When I was about 10 my parents rented Alien and disrupted my sleep for a number of nights thereafter.  This film created a truly unique and horrifying creature, placed it wonderfully dark and claustrophobic environment and let the tension build.  Dead Space does much the same and even pays homage to Alien and other science-fiction stories and authors.  The game is set aboard USG Ishimura — a planet-cracking mining vessal — a direct parallel to Alien‘s mineral refinery ship the Nostromo.  The player takes the role of Isaac Clark a reference to sci-fi greats Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark.  Other references are found in the many logs you will uncover around the Ishimura.

The graphics were the first thing to really pull me into the game.  They aren’t exceptional in any particular way, yet every spacescape is majestic, all the environments feel like working parts to a massive ship and the lighting really gives depth to it all.  From the spinning yellow emergency lights in the engine room to the antiseptic white light of the medical bay the lights set the mood for the game’s varied environs.  The lights also go out.  Often you will walk into a well-lit room only the have the lights go dark in anticipation of an onslaught of necromorphs — the game’s enemies.  Fortunately all of the game’s weapons come with mounted flashlights (something the developers must have learned from tedious flashlight-weapon switching of Doom 3) that you can use to search around poorly lit areas.

The menus and HUD conspire with the graphics to keep you cemented in the role of Isaac Clark.  Dead Space features no on-screen menus, displays or notifications instead all menus are projected from Isaac’s RIG — the suits worn by characters in the Dead Space universe.  Isaac’s health is displayed along the spine of his RIG, ammo counts are displayed on all weapons, and maps and other information screens are projected from Isaac’s chest.  The result is that a third-person, over-the-shoulder game can grab a player and ground them in a character much like a first-person game.

Using a deep-space science-fiction setting sets Dead Space apart from other horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.  Rather than shuffling zombies infesting a small town neighboring a wooded area you are thrust into a cold, massive ship stuffed with some increasingly swift-moving alien creatures.  Here, again, Dead Space takes a few cues from Alien.  The sections of the ship run from engineering with blaring claxons and devices shooting view-obscuring steam to the cavernous hydoponics area with it’s ambiance of chirping animals and insects.  It all has the slow-building tension of Alien punctuated with short bursts of intense action.  The best part about all of this is that it never tires, the game manages to stay tense from the initial necromorph encounter til the credits roll.  Usually horror games drop the scare factor in favor of action toward the end so the unending scariness of Dead Space sets it apart in this department.

Bolstering the tension is the excellent audio in the game.  The sound in the game is top-notch but beyond that the way sound is used is exceptional.  Rather than just cue “scary music” when Isaac crosses some threshold the music slowly builds and fades as Isaac moves through his environs.  Enemies can also sneak up on the player because musical cues don’t always give them away immediately.  And sometimes the music and audio cues result in nothing.  That’s right, the game fakes you out.  Oftentimes you’ll hear a clank in some ducts and it’s nothing but background noise.  This does two things: it keeps the tension ratcheted up and it really makes the Ishimura feel alive and real.  Games tend to one-up each other in the graphics arms race, and Dead Space can certainly compete there, but it will take all comers in the audio department.

Even though Dead Space sets itself apart from most horror games the game cannot seem to escape a few horror genre standbys and gaming cliches.  The knock on most survival horror games is that the player controls like a tank, and here Dead Space and Isaac Clark are no different.  Isaac may be fairly accurate using his ranged weapons and “strategic dismemberment”, but melee attacks really feel like canned animations that more often result it death for Isaac rather than necromorphs.  Also, Isaac runs like a defensive lineman, sure, he’s fairly fast enough, but he feels clunky and many of the game’s enemies are much faster.  In fact, I would say that player movement generally feels clunky with the exception of aiming.

The aiming in Dead Space is really great and ties into strategic dismemberment.  Strategic dismemberment essentially means that you can shoot off enemies’ limbs and they will change tactics accordingly.  For example, in the game’s many zero gravity environments there is a type of scropion-like enemy that moves around by grabing the ground and crawling and attacks with a stinger on it’s tail.  You could take the typical videogame route and go for the head shot, but blowing off this creature’s head will not kill it.  You could then go for the tail since this is what deals damage to you, but that takes many shots.  The best bet is to go for the arms.  Shooting off one arm severly slows the creature down and the second effectively kills it.  All this aiming and dismemberment is aiding by the fact that all weapons have a laser sight in addition to their handy flashlights.

Dead Space also suffers from what I called repetitive gaming disorder.  That is, you seem to repeat similar tasks or spend a lot of time tracking down x number of whatever.  These sort of tasks aren’t such a problem in and of themselves, but having them crop up more than once over the course of a fairly short game definitely feels like padding.  Rather than performing lots of repetitive tasks I would have preferred that the story were fleshed out a bit more.  Most of the story elements and background for the Dead Space universe are conveyed via various logs found around the Ishimura.  While I feel this is an excellent form of organic, non-intrusive story telling (ala the Metroid Prime series) it doesn’t really do enough to explain what is going on, so much so that it feels like bits were intentionally omitted for a sequel.

Somewhat wanting story and movement controls aside Dead Space is definitely a must play game.  The game sets a new standard for it’s genre and does an excellent job establishing an atmosphere through not just the use of fancy graphics but also audio.  Play this game.