I Played ‘Dead Space (2023)’.
I distinctly remember the first time I saw Dead Space in action. I was working at Gamestop, one of the first big midnight releases we held at my newly built store, employed by a few new GAs (part timers) that I never interviewed, that I didn’t choose to bring in or hire, but who ended up working for me anyway. We were releasing a new horror game from EA with the title of Dead Space that somehow had been deemed worthy of a big release and we set the game up in the Xbox 360 demo unit. No one had really shown up at the store when we reopened at 10pm to start preringing and we let one of those new GAs (his name is Scott) start playing it. As we all crowded around the unit and watched him play the opening minutes of the game, immediately we were drawn in by its darkness, by its diegetic interface and especially by the fact that this game wanted you to HEAVILY stomp on crates and enemies to give you more ammo and credits. I think more of us who were working that night ended up buying than actual customers, and as someone who was a newer owner of the 360 console, I was stoked to be able to play a game like this. Personally, I had given up on games like Resident Evil and Parasite Eve and Silent Hill back in the day, not because I wasn’t drawn in by the themes, but because the combat systems had become so brutal in games like that due to that repressive nature of their bounty systems. I was typically more of a sports, JRPG and traditional FPS player, so if the path to victory wasn’t paved with simple button presses, I usually turned my back on it. This game, however, was the first one that I stuck with, despite it holding back on fruitful amounts of ammunition and guns and power, and ended up loving every dark and demented turn. I think we all love Dead Space 2 (legendary, man) but at the end of the day, I even ended up loving the soulless and generic Dead Space 3, just to have it finish up the series.
When they announced this remake for the newest console generation, I wasn’t particularly excited about the new peeling system and how it was going to show how skin and musculature tore off in excruciating detail. I wasn’t deeply moved by the new graphics or lighting. Really, they could have done the laziest possible form of an HD remake and I would have been thrilled. My first threshold for having a new console was to have either a Series X or a PS5 by the time Hogwarts came out, and I did! But the first true next gen game I played on the new console cycle is Dead Space Remake and holy cow was I thrilled.
It’s tough to really illustrate how much a game has been “remade” unless you have a firm memory of what the game was like the first time you touched it and then in the intermittent time between the two releases, have had ZERO context to gaming and the little improvements that have been made over time. So to have a 15 year gap in between and only the memory of that original game and to immediately KNOW that the improvements that have been made almost blow the old game out of the water is extraordinary. I am a huge fan of exploring every deep crevice and every corner of a game’s environment in order to find little audio logs, video logs, lore and most importantly loot. While I often don’t backtrack or bend over backwards to get every last secret, I do love open world games and the agency to be able to rightfully explore the locales that these games put you in. Enabling back tracking through this game is such a welcome attribute to this remake. As much as I do love the textured storytelling through this title, and the open reasoning for shutting down and locking off previous portions of the Ishimura in the original, there’s something darker about allowing me to head back down the old hallways, to traverse the recycled air which I’ve already rended my enemies limbs from their bodies within. Heading back through familiar areas with newer guns and stronger armor only made me feel that much more paranoid as my initial instinct was to let my guard down, which NEVER ended up working out. Instead, the familiar hallways and domiciles I had previously cleared now had newer more powerful enemies, ceiling tiles and air vents crashing through with the mutilated bodies of fresh new demons. As much as I hated the feeling of meeting foes around every corner, even ones I’d deemed safe previously, I did love the freedom of having the option to head back through areas to check out doors I previously wasn’t able to enter, and to seek out little pockets of the ship I had once run through to escape peril.
As much real estate as the events of this game take up in my mind, the game itself only took me about 12 hours to get through. And from a plot structure perspective, it doesn’t take too many twists and turns. This works so well for a pragmatic engineer like the iconic protagonist, Isaac Clarke, who treats every problem into a completely solvable issue either from a design standpoint, or one which simply requires a brute force solution. This game, despite its winding journey through the ship itself, ends up being a very A to B story structure. Its the game’s density of sheer chilling moments that really allow it to shine so eternally. The way in which enemies appear, the scrawlings on the walls, the blood in the hallways, all of these things create an environment which feels organically deconstructed. What we experience within the game feels like a ship which was once in working order now has been gutted by an actual invasion, by an actual cult, by actual nightmares. And what adds to that authenticity is that the tech that seems to run the ship, from the hallways to the circuit breakers to the fuses to the massive space-age engines, all seem functional. I can’t explain to you what each of those things should look like, but I can tell you that if one were to tell me that this is how the future will look, I would believe you. The design is such a memorable part of this game, from the low light infrastructure to the way that every room seems to be ribbed with trace lighting in its door frames, to the way that your suit shows your health, your stasis bar, your ammo without needing to pull up a hub, it all just hums in a way that feels practical. You are so seldom removed from the flow of being IN the game that it’s hard to disconnect from the experience.
For a game that is this “old” in gaming years, I can confirm that the entire thing is a timeless masterpiece. I would venture to say that it is just as good as you remember it being the first time you ran through it back in 2008. Lots of little quality of life improvements have been made to make it sync perfectly with the way that We play games to this day, though it still has that chunky and heavy feeling that defined it when it first came out. I wouldn’t say that it exactly has “Tank Controls” but it manages to have something adjacent to that experience without feeling too much like you’re oppressed by the control scheme. It strikes a perfect balance of flexibility and motion that translate to the need to be quick on your feet when being surrounded, but also by feeling a little cumbersome in a clunky engineering rig.
If you’re a fan of traditional sci-fi horror games, this is still for you. They didn’t change any of what made this game a masterpiece, and you can feel that the people that loved this game for what it was have toiled to make sure that it still sings with the same voice that made them enamored with it from the jump. I promise you that this title will bring you with it from start to finish, from the light through the darkness and into the depths of it, warping the psyche of your character and everyone who came in contact with the marker, just the way you remember it. This is still a place where no one can hear you scream, and the simulated isolation of the game still resonates marvelously.
As the original Dead Space was the first midnight release at a brand new store (shout out 6179, Merrick, NY!), I thought it was very fitting that this game was one that I went to my first midnight release since I left that company. I have high hopes that they will give Dead Space 2 the same treatment, but incredibly, if this is the only modern taste of the series we get, I am highly satisfied. Excellent game, well worth every death, every moment of frustration and every jump of white hot terror. Just might come back for some New Game+!
