The airtight door seals behind you with the trademark whoosh of electric hinges, and you steal a glance left and right as quick as you can, your heartbeat audibly quickening. To your right, a dead end. Immediately, on instinct you press up against the wall. Walls are good. Walls are safe.
Walls are strong.
But then you see it, its jagged edges glistening in the flickering fluorescent light — the ribbons of what used to be another wall, right in front of you. As you get closer to examine the gigantic pitch-black hole, your heartbeat audibly quickens. But nothing springs out to attack you, so you cautiously move along, your giant magnetic boots clanking against the stainless metal floor. A sharp metallic clang like a dropped fire extinguisher causes you to spin on your heel… but nothing’s there. Just an empty hallway. Opening the door to the ship’s emergency room, you step inside, glad to be away from whatever might have ruptured the wall — but things are no cheerier here. Blood covers the walls and floor. The operating tables are strewn with mutilated… no, better make that half-eaten corpses. Amidst the bright X-ray monitors and the strobe of a broken light, you can barely make out something else. It looks a little bit like a baby, crawling on the blood-soaked floor. It is then that you hear the inhuman shriek, cower as bladed tentacles erupt from the baby’s back… and begin fighting for your life in earnest.
Dead Space won’t win any awards for originality. Though obviously influenced by both, its storytelling isn’t half as ambitious as that of BioShock; and it doesn’t break new ground for survival horror as did Resident Evil 4. It even trips over itself at times for being overly methodical. But a more atmospheric, immersive and genuinely frightening game I have never played.
Dead Space is the tale of Issac Clarke, an engineer dispatched on a routine repair mission to the USG Ishimura — a giant mining vessel that literally cracks open planets to extract their valuable minerals. Accompanied by a technology specialist named Kendra Daniels and a security detail headed by Zach Hammond, Clarke and co. arrive only to find the ship derelict, the crew replaced by ghastly murderous creatures, and their own escape entirely cut off.
Grounded in sci-fi horror movie tradition, the situation Issac finds himself in feels quite plausible. But in a move that proves a double-edged sword for Dead Space players, Issac Clarke himself is not. He has no backstory — all we know is that he’s trying to find his girlfriend Nicole. Following the spectacular intro in which Issac dons his trademark helmet, he never once takes it off. He never speaks. He shows no emotion save fear, and this is registered only by the pounding of his heart in your eardrums. And unlike BioShock, Dead Space doesn’t really try to explain why later on.
For all intents and purposes, what this means is that from the moment he steps onto the USG Ishimura, Issac Clarke is you — and when, late in the game, Dead Space makes rare references to a Mr. Clarke, or tries to dredge up a certain critical element of his backstory that you’ve never been introduced to in the first place, you end up wondering what they could possibly be talking about. When you finally encounter your supposed girlfriend, whom you know nothing about, you wonder if you shouldn’t just shoot her — after all, everything else you’ve encountered has been hostile. There’s just no emotional connection.
The game’s other human characters don’t fare all that much better (I had to look up their names for the purposes of this review) but as to their motivation the game doesn’t leave you entirely in the dark.
However, the lack of a second soul inhabiting Issac’s armored frame, replete with troublesome memories and emotions, makes it that much easier to immerse yourself in the scares Dead Space has to offer.
When boiled down to their most basic form, the game mechanics in Dead Space are remarkably simple: guided by an instruction relayed over your suit’s comm system, you will travel from point A to point B in order to flip the latest switch on the USG Ishimura that desperately needs your attention, while avoiding many, many, many potentially excruciating fatalities along the way. There is precious little in the way of exploration, and no choices to be made — you do exactly what you are told.
But most of the time, you probably won’t care, because every instruction relayed is for your own good — and between high-res textures and clever use of game technologies, the USG Ishimura itself feels so horrifically real that you feel compelled to follow.
