 Dead Space, right?  I’m only about 2 hours into the game, and what a slick game it is, from the beautifully interactive lighting to the wonderfully integrated holographic interfaces, and the real-time baking…
…but here’s what’s bothering me about this here DEAD SPACE in, having read over this, a rambling and nearly incoherent spill of words…
 Now, I shouldn’t even be playing the game right now, and if anything, I SHOULD be writing a post about the work I’m doing at the moment, but for the past few weeks I’ve been fiending for a story-driven, action-adventure game, so much that I popped in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune again just to quell the demand for a bit.  Great game, that one, and unusually well done in the narrative department, I think, and with Dead Space’s promise of science fiction and blood curdling horror finally upon us, I just couldn’t resist.  Bought the game, and just had it sitting there as a lil’ reward for the work I would complete.
Anyhow, my willpower broke in the face of both space AND horror, so I popped the disc in, simply wanting to check out that most important element in a story driven horror game, or eve movie: The Setup. Â Keep in mind, this isn’t a review of the game, which seems perfectly cool in itself, but a reaction to the storytelling in a game as a vehicle for dragging you screaming and flailing through what should be a terrifyingly realized nightmare scanario, just the way gramma used to do, and after my hour and a half of playing I can’t shake the feeling that I’ll have to look elsewhere to play a game whose writing is as fulfilling as it’s gameplay.
I know, I know, unlike movies, a game can have lousy writing and still be one of the best games you’ve ever played, but as I get older and eat fancier cheeses while wearing fancier hats, there are particular times when I don’t simply want to play, I want a bit more out of my virtual experiences.  But with horror, especially with horror, you’re relying on a certain relation to humanity and human reactions in horrible situations to connect you with what’s going on, otherwise you’re simply getting “BOO” scare tactics in which anyone with a functional central nervous system is going to react but not necessarily be terrified.  So yes, I might jump when a creature flops through a vent, but much in the same way I would if, say, a circus clown, or a throng of bingo-playing elderly women did the exact same thing.  It might not be as blatant as DOOM 3, in which every room consisted of something attractive or desirable tucked into a corner, say…a doughnut, and you knew that going to grab it would mean a demon would explode from the locker next to said doughnut, but it’s only slightly less predictable here, only here the scares are telegraphed by the orchestral stings that let you know “terror is afoot” in case you weren’t looking in the right direction.  It’s almost as if Isaac’s a bit on the clueless side and his helmet’s built-in iTunes has to let him know there’s something evil in the room because he’s too busy raiding lockers for cash to be bothered, prompting you to awkwardly look around the room for whatever triggered the spoooooky tunes. Â
The game touts it’s ability to generate the chills and thrills, but when you’ve removed that human quality to what triggers those reactions, then it becomes more of an arcade prompt, like Sinistar screaming “BEWARE, I LIVE!” before flying into the screen, only even more so, since Sinistar is at least screaming and you are hearing it the way a person would before the bastard came screaming at you. Â Isaac’s suit is fitted with all the latest in fancy doodads, so an ALIENS-like proximity/motion sensor would have made a lot more sense in terms of cluing you in to the presence of a threat when you weren’t looking directly at the vent that just smashed open, belching forth a mutated abomination. Â Genuine, confident scares don’t always need a composer to signal the presence of scary. Â If you’ve ever played Condemned, you’ll know a threat doesn’t have to be a surprise for you to be pissing your pants in dreadful anticipation of the inevitable confrontation. Â The insane hobos in that game would let you know they were in the room somewhere with a phlegmy cough, a clumsy stumble over something in the room or just some ugly laughter, and you KNEW that up ahead was someone that was just waiting to bash your brains in with their dirty, insane hobo sticks, usually without the help of theatrical musical accompaniment.Â
Often times, I’d kill a mutant in Dead Space so quickly that the straining horror-strings would be cut off strangely and abruptly, quickly fading away back to where incidental music stings go when they’re no longer loved and needed.  Distracting.  It’s a thing I don’t actually see too often in video game reviews, mentions of whether or not the music is appropriate or successful in helping the game be the game it wants to be, but just in the same way you want good writing read aloud by capable actors directed by people who understand what is crucial for conveying the mood they want to establish in aid of gameplay, where story-driven stuff is concerned, you also want your music not simply to be wearing the appropriate suit for the job (scary music for a horror game, clown horns for a peanut-eating game) you want it to be just as capable as those actors for doing just enough to help out and not chew the scenery when what you need is to evoke something as natural and human as fear (or peanuttery in the case of that awesome sounding peanut-eating game).
