Dead Space: Scarier Than Clowns or Invisible Skeletons

To paraphrase Stephen King, if you find you cannot horrify, you go for the gross-out. EA's third-person "survival horror" game Dead Space (for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3) frequently horrifies and grosses out. It's also ironically produced -- if we're to believe Wikipedia and MobyGames -- by a guy who paints "fantastic sunsets, huge redwoods, snowy mountains and colorful seascapes." Let's just say there are no sunsets, redwoods, mountains, or seascapes in Dead Space, though there are buckets of blood, mangled body parts, mangled body parts protruding from bodies in ways you've perhaps never imagined, and imaginative ways to excise said parts from the skittering, screeching, spine-tingling trunks of creatures you wouldn't want to meet in broad daylight, much less on a derelict space freighter.

Does it matter that you're tethered to a story that trots out Gaming's Top 100 Tropes like it's teaching a freshmen level seminar? Not really. You're here for one purpose: to walk into rooms, have something pop out and go boo, fumble to carve the freakishly nimble mess of flesh into giblets before it eats your face off, then do it again times 11 or 12 hours of Space Hulk meets John Carpenter's The Thing. Did I say "carve"? Dead Space takes the counterintuitive and tactically intriguing tack that shooting off limbs instead of central body parts is how you kill enemies faster.

Besides, we all know by now that interstellar space distress signals are just Evil Hallmark Invitations to die messily and with a chorus of shrieking violins or guttural whisperers (or both) soundtracking your gurgling, squelching demise. Still, someone's got to go in with a bucket or a bazooka and mop up the mess, so why not a guy like Isaac (Asimov + Arthur C.) Clarke? He's the right name, and more importantly, the right profession: an engineer, which means he's Mister Fixit in a pinch, and this is a game full of pinches: Missing keys, broken widgets, mechanical puzzles, an A-list of malfunctioning hatches and elevators -- you name it and you'll probably have to crawl over half the ship to get it, then half as much again to carry it back to where you started from.

Which is all the excuse the design team at EA Redwood Shores needs to not so much kill the lights, as make them juke and jive while creatures that resemble amped up versions of a Clive Barker action figure lurch and scramble and strike stomach-upending poses. In fact it's the work of minutes, counting the intro, until you're kicking and hacking through snarling squads of creatures called "necromorphs," which just so happens to dovetail with a game design tidbit Bethesda's Todd Howard (Fallout 3) offered Gamasutra's Chris Remo in an interview published today. Explaining the way his own games start, Howard said: "I've always been interested in games that just start, and you play them, [and] the character generation is part of the game."

Scrap the character generation bit (there's some statistical health and weapons augmentation as you locate scattered power-ups, but that's it) and Dead Space fits Howard's bill to a tee, a game that accelerates from zero to 60 to "scared-out-of-your-wits" in the space of minutes (maybe five, tops, if you're a dawdler). If you hate lengthy preambles and interruptive cutscenes where you're standing around while other people blah blah blah, Dead Space is Just the Facts, Ma'am, or at least the facts according to a weapons arsenal that speaks the lingua franca of bolt cutters and stasis fields and other sundry energy weapons.

Of course there's still a bit of cliche to tromp through, like the part where you're conveniently separated from your crew almost immediately, the series of escalating encounters with pop-up necromorphs in dim lit corridors plagued by steam and tendrils of smoke, the solving one engineering problem after another to open doors that leads to more doors with increasingly complex "solve" states. There's the wonderfully nuanced if altogether familiar soundtrack with its inexplicable and unintelligible whisper sounds accompanied by shivery violins -- screeching string sections that slow to clicking arpeggios like fingers on a chalkboard plucking the ribs of a fishbone -- all keyed to make your nerves jangle (hey, it works!). You've got "found" audio logs that tell the story on the go, pretty well cribbed from System Shock (take note if you thought these originated with BioShock). And who can forget all those crew buddies who, despite occupying a completely different part of the ship, can somehow "see" every move you make, and who frequently chime in to offer clairvoyant advice?

On the other hand, Dead Space gets plenty right. The interface, for instance, is a thing of subtle beauty that carries off a few high wire ideas with watch-for-imitators-to-come aplomb. Game designers are always asking questions like "How do I scrub extraneous information from a heads-up display?" or "How do I keep players focused on the action and not a bunch of peripheral dials and switches?"

Simple. Make you the interface, or in this case, Isaac Clarke.

Take something as straightforward as "health," commonly a bar or dial or derivative of a number between one and 100 running along a corner or panel of the screen. In Dead Space, it's a stack of cylindrical mechanical vertebrae running up the back of Isaac's space suit, an electric blue exo-skeletal spine you can easily and intuitively monitor without feeling like the camera guy tagging along behind the hero (since the game is third-person, you tend to be viewing Clark from behind and slightly off to the right). Other attributes represent as parts of the suit too, like your "stasis" power levels, which feed an ability to momentarily zap a creature or object into slow-mo.

Bravo, person-who-put-all-that-together, and take a bow.

But enough said for now, because I need to stop typing and go back and finish the darned thing, which I'm masochistically and somewhat regrettably playing on the "kill me, I'm easy" difficulty setting. As it stands now, I'm calling "buy it."

Quick design-y sidenote: Throughout the game, Isaac Clarke doesn't say a word, he just grunts and gasps apprehensively. We're only afforded a glimpse of his face at the outset (and, I'm told, the ending). The trouble with this fairly common approach is that it makes you feel like a child at the outset. People wheel and deal around you, laugh or joke, talk to or tease you, but all you can do is sit or stand in mute repose. As soon as you've boarded the space freighter, you pop on a full-masked helmet, completing the psychological distancing trick that's typically employed to imply that you're the hero, not the third-person avatar you're starting at on screen. Maybe it's that you can see Isaac's avatar as you play here (instead of just a pair of hands, or "floating gun"). Granted it's a subtle, nitpicky thing, and maybe you won't care or even notice, but for some reason Isaac's uncanny silence drew my attention in Dead Space, and made me wish he had more than merely a physical role to play.

Quick tech-y sidenote: If you're thinking about running the PC version and you're wondering how this thing performs, try "amazingly." I've got it running at the highest all around detail settings in Boot Camp mode on a 2.4GHz Macbook Pro with 2GB RAM and a measly NVIDIA 8600M GT w/256MB VRAM and it's smooth as glass while somehow managing to look every bit like something that'd run on dual SLI GPUs in a monster rig.

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Source: http://blogs.pcworld.com/gameon/archives/007922.html

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