails from 2008 as a bit of a cross between System Shock 2 and Resident Evil 4, if you were to take the slow-paced over-the-shoulder combat system from RE4 and put it in a space horror setting reminiscent of SS2. According to interviews with the development team, Visceral Games, Dead Space was originally being designed with the hope that it could become System Shock 3, but after playing Resident Evil 4, their eyes were opened to new possibilities, and thus the game shifted from more of an RPG focus to an action-horror focus.

This was around the time that horror games started shifting from more traditional survival-horror games where players controlled a feeble survivor with limited resources, to controlling badass killing machines with a full arsenal of weapons, when the focus shifted more from making the player feel so scared and vulnerable that you might prefer to avoid combat whenever possible, to glorifying the combat and making the thrill of killing these terrifying enemies the main reward. Resident Evil 4 ushered in this new era of action-centric horror games, and Dead Space was one of many subsequent games to pick up that torch and carry the trend onward.

I played Dead Space for the first time in 2010, but that was so long ago that I don't remember much about it. I know that I liked the game, generally speaking, but wished that it could've focused a little more on its horror side of the equation, instead of leaning so heavily on action and jumpscares. With my newsfeed recently filling up with articles celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the original Dead Space, I figured it was time to refresh my memory and see how much my opinion on it has changed, if at all, and to see how well the game holds up a decade later.

My video review of Dead Space

Dead Space begins as many horror games do, with a slow and gradual introduction that aims to lay the atmosphere on as thick as possible before the threat becomes apparent and the monsters start coming out in droves to murder you. Playing as a spaceship engineer by the name of Isaac Clarke, you arrive with a small crew on board the USG Ishimura, a colossal "planet-cracker" mining vessel orbiting a remote planet that sent out a distress signal before cutting all radio contact, with the ostensible goal of figuring out what went wrong and repairing the Ishimura. Once on board, you find the bloody remains of crew members and discover audio logs suggesting some type of alien incursion, and before long you're being attacked by the reanimated corpses of the crew, now sprouting alien appendages. Predictably, things go wrong and you get trapped on board the Ishimura, thus cuing the rest of the game where you have to explore the ship, get its various systems working, kill a bunch of aliens, and find a way off without getting yourself killed.

The story doesn't do much for me because the whole thing feels like a standard horror setup, where the design focus was clearly to make a scary action game more so than to tell a good story -- the story is just a premise to get you into these tense and frightening situations, and a vehicle to advance the gameplay forward into new scenarios. The game has two main things going on, in terms of the story: the underlying mystery of how the alien Necromorphs™ came to be on the Ishimura, and Isaac's motivation to be there in the first place, that being the fact that his girlfriend Nicole was stationed on the Ishimura when the outbreak occurred. So, throughout the game you get glimpses of contact from Nicole, who's seemingly still alive, and unearth hints that the Ishimura may have knowingly been someplace they weren't supposed to be, doing something they weren't supposed to be doing.

That's all fine and good -- you can actually read a lot into the Nicole side of things, if you really think about it -- but both sides of the main story have major twists that feel way too predictable because there aren't enough red herrings to make you think otherwise. Spoiler alert: if the game is consistently going out of its way to explain Unitology to you, it's probably because they're behind the alien incursion; if the game is making repeated references to an artifact found on an alien planet called the Marker, it probably has something to do with the aliens who're now onboard the ship; seeing spooky visions of Nicole randomly appear out of nowhere and hearing random whisperings while she beckons for you to "make us whole again" probably means that she's either dead or possessed by aliens; if one of your partners is constantly undermining the other and passive-aggressively trying to steer the mission a certain way, they probably have ulterior motives.

I'm especially annoyed with how often the game puts you on the other side of some barrier when interacting with other living NPCs. It's almost like they wanted to leave the player constantly in control of the character, for the sake of immersion, but didn't trust the player not to shoot important NPCs, or they wanted the player to be alone and isolated all the time, for the sake of the horror atmosphere, but needed other living characters to be part of their story. It's a bit like trying to mix water and oil, only to find that they don't really go together; you still end up with both water and oil in one container, but they don't blend very well. There's a moment early on, for instance, when you conveniently get separated from your partners, and they send you to go fix the tram system so that you all can get around the ship, only to leave you behind instead of waiting a few more minutes for you to catch up. I could understand if they were being attacked and had to do so for their own safety, but at that moment there's no threat and they're actually the safest they've ever been since arriving. Maybe that's their goal, though, seeing as one of them is secretly a mole there for nefarious purposes, but it feels more like a contrived excuse from a design standpoint to make sure you stay by yourself for a while longer.