And natural human reactions gets me back to why I even started writing this mess in the first place, that and the fact that I’m procrastinating doing revisions on a storyboarding sequence in which a hot dog is electrocuting himself in a protracted death sequence.
The Setup:
You’re approaching an enormous craft that has recently gone transmission silent. Â Your fellow crew chatter amongst themselves, figuring it’s a simply matter of a communications blackout caused by a downed transmitter or something along those lines. Â Suspiciously, the lights appear to be off, making the whole approach even more worrisome looking. Â Your character, Isaac, is too preoccupied lamenting his breakup with a department store mannequin to pipe in with his thoughts on the whole thing, and even if he weren’t he’d not be able to say a word as, like Gordon Freeman, or that creepy sister with no mouth in the Twilight Zone movie, he doesn’t speak at all. Â Trouble with a setup like that is that, without a chatty protagonist to be the proxy for getting you involved with the story and the emotions it hopes to elicit, you’re left to rely on the dialogue and the behavior of the NPC’s you’re supplied with, but in Dead Space, that’s pretty much like being saddled with a few of those animatronic guys from The Hall of Presidents at Disneyland. Â The acting and writing’s certainly not ‘Master of Unlocking’ bad, but being serviceable is only enough for people that still think the shaky heads from Jacob’s Ladder are still “fuckin’ scary, dooood” hundreds of music video abuses and shitty House on Haunted Hill incarnations later. Â So you’re left with a paint by numbers kind of “shit goes wrong” story that’ll either leave you feeling flat or thrill your pants off if you’re the kind of person that thinks Event Horizon is scary by default for the fact that there’s “EVIL SHITâ„¢” in it.
It’s about as basic as walking into a destroyed, blood-filled lobby, which you and your buddies do at the start of the game, and simply reacting the way you’d expect real people to do when presented with a hideous turn of events, especially considering you were only expecting to have to repair a communications array. Â And since Isaac’s such a drag at parties and doesn’t say shit he (YOU) walk over a blood smear big enough to have come from a horse chopped in half and used to draw pictures with as though by some monstrous child, and don’t react with the requisite ” woah woah, wait up, guys. Â There appears to be a whole lot of blood here and I’d like to begin screaming my glowing face off, yeah?”
After being separated on the mutant infested space ship filled with human corpses, there’s a moment where you open a door and are finally reunited with a character who has mostly been in contact via your helmets network, but he doesn’t so much turn away from his computer work to address you with relief or a scream of “OH FUCK! YOU’D BETTER NOT BE A MUTANT!!”. Â He casually just tells you, while not looking at you at all, to please go put up more spice racks, a thing he could have done remotely. Â Weird little character voids like that did a lot to make me wish the game would simply cut back on the story and throw more and more waves of monsters at me in a mindless PAINKILLER or Serious Sam style assault so I could use that pulse rifle and live out my ALIENS dreams.
Questions eventually get asked, but not when it seems real human beings would be asking them, and certainly not in the frantic, gibbering fashion expected of anyone in a story that is supposed to be establishing a sense of horrified confusion. Â And since no one else is really reacting the way you or I would in this situation, Isaac, the mute, comes off as a robot who sees this shit every day and is just kind of meandering about the ship as a handyman who occasionally has to shoot some huge critters on his way to emptying out the septic tank or unclogging the chicken soup machine when his boss calls him up to give orders.
Since I never felt that the people in the story were infused with genuine human reactions, the game never actually scares me so much as occasionally startling me with a vent goblin accompanied by his invisible orchestra that lets you know a monster has arrived, quieting down as soon as you blow it apart. Â If the music has to clue you in to the fact that you should now be frightened, something’s a bit off. Â It became more of an arcade game cue than something that aided the sense of frantic horror.
