No natty subtitle – no time for that, I’ve got catchup blogging to do
I got Dead Space late last year in the silly season, but saved until a few weeks ago, it was getting a lot of love on rllmuk so I thought I’d save it until I has some time to do it justice.
Wow! now this is how to do survival horror. It’s the videogame equivalent of Event Horizon meets Alien meets Resident Evil meets The Thing. I’ll cut to the chase plot-wise; you’re a space engineer dude, you’ve come to rescue some giant ‘planet cracking’ super mining ship, turns out this ship has gone all kinds of batshit mental since they picked up some alien “Marker” thing from the planet below. The uphsot is – the ship is now infested with necromorphs – sort of undead, mutant, evil, deformed killer things. Sounds a little bit shit so far, right?
It isn’t. It’s a terrifying, well paced, slice of true survival horror. See Resident Evil was the game that pretty much invented the whole survival horror genre, but has moved further and further from it in recent years. So it’s refreshing to see a game return to those roots and do it so well, and in space. The necromorphs are bloody nasty (the graphics in the game are superb), and the main premise of the combat is to try and slice and dismember them rather than just blast away. This works really well, especially with certain weapons like the ‘Ripper’ basically an industrial circular saw you can use to dismember the necromorphs as they crawl/run/amble towards you, yes it gets messy.
But this isn’t a cheap shock, gore obsessed kind of game, the scares are generally quite subtle and frequently based on what you can hear rather than what you can see. The audio and sounds effects are something often overlooked in a game, but not in Dead Space, they really heighten the sense of terror with all sorts of subtle ambient sounds interspersed with some nerve jangling industrial grinds/howls/roars – the sort of stuff that makes you think “how the fuck, did the sound guy come up with that!?”. It’s gratifying to see they got a BAFTA for the sound work. A great example of the sort of scares you get in Dead Space, is what was referred to on rllmuk as “the room”. A small fairly inconsequential part of the ship, yet it is probably one of the most unsettling spaces I’ve ever encountered in a videogame. There isn’t a single enemy in “the room”, but it’s terrifying, it’s place you just want to get away from, all down to very good use of sound effects and lighting. When I was playing this with headphones, late at night with lights off – I could just about manage an hours play before it just got too much. I mean this as good thing BTW!
So lets wrap this up; the positives:
The game is a good length, is a decent challenge without being too hard, graphically impressive, has several good ideas (the zero gravity and vacuum sections are pretty unique) good replay value, the fantastic HUD (which is a sort of ‘in game’ holographic thing that pops up – so no immersion spoiling menus)
The negatives;
Ending was a bit weak, the plot is not entirely clear (possibly deliberate), has a slight lull in the middle chapters.
It’s the sort of game that makes me glad I’m a gamer, and after the tragedy that was Resident Evil 5, Dead Space has reaffirmed my faith in videogames.