It’s Resident Evil 4’s little brother, but there are worse families to come from.

I haven’t played Dead Space in about eight years. I was still a teenager the last time that I booted it up, and I don’t think I ever finished it. Most of my time with the series was spent playing the sequel, which I started with; the “Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2” campaign worked on me because I was, like, thirteen years old. Regardless, it’s a series that I’m decently fond of, and all the news and coverage of the recent remake made me want to go back and check out the title that started it all.

Fifteen years later, it’s still punching well above its weight.

Who decided that games ever needed to look better than this? Seriously, who? Dead Space is visually more impressive than most of the multi-million dollar AAA games coming out today. Sure, it’s a lot of sterile corridors with more than a few obviously copy-pasted rooms, but the lighting effects are still working like a Trojan to make all of these environments look incredible. That aside, the game plays with scale in an equally impressive manner; you’ve got tiny Lurkers, bird-like Infectors, Isaac-sized Slashers, tall and lanky Dividers, massive Brutes, an enormous Leviathan, and the incomprehensibly-large Hive Mind, all of which need to be dispatched by some schlub with an engineering degree. It would have been so easy to just make them all vaguely humanoid — they are literally infected humans, after all — but Dead Space puts in the work to create these varied designs that are both visually striking and mechanically unique to play against. This released in the same year and on the same console as Gears of War 2, and you would not be able to tell from looking at them side-by-side. In the darkest ages of brown ‘n’ bloom, Dead Space did gunmetal ‘n’ orange emergency lights. It’s a striking visual identity, and the last stop on the graphical fidelity train before we ran directly ahead into bourgeois raytracing decadence.

Further setting itself apart from its third-person shooter contemporaries are Dead Space’s demands for the player to shoot off limbs, rather than go for center-mass magdumps or instant-kill headshots. This is far from wholly unique — Killer7 both encouraged blowing off enemy appendages and hitting pin-point critical zones usually placed away from the head — but Dead Space was likely going to be the first time that most people got to see a combat system like that. It does an outstanding job in differentiating itself on this alone; your reaction to being jumpscared by some horrible shrieking monster is likely going to be to panic-fire on it until your weapon clicks empty, but this is only going to result in you getting run through by a Slasher who is totally going to go brag to its friends about the screaming dumbshit engineer it killed today. Aiming for the limbs is tricky and counter-intuitive to the muscle memory you’ll have developed if you play a lot of third-person shooters, and in the year 2008, you were playing a lot of third-person shooters. It forces you to perform a specific, precise set of actions under pressure, which suits itself well to a horror game. The way that the limbs soar off and the necromorphs disassemble is likely going to be the main thing here that you'll wish other games so much as tried to adopt.

Of course, I think it's long been agreed that Dead Space isn't especially scary. Necromorphs will sloooowly work their way out of vents or loudly announce they're about to drop through the ceiling, and then stand there screaming for a couple of seconds in a fully-lit room so that you can get a good look at them before they attack. On normal difficulty, you've got more than enough time to react and blast all of their limbs off before they've finished their little pre-combat roars. I imagine that this is slightly less true on hard mode, but the PC version has a bug that keeps swapping your difficulty to medium no matter what you initially pick at the start, making it both the intended way to play the game and the obligatory one.

Also not helping matters is how ridiculously generous the game is with resources; you'll basically never be hurting for ammo or health packs no matter how much of the stuff you waste. I ended my playthrough with literally around forty health kits of varying sizes sitting idly in my store safe because I never needed to use them. There's also also a bug that makes it so the ammo for the weapon you most recently bought is vastly over-represented in the random drops, which meant that I had hundreds upon hundreds of Line Racks which I could sell for 3,000 credits a pop. I had more money, health, power nodes, and ammo than I knew what to do with, and it mostly just wound up in storage well after the final boss. I beat the Hive Mind without taking a single hit because its attack pattern is the slowest left-right-left-right combination you've ever seen in your entire life, so the eight full heals sitting in my inventory went unused.

But, y'know, nobody really ever complains about Resident Evil 4 not being scary, and that game is still probably the greatest piece of survival horror ever created. It's not like it's a mark against Dead Space. Even so, I think it would have been nicer if it had tried to be a bit more subtle. When you're in the silent vacuum of space and a Slasher creeps up behind you, it works. When you hear weird, ragged breathing and round the corner to see a Divider standing right in your face, it works. When a monster explodes out of a vent with all of the lights on and screams while every instrument in the orchestra plays at the same time, it doesn't.

I know that the creators commented that they were trying to move away from jumpscares in favor of building atmosphere as development on the game went on, so it's clear that they're aware. It might just be an inherent problem of this being Dumb Couch Guy horror — you've gotta have your blaring horns and shrieking strings and horrible, fully-visible monster if you want to sell "a scary game" to general audiences. People weren't showing up to this because they wanted a cerebral game that commented on organized religion and mineral exploitation, or whatever. They wanted to leap at the jumpscares and throw their snacks all over the room when they did it.

Hell, it's what got me in the door. Like I said, I fell for Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2. I'm as dumb a couch guy as any.

Story's fine. I still have no idea what the reason behind creating the Marker in the first place was. "Scientists found this real alien artifact that turned everyone into monsters, so they made a copy and shipped it off to this planet". Okay. Why? I think they explain in a text log somewhere that they did this out of desperation to create an energy source, but nothing I found gives me a reason why they think that would happen at all. It's harder to find information on what was actually in the original game now that the remake has come out and rewritten a lot of the plot of the first title. Regardless, most of the actual plot of Dead Space is a series of go-here, do-this quests that seem more like spinning wheels than anything else. It winds up making sense why your supporting cast is so useless with the twist that one of them is constantly, actively sabotaging you, so I don't feel too slighted by the fact that most of what I did accomplished nothing. Besides, this is cosmic horror. Being insignificant is part of the fun.

All in all, Dead Space is still an immensely solid title a decade and a half after release. I can't believe that it still runs on Windows 10 as well as it does, but that opinion might be colored by the fact that Splinter Cell: Conviction refused to recognize my operating system when I tried to play it the other week. I feel through the floor once, and one room refused to load properly until I repaired the install, but this remains a technically near-flawless, polished experience. Apparently someone at EA has been stealth updating the game as late as December 2016 to help it run better, which probably explains the compatibility on newer OSes. Maybe it was part of a long con to hype up the remake, but seven years would have been way too long of a time to wait for a marketing payoff. I think it's more likely that someone working at EA cared enough about the franchise after it was unceremoniously killed off by the company to keep this functioning well into the future.

It's really funny that they considered "beat the game using only the Plasma Cutter" to be an achievement worth 40 Gamerscore. I think you'd have a harder time if you actually bothered buying the other guns.