Christ…what have I written? Â I gotta get back to work…
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UPDATE: That post was written a while ago, pretty much when the game was released. Â I’ve since finished the game, and actually enjoyed it overall, mechanics-wise and aesthetically, mainly, but by then, was a bit too late for me to really give a shit so much as to let it affect my involvement. Â There’s a fun bit of incorporating Tom Cruise’s pals and projecting them into a future where they’re commandeering space vessels on their religious quest for immortality. Â Interesting story elements that I appreciate, but not executed in a very satisfying way, sadly. Â Maybe I’m just a bit jaded, horror-wise, and it’s interesting to see EA actually trying something original, as hackneyed and familiar as the parts of it may be, so I hope they give this kind of game another go instead of retreating into more licensed tedium, exclusively. Â Between this and Mirror’s Edge, I’d say there’s some small spark of life underneath the playing it safe, so I’d definitely say give Dead Space a go, but don’t expect to see anything you haven’t seen done before. Â It’s pretty as hell, and plays as comfortably as you’d want, making going back in and sawing more limbs off not the worst thing you could imagine.
All in all, a cool game, but I’m still waiting on my gaming scares.
Now, please enjoy some people reacting to blood filled rooms, with guest artists!
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Nice review I was waiting for a good description of the game before I bought it.
Why don’t you just make a nice blood-soaked horror game infused with realistic characters and an intriguing storyline for everyone?
No sarcasm, that’d rock.
The fact that a mutant baby demon comes flying out of a vent, blood hurling and everything, doesn’t seem to startle Isaac is whats supposed to be the scary part of the game. That he shows no emotion when he is blowing arms and faces off in a gore soaked room is quite startling.
Love the DOOM3 reference. Just pictured a small child going after that doughnut and getting torn to shreds by an Imp. Or bingo-playing monkeys. Either way…
I agree that there is a serious lack of half-decently terrifying horror games. They’re all just one predictable startle after another.
An enjoyable, distracting-from-my-job read! I’ve been holding off on Dead Space in favor of Fable and Mirrors Edge, (and the requisite Gears of War 2). Though I do intend to pick it up eventually, it’s great to get a feel for what to expect, so thanks for the heads up.
Well done, a well-thunked-out rant. That’s a rarity out here in the wilderness.
Also, Alexovich wins.
I shall purchase the game now. Thank thee.
Thought about buying Dead Space, but Warcraft has kidnapped me. If all it does is startle you with orchestra, I don’t even wanna know. I can get the same effect by muting my TV and hitting the button again when fighting Sephiroth on Final Fantasy 7.
Jhonen, you could churn out a halfway decent space horror. You’d be great at scaring the shit out of people. You proved that with a white room and a moose.
Nice rant. felt obliged to throw my fangirlishy two cents in. England is still raining. *wanders off to mumble at self*
Last Horror Game I played was Obscure 2, it is sooo amazingly like a bad teen horror it’s awesome. Sure I’ll never play it again but for 10 bucks Australian it was entertaining for a day. But for scariness I still can’t think of anything better than AvP on the marine scenario, Nothing like the Blip of a motion tracker to get the adrenaline pumping.
This is good to know as I was at EA (los angeles location) the other day and instantly became hypnotized by the graphics of this said game on the large plasma screens in the lobby. Needless to say with out research I promptly bought the game at the store (also conveniently placed in the lobby but discounts negate that fact!). I’m relieved to know that my impulses served me well unlike with hellgate london.
i am now glad i didnt buy this instead of fallout
Hello.
Well, I was kinda hoping for Dead Space (horror AND space? Who could resist that combo?), but my hopes are firmly lowered after reading this wonderful mass of words and reason you’ve posted.
Thank you very much, Jhonen, from keeping me from wasting my money on this game. Orchestral scares are one of the things that annoy me the most in games, that whole ‘this is battle music, a monster is near’ thing is very annoying.
Also, my final two cents: Buy Fallout 3. It’s like Oblivion, but good.
Have a nice existance and continue figting the forces of evil with your mighty pen.
Sounds like a decent game, but I’ve been sucked into Fallout 3.
Awesome. I’m getting pretty tired of these games which sustain themselves purely on shock value. Like you said, it’s nice to have substance.