Still, the lore and world-building are pretty good, here, and deserve some recognition. Even though most of the entire crew is dead by the time you arrive, you can get a pretty good feel for what kind of vessel the Ishimura is and what goes on in it, thanks to the variety of audio and text logs available to you. None of the characters or situations in these logs are particularly memorable, but they give you enough glimpses into the operations and functions of the Ishimura that, taken in conjunction with the environmental design, you get a good idea of the type of universe that this game takes place in. There's a sub-plot, for instance, about a popular religion called Unitology that eventually becomes a main plot point, and it comes off feeling pretty natural in the context of the world. Sometimes, these audio and text logs can feel awkwardly forced in games, and I hate it when games rely on these logs as their main source of storytelling, but fortunately Dead Space avoids these two pitfalls by making their logs feel more like supplemental material. Then you've got all the signage indicating popular movies, products, and magazines that people in this world would indulge themselves in, and it becomes a little easier to believe that this is a real place.

The atmosphere does a great job of immersing you in the setting, too. I love the complete lack of on-screen HUD, with all the information you need being logically placed on your character model, and your menu screens being holographic projections in the 3D space for your character to see. Sound design is particularly on point, with constant ambient sound effects like clanking and groaning metal that makes it feel like the ship is literally alive, and makes you anxious of what monsters might pop out, when and where. The sound effects are so good that they turn perfectly harmless, empty rooms into some of the most tense and stressful areas of the game. Meanwhile there's plenty of moody lighting and fog, although I wish everything could be even darker and use more dynamic lighting. It looks great for its time and still holds up well, but this is a game just begging for a modern remaster or graphical overhaul to bring its great atmosphere to its full potential. The visual aesthetics can get a little bland at times, though. There are some standout moments like the control deck and the green rooms, but you spend the bulk of the game staring at dark gray, industrial designs that make it look like the ship was deliberately designed by its engineers to be a horribly depressing place to live and work, and which would eventually become the backdrop for a space horror game.

The ship's actual design doesn't strike me as logically immersive, either, since it feels more like video game level design than an actual, functioning ship. A lot of areas feel nonsensical and impractical when looked at from an in-world perspective, like the medical wing which seems to have a waiting lobby with a view looking directly into open surgery tables, and which also requires you to walk through the surgery room to reach any other area in the medical wing like the long-term patient beds or the intensive care unit. Then you've got a lot of pointlessly twisting hallways, oddly-placed doors, an elevator that opens into another door, incomplete walkways that can only be crossed by moving giant magnetic energy beam platforms into position, the need to go through an airlock into the exposed vacuum of space just to take a 10 second walk into another airlock to reach another interior room where part of the engines is housed, and so on. It all gives me flashbacks to the horrifying level design and architecture in the original Half-Life. To top it all off, the whole ship feels like it's connected by linear hallways as opposed to a more circuited hub system, so getting around the ship can be a bit of a nuisance. You have to backtrack to previously explored areas a few times, but side routes and doors randomly lock and get sealed off, so it doesn't feel like a free-form exploration system because you're literally being routed through linear paths the whole time. Consequently, the Ishimura doesn't feel as immersive as something like the Von Braun from System Shock 2, or Talos I from Prey (2017).

None of that really matters too much, though, considering the action and the horror are the two main selling points. As an action game, Dead Space is pretty good; the weapons are all pretty satisfying to use, and the game's Dismemberment System™ makes for a fun and unique way to battle enemies. Instead of the usual "aim for the head or torso" gameplay ordeal, in Dead Space you're looking for appendages to hack off using plasma cutters, rotary saws, line beams, and so on, and with the game's variety of enemy types you're always being introduced to some new threat that has slightly different attacks and weak points. This makes the first encounter with each of the various necromorphs a little unsettling because you have no idea what they're capable of, or even what you have to do to kill them, except through experimentation; it's a bit like a mini-puzzle, except it's actively engaging with a grotesque monster that wants to kill you. The controls feel tight and responsive, if you're using a controller, at least, and enemies react quite viscerally to being shredded to bits, so it's generally pretty satisfying to kill the enemies in this game.

As a horror game, however, I don't find it that horrifying. It's gory and grotesque, sure, and some moments can be kind of spooky or unsettling, but they give you so many tools and resources to deal with the necromorphs that they cease to feel scary after your first encounter. In fact, they start to become more annoying than scary after a very short while on account of the predictable pattern of "things spawning out of nowhere in front of you while something also silently appears behind you." The whole game is basically a linear monster-closet corridor-crawler with enemies popping out from vents and walls to jump scare you, which feels like cheap scare tactics. It also makes exploration somewhat routine when you can predict when and where enemies will appear, because pretty much any time you see a hallway with a sparkly item at the end of it you can safely guess something will drop suddenly out of the ceiling to ambush you, while something else slowly moves in from where you just were. Perhaps ironically, the game is at its scariest when you aren't being ambushed by monsters, like when one is mysteriously already present in the level when you walk into a room, and then slowly turns the corner and leaves, or when the game breaks its patterns and surprisingly doesn't spawn an enemy in a predictable spot. Besides that, there's no real tension in the survival-horror aspect because the game loads you up with so much ammo and supplies that, even in hard mode, I was constantly swimming in resources.