Even if it weren’t inhabited by carnivorous aliens, you get the idea early on that the USG Ishimura is not a place you’d like to spend your holiday. Comprised of stark, claustrophobic corridors and confined, purpose-oriented living and working space, its very architecture screams pain. One corridor has wide louvered steel shutters on its windows with thin tabs on the end of each blade — from a distance, it looks like deadly spikes are covering the walls. Another spherical door features bolts all around its edges that convey the impression of a mouth brimming with pointed teeth.
Of course, you can’t see any of the ship’s twisted architecture without light, but the lighting in Dead Space is far more than window dressing; it serves a major role in the game’s scares. While a lack of light offers some scare to any competent horror game (see Doom 3 for an extreme example), Dead Space doesn’t just leave you in the dark. Flickering, strobing, flaring up when you least expect it, and in one particularly brilliant section where a quarantine lockdown causes a powerful rotating light to drop from the ceiling, intermittently blinding you even as it helps uncover your would-be predators’ locations.
Perhaps worthy of even greater praise is the game’s aural work. Yeah, it’s got the standard situational music that build tension right before a major fight, and it’s got the sudden scripted sounds designed to freak you out at specific moments, sure… but Dead Space’s audio designers have also filled the USG Ishimura with enough ambient noise, from the powerful shriek of engines to the slamming of faulty power doors, to bring it the ship to life in the most disturbing ways. I can’t count the number of times I jumped at something that turned out to just be a natural part of the ship… or something that I had clumsily knocked over myself.
And we haven’t even gotten to the creatures themselves.
Dead Space’s primary combat mechanic is something EA calls “strategic dismemberment.” As the game forcefully drills into your head umpteen times in the game’s first hour, this is a fancy term for YOU HAVE TO CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS. But regardless of the fact that this is the best way to conserve ammunition, you’ll want to heed this advice because it is those limbs that allow some of the most spine-chilling creatures to appear in a video game the abilities to:
*Slice off your head, then mount themselves in its place
*Fire hypodermic needles into your back
*Drag you kicking and (internally) screaming to their lair
*Scare the dickens out of you when you accidentally kick their corpse with your foot and see what appears to be a living creature about to slice your feet off
…and employ a myriad of other methods to turn you from a well-armored engineer into a pile of body parts. Thankfully, the game has equipped you with a variety of effective and immersive ways to do so. Rather than find military hardware lying around the ship — only the game’s very weakest gun is actually a gun — Issac employs improvised mining tools to great effect.
With these powerful weapons, an over-the-shoulder camera reminiscent of Resident Evil 4, the added ability to move while aiming, blue laser sights and plenty of duct tape, Dead Space’s combat control is quick and responsive; the proceeds of said combat visceral and thrilling; and fights very rarely feel unfair.
(As in the screenshot above, bladed monsters love to creep up behind Issac for a kill — but we noted that they always pause right before they attack, giving you time to have a solid chill run down your spine as you see the blades encircle his shoulders, and even react if you’re quick-witted.)
But while the game’s combat is fun, it also leads us into a discussion of Dead Space’s primary flaw amidst all this glorious atmospheric gloss: the game is too methodical for its own good.
At times, Dead Space does a wonderful job of foreshadowing some of the horrors that await you. If you pay careful attention to your surroundings, you can not only guess at portions of the plot but also get a general sense of what and where new enemies might appear before you ever come across them. Dead Space is also one of the only 3D games in which you can never, ever get lost, or even have to glance at a map: you can simply press a button and get a holographic path projected from your current location to your destination in 3D space, right in front of your character.
But though the game often succeeds in both holding the player’s hand and maintaining immersion at the same time, more often then not the game inadvertently telegraphs its intentions. There are a number of telltale signs… and if you’ve already made up your mind to play this game, you may want to stop reading right now so as not to curb your enjoyment. Feel free to skip to the picture below.
