Best of 2023: ‘Dead Space’ Review (PC)

Despite being middle-aged and having a deep love of horror. I am too much of a coward to play horror games. I love the idea of them, but games give you agency, and that dear reader is too much pressure for me. Running in panic as the monsters close in, is too much for me to bear. I love the idea of it, but the moment I see the first monster, I must “take a break” and never come back to it.

That is, until the Dead Space remake. I am calling this, the perfect sci-fi horror game.

As the game loads up, we are presented with the terror that this game is from “Electronic Arts” (branded as such, rather than EA, which felt significant). If I hadn’t been forced to install some pointless EA software on my PC, just to play it, I might think that awful company had changed (it hasn’t). But in Dead Space, they have a genuine horror masterpiece on their hands.

Our game kicks off with “luckiest man alive” Issac on a repair ship, heading towards a giant mining ship, that has lost comms. It is fair to say, things do not go well. Issac’s wife is also a doctor on the Ishimora (the mining ship). Understandably, he is rather keen to see she is OK.

Issac is quickly given a mining laser and let loose in a devil’s playground. Over the course of our terror-inducing adventure, we are forced to respond to endless emergencies, to keep the ship (which has seen better days) from destruction. In doing so, we are forced to loot our way through every nook and cranny of the ship in a desperate attempt to get a full clip of ammo with a gun or find a med pack that will take us off one health. In doing so, we get to experience, top to bottom the catastrophe that befell the ship.

First thing is the music is astonishing. It sounds like the best of the scores to the Alien franchise. The game also looks incredible, and the changes since the original version to things like dynamic lighting make a huge difference.

Dead Space employs a lot of shock scares, but it does so in an incredibly smart way. Like a good horror film, sometimes the shock is exactly in line with the setup, and sometimes it isn’t. The game also gives us time between shocks for the tension to build again. The game knows horror, and it plays with our expectations, in a giant game of “you know, that I know, that you know”. We know something is coming, and it might come right behind me. It might come from the vents on the floors, the walls, the ceilings. The game might force us to take the fuse from the lights, to open a door somewhere. Then force us to trudge back, desperately waving our torch around in the darkness. It is the growing tension, more than the alien freaks themselves that causes the heart palpitations.

There is a rock, paper scissors dynamic between weapons and enemies. Some monsters will go down apologetically to a quick blast of the flamer, but if you have no ammo for it, or you don’t have it on you (you can only carry so much) then you will have to desperately shoot away with a far less optimum option, forcing you to expend precious ammo you know you desperately needed.

The plot is for the most part played out in audio logs we find, as we are looting this disaster site. The story is not only brilliantly told, but you also get a real sense that some of the victims of the events were real heroes and did their absolute best to keep things together. Some others, less so.

Much like the original Alien film, there is just enough plot, given by showing us, rather than telling us. We don’t get lengthy exposition, but we find strands of the story, that we must piece together. The more we find, the more we know.

As the story unravels, we find new weapons, to kill new enemy types. We can upgrade our existing weapons and our suit. We use our metal boots to stamp on corpses to reveal more items. The whole experience is brutal and bloody. There is no HUD in the game, health, ammo and other pieces of information are all viewable on Issac’s character model, a brilliant touch that keeps us in the game, and keeps the emersion. As you move on, oxygen becomes a precious resource.

A brilliant horror story, akin to Event Horizon, made all the better for the medium of a video game. Beyond the story, the gameplay is brilliant. The controls are tight, and as a player we MUST get good at the game to proceed. Issac can upgrade his tools, and he can get very powerful, but only if you can stay calm. Make cool decisions about moving, then take your time to pick your shots, to carve off legs and arms of the freakish monsters running right at you. Even on “medium” difficulty, the aliens are deadly. One of the average ones can easily kill you, given half a chance, and firing one round more than you needed to, is a sure-fire way of getting you in a tricky situation in 10 minutes time.

The game also has a good run time and has enough new things to show over the duration to keep you hooked.

Dead Space is a bloody masterpiece.