It's really cool how the weapons are all supposed to be tools a space engineer would use (except for the combat rifle, which is just obviously a weapon), being repurposed to fight aliens, and I love the branching upgrade paths that require you to decide routes to reach your desired upgrades, and which types of upgrades you want to prioritize (rather than just linearly upgrading damage, you have to upgrade other things along the way) but unfortunately it's all rendered moot by the fact that they're pretty much all inferior to the starter weapon, the Plasma Cutter. Other weapons can be fun and useful, too, but the starting pistol is just so useful and so versatile that it made it hard for me to justify branching out to other weapons because they weren't as effective at killing enemies, or required extensive upgrading before becoming practical (but you don't know that until you upgrade them all the way), or their ammo was too rare/expensive/space-consuming.

The game throws a steady supply of small mechanical changes your way, periodically introducing new weapons, new enemies, and new scripted gameplay mechanics (like zero gravity, rail shooting sequences, escort missions, a couple of big bosses, etc) which should in theory help to keep the game interesting from start to finish, but it all feels like a bunch of variations on the same things. Once you've fought an enemy once, it'll follow the same strategy and pattern for the rest of the game, and the environments don't often do much to mix things up, since you're typically either in a tight hallway or a wide open room. There is mechanical variety, certainly, but the changes never feel so drastic as to breathe all new life into the game because it always feels like you're in the same environments fighting the same enemies with the same weapons the whole game. Compare this to Resident Evil 4, which Dead Space was clearly influenced by -- that game changes locations multiple times, going from the village to the castle to the mercenary island, completely changes the type of enemies in each location, and has something like 50-100% more bosses, and (in my opinion) better, more memorable setpieces.

Dead Space's unique setpieces come off feeling awkward and forced, and in each case I came out of it thinking "that was weird" or "I'm glad that's over." Things like running along the exterior hull of the ship dodging asteroids while having to replenish a waning oxygen supply amounted to "run to the next wall, stand there for 10 seconds, then run to the next one, stand there for 10 seconds, repeat until you reach the other side." Shooting down asteroids with the turrets controlled awkwardly, and felt like so much of a break from the core gameplay that it didn't belong. Others aren't so bad, but none of them really stand up to Resident Evil 4's best moments, and I've apparently forgotten most of the others a month and a half after finishing the game. Every now and then you need to solve puzzles to advance, but these mostly amount to "put a thing in a thing" using kinesis, which lets you pick up and move objects remotely, and/or stasis, which slows an object's movement to a halt, and therefore aren't very satisfying. Some setpieces and formula changes are actually pretty good, like when you have to hunt down the plague bearers, or when you fight the leviathan, or when the tentacle grabs you and pulls you through the hallway, but that last setpiece gets repeated two more times so it loses its luster rather quickly. The final boss, for instance, is an awesome spectacle, but is a complete push-over and therefore fell completely flat for me.

The PC port leaves a lot to be desired as well, feeling at times like a broken afterthought. Mouse aiming feels horribly slow and imprecise, almost like it's emulating a control stick -- it takes huge movements with the mouse to move your aim even slightly, and it doesn't seem to account for different speeds of movement, either, apart from needing to be above a certain minimum threshold to even move at all, meaning that trying to make small adjustments to your aim can sometimes lead to you not moving your aim at all. I tried various fixes, but in the end I felt like I had to use a controller to get any kind of bearable performance out of the aiming. A lot of keyboard controls are also permanently bound to specific buttons and can't be remapped, some of which are a bit awkward and nonsensical like having to shift your hand over to the arrow keys to navigate your inventory and other holo-projected screens. Vertical sync screws the game up, too, forcing the game into a stuttery and unbearable 30 frames-per-second that also increases load times ten-fold or more -- loading a save file usually took me about 30 seconds, and opening a door would sometimes take 10 seconds or more. With v-sync turned off, both of those actions were practically instant. Unfortunately, turning v-sync off seemed to break some of the physics, leading to a lot of graphical glitches that were at times more disturbing than some of the game's horror imagery.

Playing Dead Space 10 years after its release, it's clear that it was a good game for its time, and it still holds up well. Despite its age, it feels like a modern game, and its design elements feel timelessly well-executed. I had some issues with it back when I played it in 2010 (namely, the over-reliance on jump scares and monster closet level design) that still hold true today, but that might just be me wishing the game were something it isn't. It isn't the horror masterpiece everyone claims it to be, at least not in my eyes -- it probably wouldn't make it into my top 10 favorite horror games, but I can see why it appeals to a lot of people. When viewed as an action game with strong sci-fi horror theming, however, it works really well, and in that light I think it deserves the legacy it's achieved over the past decade, and probably is one of the stronger games to come out of that console generation.