It has always worked as a tone piece, painting broad story strokes across a canvas it can fully splatter with blood, Jackson Pollock-style. I don’t mean that as a knock in fact, it’s part of Dead Space’s appeal. It’s one area where I can feel that it came from a pre- The Last of Us world. The new version tries to give its story a little emotional infusion by turning the once-silent Clarke into a fully voiced protagonist, but that doesn’t change much, other than breaking up some stretches of silence. It gives glimpses of what its version of 2508 looks like, balancing capitalist satire with searing indictments of religious cults. Dead Space spends a lot of time setting the groundwork for the franchise rather than telling a complete tale. Story was not the first installment’s strong suit, and that’s never been much of an issue. All of that holds true as Dead Space still exists as a perfectly engineered popcorn game. It’s a compact game that balances tense jump scares with power-fantasy action. The story of Isaac Clarke, an engineer who finds himself stranded on an abandoned mining ship (the USG Ishimura) overrun with murderous necromorphs, plays like an even more grotesque homage to Aliens. If I’m simply looking at Dead Space (2023) as its own piece rather than critiquing its effectiveness as a remake, it undoubtedly still works as a third-person horror experience.

If you’ve played the 2008 version to death, though, nothing here is likely to deepen your relationship with it. Its limb-carving combat and claustrophobic atmosphere still outclass its peers 15 years later, and that fact is only emphasized with some smart adjustments. It’s so respectful that I can’t help but compare it to Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot take on Psycho when playing it, leaving me to wonder how necessary a project like this really is.įor anyone who’s yet to play one of gaming’s horror greats, the new take on Dead Space is a fairly definitive version of the experience. Several moments had me outright misremembering the 2008 version, as the developer reworked things with tweaks that feel like they were there all along. Even when it does break from the script, it does so in a way that’s sure to trigger the Mandela Effect for fans. Every choice it makes is in service of the original, from modernizing its few dated systems to making each weapon more viable in combat. That’s precisely the route developer Motive Studio went with in its retelling of Dead Space.

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