1.) A large percentage of the game’s enemies will come in through the ship’s vents, which look exactly the same throughout the entire game and stick out like sore thumbs, always clean even while surrounding walls and ceilings are bloody
2.) Though the game has a fairly reliable autosave that will load in case of untimely death, there is almost always a major attempt to scare the player after each major save point
3.) The game will stash copious amounts of ammunition in crates, boxes and lockers before each major firefight
4.) Every major, large open room houses a fight
5.) Boss monsters will have obvious methods by which they are to be killed, if not sporting downright impossible-to-ignore glowing weak spots
6.) Enemy AI is entirely based on proximity — if you stand a certain distance from a solitary foe, mobile or immobile, they will react the same way every single time, allowing for a number of exploits
7.) Each of the game’s twelve chapters is designed to be almost precisely an hour long if completely explored, and begins and ends at the same location
While Dead Space housed enough surprises and genuine scares to keep me going through the finale just fine, by about the game’s halfway mark I was enough in tune with the games’ designers, given these signs, that I was seldom caught off guard — and the tone of the game changed from an “What the F**K IS THAT?!?” to a “Oh no, here we go again.”
Flaws aside, bashing my way through aliens and plot devices in Dead Space was a hell of a lot of fun, and I enjoyed almost every minute — but this isn’t necessarily a game for your collection. Without a particularly compelling story or characters, Dead Space’’s game’s enjoyment lies heavily in its potential to surprise… but as such a linear, methodical game, that sense of surprise is hard-earned on a second playthrough.
When I set down the controller at the end of my 12-hour tour, I knew for sure that I would never pick it up again with Dead Space in the drive.
GameCyte Giveaway: Dead Space was great and all, but one playthrough is enough for us. So, it’s time to share the wealth. How’d you like to get a free copy of the game?
Tell us about the scariest moment you’ve ever experienced in a video game in the comments below, include a valid email address we can reach you at, and in a week’s time we’ll choose the best commentor to be the recipient of our slightly-used PlayStation 3 review copy.
November 13th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
I’m not the easily spooked sort, but I was having heart palpitations through the entire Fear game.
quitecontrary1977@hotmail.com
November 14th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I was playing The Suffering on my PC. It was night, no light on, just me and the screen. In the game you can use the surveillance cameras watching TVs in some rooms. So I did, I checked these cameras, and suddenly, I was looking at the very room Torque(character I played) was in, and there was someone approaching ‘me’ from behind. I’ve switched the camera off and turned around, but there was nobody… it caused me a heart attack^^
November 15th, 2008 at 2:24 am
I was playing alone Silent Hill 2 in my room, i was on the apartmens and i was in the aartmens, then i heard some scream outside of my house and i like SH*T Bricks because it was a women Screaming and the scream looked alot the one when you’re near seeing the Piramid Head on the other side of the bars. THAT moment scared me a lot! Thank god the women was “just” screaming with her husband. Damn Neighbors.
November 16th, 2008 at 7:55 am
I was close to finishing a level on the Half Life 2 mod “The Hidden”, playing in 7 channel surround on a 166inch projector screen about 4:30am. I was sneaking around a building and I could hear on the surround that something was going to happen and that the “Hidden” character was stalking me. I spun around to strafe and at that exact moment that I saw the hidden reflected in a steam vent - knife drawn, my cat dropped onto me from a shelf about 5 feet above.
Scared the living daylights out of me. Cat, coffee, wireless keyboard and mouse all went flying in different directions…
November 19th, 2008 at 1:22 am
Good review, I had the pleasure of giving it a go at the London anime expo in some metal box with props flying about lol, was sold on it there and then, looked and played so well.
Still not go it due to my car always being thirsty and needing some drink called diesel…
Anyway scariest moment in a video game for me… hmm I have to say there’s a few, but I’ll go with the first moment I had when I was scared to play the game, as for me .. that’s a scary game when you feel nervous about doing anything lol.
Now let’s go back to the past, it’s a dark and stormy night in the winter, probably this time of year actually… I live down in Cornwall (South UK) in the sticks, in a very remote old tin captain’s house. Now this house is also very large, the ceilings are huge and all you can hear outside is a storm, with the rain lashing down upon the windows and the tree’s swaying like Paris hilton’s hips.
