Dud Space

This is one of the most confusing games I've played, and I mean that with no hyperbole. Granted I have experience around the original Dead Space, of which I'll get to in a bit, the reception for the remake amongst my circle of friends and folks on the internet has been effectively unanimous praise. I'd had this version of the game on my radar for some time, but I had never felt the rushed need to play it because I'd soaked in enough of it growing up. I never physically played the original myself because I was extremely horror adverse as a youth. Any scary show, movie, or game sent shivers down my spine and I had nightmares for days upon days... but like most people that waned as I got older and I began to dabble into the survival horror genre. I'd watched my buddies play Dead Space quite a bit, and caught countless speedruns of both the original and the remake at Games Done Quick events to the point where I felt like I knew the game pretty well without ever completing it myself. After being beckoned to jump into it, at the same time I was playing two other survival horror games, I finally assumed the role of Issac Clarke and boarded the USG Ishimura.

What I got was what felt like to me the most recycled, drab, monotonous, and focusless survival horror game I've ever played. My opinion of Dead Space is effectively so low that I would rather play Resident Evil Revelations 2 again because that game at least made me laugh at how poor it was of an entry.

For a game that wears its influences on its sleeve as much as Dead Space does, I hoped it might be able to grasp the what made groundbreaking pieces of media like Resident Evil 4 and Alien so good. What legitimately insulted me about Dead Space more than anything else was how every encounter from the beginning all the way until the very end of the game felt the exact same. You walk through a hallway and see a panel, what do you think will happen? If you're answer is: a Necromorph will pop out, you are correct! Every single panel! Every single hallway! The entire twelve chapters! Wow! You walk into a room that sizable could fit four to five human sized people holding their arms out, there is a door on the other side, what do you think will happen? If your answer is clearing out a room of enemies for thirty seconds to life the quarentine... you are right! It felt as if the scenario designers for this value brand RE4 turned the entire game into an if:then statement and let that decide gameplay sequencing. If player runs through hallway, then they must fight necromorph that will surprise them. Dead Space spends its entire runtime telling you to be scared instead of... actually scaring you. Wave based combat works in some games like perhaps a Gears of War or a title where it makes conceivable sense to be fighting a controlled group of reinforcements over time, but having Isaac fight the exact same group of barely-varied zombies wave after wave makes for an absolutely abysmal level of gameplay. It would be one thing too if the shooting and combat was interesting and controlled well in any form like a Resident Evil where there's more to it than just shooting... but Dead Space's encounters are all conquered in the exact same manner. Because they didn't want to copy RE too much, they craft some in-universe mumbo jumbo that decapitation doesn't work against your enemies. What does though is the dismemberment of arms and legs, which really just means you'll be using more ammunition to do the exact same thing you do in other shooters. Running into the same enemies and shooting theirlegs then arms for however long Dead Space is mind numbing to say the least. It took me not even a few hours to get bored by what I was playing, an impressive feat for somebody who literally put eighty hours into Soul Hackers 2.

I had moved on to my next paragraph and came back to write a little blip here. You know what I love? When I enter a room and need to restore power to a door so that I can progress, I really love when there's a battery hidden somewhere in the room that I need to pick up with my force gravity spell and walk as slowly as possible to restore power and move on. Its needless padding to runtime that does not enforce player agency or make you feel more complete in your quest to quell the necromorph outbreak. For the four thousand times you put a battery in its slot, you do not feel the sense of pride and accomplishment that was probably hoped for by the developers.

I had issues with the game outside of its encounters and combat too. Dead Space is dark, and yeah that makes sense because it's a horror title and the use of the unknown and what you can't see is paramount in making the player or audience feel uneasy, but there is a happy medium at play that was not present in Dead Space. For the first few hours of the game I physically could not see in front of me. I have a good monitor and graphics card and was running the game at fairly high settings, which in my opinion means that things should be... clear. I had to crank the brightness up to 100 to be able to conceivably see where I was going. I turned the music off at a certain point too because it was extremely distracting and took away from the atmospheric integrity of horror in outer space.

Dead Space's mission structure of going from point a to point b to press a button or turn something on became tired as soon as the game began. I understand interaction in Dead Space is meant to be scant to drive home Isaac's isolation, but it makes for bad game design especially in its poor implementation. Story beats happen because there are a plethora of folks who see him and talk to him from a distance, which half bakes the intended isolation. He's constantly fed information and conversation as he runs through each samey hallway, he never truly feels alone. I'm not saying that Isaac needs a buddy or anything on his quest to... do whatever this game is about, but the poor quest design and forcing of every single task upon the engineer makes for resoundingly boring mission design.

There's really nothing I liked about Dead Space. I did not like Isaac Clarke, I do not like him with green eggs & ham. I did not enjoy the story, the gameplay, the environmental design... nothing. But hey that's okay! This game is unanimously praised by seemingly everyone, so maybe this review won't be helpful to you, but this was the widest miss of my gamed played in 2024.

Dead Space is a poor attempt at trying to recreate Resident Evil 4's magic. What RE4 manages to do in creating a gameplay and narrative rich action-survival-horror game, Dead Space fails to do. I cannot recommend anyone to play this title, especially if they already played the game as released in 2008.