Dead Space

We've seen a handful of decent horror games in the past few years, but none of them have matched up to the greater Gods of horror – such as the first two Silent Hill games – in any way. The eeriness and atmosphere of dread conjured up by Konami made those games more than mere fright-fests. The problem with most conventional horror games such as Condemned 2 is that they resort to the traditional and lazy way of freaking you out; they throw monstrosities at you from your blindside when you least expect it, to startle you and make you jump. Honestly, this is the cheapest and cheesiest form of horror.

It takes a lot more to come up with a sophisticated psychological horror that doesn't startle you silly but instead keeps you in a perpetual state of dread by building a believable realm of terror around you and immersing you so deep into it, that you're far too afraid to play on, but you do so anyway since the gameplay and/or storyline are far too compelling. The best example of such ingenious design, writing and implementation is the monolith of horror games, System Shock 2 (SS2). Dead Space is comparable to it, which already says a lot!

Before I get too carried away by the nuances of horror, let me break things down. Dead Space is EA Redwood's brain child – a third person horror/action game that takes place entirely in the outer reaches of space. The game's been released on the Xbox360, PS3 and PC; this is a review of the (identical) Xbox360 and PS3 versions. The game puts you in the boots of of Isaac Clarke, a space engineer who works for the Concordance Extraction Corporation or C.E.C. – a deep space mining company. When an SOS is sent out by the USG Ishimura (one of their sophisticated 'planet-cracker' class mining ships) Isaac and four others are sent to aid them. Most of the action takes place on the Ishimura, where almost the entire population's been annihilated by a deadly infection that reanimates the dead.

Equipped with an exoskeletal space suit called the 'Rig', Isaac boards the carcass of the Ishimura to investigate what wiped the population out. This is where the game's first similarity with System Shock 2 becomes evident – both are based in solitary environments on space stations in remote corners of the galaxy. While in System Shock 2 you were pretty much isolated from any living beings through most of the game, in Dead Space you have two companions – Kendra Daniels and Zach Hammon – who help you throughout your mission. This waters down the feeling of isolation that magnified the feeling of dread in System Shock 2, but in the bargain the game becomes far easier and more accessible.