I’m sitting there at my desk alone in the dark, as my parents have gone out to a friends and taken my little sister with them. I was around 11 years old I think at the time, and this is the mid 90’s. I’m bathed in the glow of a state of the art 14inch CRT monitor which is displaying the image of window 95 running of a 486 PC, for those who know what I’m on about, your having some nostalgic memories right now.
Continued below…
November 19th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Now I’m a guy who loves a good horror, not your gore fest, but something with suspense and a good story. I’ve already at 11 watched far to many scary films (scary at that time at least) poltergeist 1 and 2, nightmare on elm street, a clip from hail raiser.. so yeah I had nightmares now and then lol. But I thought it would be a good idea to play the game I got of my nextdoor neighbour. He said not to play it with the lights out, or alone as it will make me jump and is very scary. The title in question was of course Alone in the Dark 1. A rather fitting title for such a stormy night, for those that don’t know the game, follow this link:
Now there’s an Loft/Attic, what ever you wana call it, that you can go into, it’s stormy in the game just as it is outside, even thundering if I remember right in the game, making me feel totally emerged with it. I am Edward Carnby as I explorer the Derceto mansion, creeping around in the dark and eerie place, on edge looking for clues and ways around. In this loft you pass a window… but you ignore it as there’s a dirty big chest, CHESTS MEANS PRIZES! I walk over to it, kick it to open, all is well, grab what was inside, and head back out, then just as I’m inline with the window BANG, a dirty great big creature blasts threw the fo*ker, screaming its head of, at the same time (because that didn’t scare me enough) a lightning strike outside hit near by, loud bang, I jumped out my skin from both events, then the lights flicked off due to the trip switch in the house flicking off, the main power to the plugs is still on so the damn PC is still on, creature screaming!! I’m in the damn dark… ALONE, thunder and lightning outside… lets just say I was damn scared, and erratic lol… ran out the room with a face like I’ve shat myself no doubt, and waited in my bedroom till my parents got home.
Worst thing is at 11 I had no idea how to flick the trip switch back on to turn the lights on. So I’m just sitting there scared to bits waiting 30 mins for my parents to come to my rescue.
Oh fun times lol.
Sorry for going on a bit, this is why I never post… and I’ve never had a chance to share that with anyone lol ..ahh good times
Tizz
tizz35@hotmail.com
November 19th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
My scariest gaming moment is definitely those regenerators in Resident Evil 4. When I first fell down the trash compactor with Ashley in the lab, I accidentally skipped the cutscene where it came to life, and all of the sudden the game started up again like nothing happened. I tried opening the door and all of the sudden the regenerator just emitted those damn spikes and completely raped me. That’s the worst experience I’ve ever had.
November 19th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Playing FEAR, when i was heading down a ladder, the little girl was right there at the top of it as I started to go down. Scared the hell out of me.
November 19th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Playing Resident Evil on PSX for the first time. Not only was it the first Playstation game I had played, but my first Survival Horror games. I’m just minding my own business, walking down the hallway, when a freaking zombie dog lunges through the window and tries to feast on me. My younger brother, who was sitting next to me watching, jumped about a foot in the air spilling his drink all over himself. Good times.
nnysasaki@gmail.com
November 19th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Great review BTW.
But my scariest moment -
Beginning of F.E.A.R., it was incredibly late at night and I decided to try it out.
Going up to the top and the guy coming out from the corner to hit my with the plank of wood.
I never played that late again.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Growing up, I didn’t have a whole lot of money to spend on games. Money was tight, and I was too young to have a job; so when a blockbuster game was released on the OTHER console, in this case a PlayStation UNO, a friend and I would get together and kick its ass in just a few nights.
Somewhere around hour number “too goddamn many” into Resident Evil 2, we had infiltrated the lab and turned on the BOW. gas. Well, HE was kicking ass, I was just the acting co-pilot. “Screw the sun’s imminent rising”, we thought (admittedly, imminent may not have been in our vocabulary at the time), “those plant fuckers are going down!”
As planned, they went down…hard, but I noticed something strange about the way Leon was walking. His movements rapidly became more erratic, and he would often run into a wall and remain there for five seconds before continuing on his horticulture-hatin’ way. Something was amiss, but what? The obvious was lost on my young mind.
