Reviews// Dead Space

Dead Space™ ¹ is a survival horror game from EA. Dull name, great game. It subscribes well to the conventions of the survival horror game ², you are thrown into a scenario not quite knowing what to expect or how to deal with the obstacles that confront you. I always find this part of a game frustrating, which makes me sound like a pussy. I am not.

In real life, I am pretty sure that if I was abandoned in a strange environment with marauding monsters besieging the place, I would account for myself well. But in real life it's easy to survey your surroundings; evaluate what will do most damage and acquire it. In a game, with your famously tunnel vision, first-person perspective (and a head that will only rotate at speeds designed to minimise nausea in people who shouldn't be playing these games anyway) evaluating your circumstances can be much more time consuming. Being under constant threat of dismemberment certainly heightens the drama.

In Dead Space™, your strange scenario starts thus - (SPOILER ALERT - this is a review of the game, if you really expect it not to tell you anything about the game, maybe you got the wrong idea): You and your extremely small crew of colleagues are aboard a spaceship destined for a bigger spaceship. As you approach it, it is eerily quiet, no radio contact, no lights. You come in to dock, but the automatic systems designed to assist you in doing so do not engage; you crash-dock, damaging your ship in the process. You are now stranded on the larger spaceship which, for reasons that will go unexplained at first, is rammed to the gunwales with extraterrestrial lifeforms, all of who seem to have gotten out of the bed/hive/nest or whatever it is they sleep in from the wrong side this morning.

Traditional sci-fi movies, specifically Alien, which was as important to that medium as Resident Evil was to video games, have taught us what happens next and Dead Space™ does not disappoint. 

The interior of the ship is littered with bodies, though strangely not as many bodies as you might expect for a crew of that size. A furore occurs, and you are separated from your colleagues, though periodical radio contact is possible. You see a sign scrawled on the wall in blood that imprecates dismemberment.

From here you have to navigate your way through the ship, alone, achieving a set of objectives that purport to bring you back into contact with your colleagues thus enabling you to escape from the ship. As you progress, it becomes clear that the ship is invested with an apparently alien life-form that rips humans limb from limb and asks questions later.

You are armed with only a plasma cutter. The aliens are strangely inured to plasma cutter fire.