A "review" of Dead Space

It's System Shock 2.

You arrive on a derelict space ship and are immediately confronted with horrible monstrosities that appear to be, or have been until recently, the crew. They attack you and you must defend yourself with improvised weapons while investigating what happened and trying to find a way out.

It's System Shock 2.

You wind through engineering and medical facilities killing the monsters and gaining small quantities of ammunition from them. At the same time, you collect something called "nodes" that you can use to upgrade your weapons and equipment. If you don't have something, there are several computerized stores located throughout the ship that will dispense health packs and ammo for a fee.

It's System Shock 2.

Despite the fact that the ship is teeming with baddies, there are stretches of the game where you are, relatively speaking, perfectly safe. These stretches are punctuated by "chokepoints" where you are ambushed by a small squad of creeping horrors that assail you from all directions and usually reserve one or two enemies just for the express purpose of swatting at you from a direction at which the camera isn't pointing. The clusterfuck of tentacles is pretty much mindless, non-tactical damage-dealing — guaranteed to accomplish little more than to drop your health to almost nil and artificially boost the value of finding and using health kits.

It's System Shock 2.

When you first arrive onboard the ship, your captain tells you that the door is locked. To unlock it, he orders you to "hack" it. By using a "kinesis module", you can pick up objects and levitate them, pulling them towards you when you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach them.

It's System Shock 2.

I made the mistake of going to the medical level, where you are presented with the opportunity to purchase a pulse rifle for 7,000 credits. (I wondered about that myself, then I realized that on a ship where the dead are coming back to life, the hospital is actually the best place to keep your heavy ordinance.) For a split second, I was hoping it wasn't going to be System Shock 2. A few clusterfucks later, I'd gone through my ammo faster than I go through the large tub of buttered popcorn I always buy at the movies. I determined that it's probably wisest to forego the shiny weapons and stick to the trusty old wrench plasma cutter. Cheap, simple, and unlikely to jam on me when the zombies start to peck.

So the gameplay in Dead Space is fairly formulaic: someone tells you that X is offline. In order to get to Y and save the day, you need to find Z to repair X. Z is located on the other side of some doors and bulkheads and all along there are a dozen monsters waiting to bite you in the ass, and not in the good way. Reach destination, get Z, shit pants, fix X, get to Y, find out that something else is offline. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Traditional shoot-em-ups fall into two categories: the Quake-style "put so many monsters everywhere that you can literally just tape down the fire button so you don't get a cramp", and the more subtle, psychologically-scarring "Did I really just see that?!" genre like Dead Space where there are many fewer monsters, but when they jump out at you, it matters.

The idea behind these games isn't to see how good a shot you are or how high you can get your body count. The objective is to chew at the edges of your nerves, using a combination of tense music, dark ambience, surprise, jump scenes, and dreadful anticipation to set the deepest, most reptilian parts of your brain going into overdrive.

As human psychology goes, there is an innate fight or flight response that is triggered when presented with stimuli that makes us feel endangered. A simple attack of a zombie screaming "Boo!" is going to quickly get tiring. However there's a different kind of reaction when you are presented with the possibility of danger, something that your conscious minds interprets differently from your subconscious mind. The incongruity of the two halves of your psyche lead you to think neat things like "Sh-should I be running now?"

Case in point. At an early point in the game, you get orders to return to your repair ship at the docking platform. As you turn to face the doors alone, you see... something... crawling just out of sight above the archway of the doors. Now, presumably you're thinking "Hmmm. Monsters. Better not go that way." But you have no other choice, so until you grow the balls to walk through and encounter whatever you know is assuredly out there waiting for you, you just have this heavy sense of dread growing in your chest. You're not in danger now, but you're being presented with situations that, when you enter into them, you are absolutely going to be put in peril. And not in the good way. You're going to slug your way through monsters and mutations and whatever else it takes to get one more clip of ammunition, one more health kit, one more node or upgrade or nanite or Adam or Eve. You're the reluctant hero, the man who was not born great and did not achieve greatness, but rather had greatness thrust upon him.

Greatness, and a wrench.