Later, the young rookie’s actions finally completely ceased in the worst possible time. He had just entered into a room with a man-sized moth with geriatric-level speed and power, but he did nothing to defend himself. The moth started kicking this cop’s ass, the same person who earlier had defeated countless zombies, a rapidly mutating man, and a giant crocodile, all with ease.
Since I couldn’t remember the last time we had saved (we were rebels), I peered over at my compatriot with the controller. He was asleep. Snoring, even. How I had not heard I have no idea. Fearing having to replay hours worth of gameplay, I tried to wake him. No luck. I tried removing the controller from his hands. No luck either, even in his sleep he didn’t want me to play. I even tried controlling the character while he was holding the controller, but that didn’t work out. Ultimately, Leon was killed by a giant fucking moth, an enemy now known as one of the weakest in any Resident Evil title. “Fuck it,” I thought. “That was the scariest moment in a videogame that I’ve ever seen. I’m going to bed.” So I did, leaving my comatose friend in the living room sleeping in a vertical position.
November 21st, 2008 at 1:07 am
@Mr. Kyle: Scary? Sounds hilarious to me. Good to have you here, and thanks for the lulz!
@JBI: I love that moment. It’s one of the few parts of the game in broad daylight, but it’s so sudden — you never see it coming the first time.
@Simon: The Hidden… brilliant mod, comes highly recommended. Game puts you on edge, and the cat… you came close to winning this, for sure.
But…
@Matt: You are our winner. Not just for putting the extra typing effort in, but for sharing a story that sticks with you… I’ve got this great image now of an 11 year old Brit scared shitless by his demonic computer, the only source of light in the room displaying a hideous monster.
November 21st, 2008 at 2:46 am
lol ta Sean, yeah reliving that as i was typing it brought back fond memories, made my girlfriend laugh too when I showed her this article, probably at me… I’ll have to get her to play DeadSpace, see who gets scared then lol
btw my re7ox email address i don’t think is working atm, but i couldnt put my hotmail one in the reply field, but its tizz35@hotmail.com
Thanks alot
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:15 am
probably from Doom on the SNES when I was like 8 years old and would get freaked out when monsters came up behind me.
November 26th, 2008 at 4:11 am
2 am on a cold windy night the year 2000……. playing Alien Resurrection on ps1 on a sony 80cm trinitron … Facehugger suddenly jumps on my face nearly making my heart stop!
January 7th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Too late to enter the draw, but I wanted to share.
A few examples I can think of.
1. When I was a teenager I loved playing text adventures on my Commodore PET. One, called “The House of the Seven Gables” took place in a haunted house. For a game with no graphic content whatsoever, it was quite spooky to play at night with only the green glow or the CRT to light the room.
2. Splinter Cell. This was the first game I bought for XBox, which was my first console since the SNES, so my first long-term exposure to good 3D graphics, and I dove in head first. The lighting in the game was like nothing I’d seen before, and the camera is excellent, showing the play, your view, and allowing very little peeking. Sound is such a vital element that I found myself listening carefully for the sound of my footsteps and clues as to enemy locations (doors opening, coughs, radios, or nearby voices, footsteps, etc). When an enemy guard bumped into my back in the dark, yelled, and shot me I almost had a heart attack.
3. Also Splinter Cell. Or more accurately, right after. I bought the XBox and the game at a Boxing Day sale, so I played it for a long stretch on a day with an early sunset. After a ridiculously unhealthy number of hours playing I knew I had to leave to house for food, coffee, chai, change of temperature, people, anything. As I walked along the dark, wet, dimly lit street I felt uncomfortably as it I was still in the game, even looking ahead as though to evaluate my path along the street. It was only then that I became aware of how immersed in the artificial world of the game I had been. It wasn’t all that scary, but it sure was freaky.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
>and the tree’s swaying like Paris hilton’s hips.
Paris has hips?
January 7th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
@Scott F
To be fair, trees don’t have much in terms of hips, either. I’m pretty sure that’s the joke