Well now I can stop saving up my money for this, thank you…now I can create my own horror in space by rocket launching my mother’s collection of toenails into the atmosphere. G’day
Christ Jhonen, when did you become a video game reviewer? Heh heh.
I wouldn’t mind more of this. You play games, we get whacked out views, it’s win-win.
goddammit your so multi-talented. Even reading just a simple review is quiet entertaining. my friend has been wanting to buy that game but we recently left our home and moved to new orleans leaving the x-box with a freshly raped version of soul caliber 4 in the system.
Love your review, and can’t wait to see what you are going to put out next. need to find a comic book shop here and pick up jellyfist which i still haven’t been able to acquire.
as always, much love and appreciation.
You should give “Dementium: The Ward” for Nintendo DS a go. It’s not ‘terrifying’, but more of a “OH FUCK WHERE DID THAT HEADLESS MUTATED BABY THING COME FROM IT’S NOT DYING HOW DO I KILL IT I NEED TOO -dies-!”
Pretty decent game. Worth the thirty bucks.
Just my opinion, ‘course.
when dead space was advertising on TV, it actually looked good to me, until the horror genre popped it’s head on the screen. then it lost all appeal to me. I didn’t care much for doom, or any actual games that jump out and say “boo!”.
I’m such a wuss. XD
Seriously, shit or get off the pot.
I can name fewer than 2 people I would LIKE to see design a video game, and you’re one of them.
Get cracking!
I haven’t played the game, but I’ve been watching a sailor play it in the recreation center I work at. It looked pretty scary at first with all the mutants popping out and trying to rip your face off, but killing monster after monster isn’t so scary after you’ve been doing it all day long.
“I know, I know, unlike movies, a game can have lousy writing and still be one of the best games you’ve ever played, but as I get older and eat fancier cheeses while wearing fancier hats, there are particular times when I don’t simply want to play, I want a bit more out of my virtual experiences.”
Ohhh ho ho ho, I see what you did there.
Yeah, this is more or less how I felt. Sawing off limbs is a lot fun and the game holds your interest for a good 12 hours but it’s evident a lot of thought was put into this by a group of very enthusiastic people who, for all their good intentions, just don’t know how to scare you. They almost get there, the first few levels have some great scripted scares and atmosphere, but it just never takes you as far as it should. Far too many monsters that are far too easy to kill jumping out and showing off their normal maps. The dread quickly dissipates.
Having a silent protagonist was the worst choice they made. They probably thought they could do the Half-Life thing and make the protagonist a stand-in for the player, drawing you in even further, but they don’t have the storytelling chops and it just doesn’t work as well in third-person.
If you haven’t already, I would recommend picking up the Ben Templesmith comic, or watch the “animated” version on YouTube or Gametrailers. It fills in a lot of backstory. I don’t think I’d be as interested in a Dead Space sequel if not for the comics. There’s also a faux-anime movie called Dead Space: Downfall, which is very pretty to look at but nothing special.
And it’s nice to hear someone finally say that 1) Event Horizon is not and never was scary or even particularly good and 2) the vibrating Jacob’s Ladder heads are done.
I can’t complain too much, at any rate; this is the only video game I’ve played thus far that allows you to kick a baby in the face.
Very much like the views Zero Punctuation had about that game.
Personally I’ve been scaring myself by playing Call of Cthluhlu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Pretty good game so far, if a tad linear.
Yeah, I know what you mean about the music…if something’s really going to get to you as scary, it shouldn’t be as predictable as things are nowadays. Most horror movies and games don’t do their job because the music just about screams at you when something’s about to happen. It seems that otherwise it’s a good game…hopefully EA might make another one like it.
It appears that the gaming industry is in dire need of your keen mind… very poignant observations.
Jhonen, anything blood-soaked from you in any medium would be just super. You create some of the most outstanding monstrosities I’ve ever seen… you know what I mean. :)
Entertaining. Despite the fact I don’t game too much, I did enjoy your random shot from Dark Star.
I hope that, if/when we make contact with other life forms in the universe, they end up being like the beach ball alien from Dark Star.
I have not played Dead Space, however i totally feel ya on the bit about game reviews lacking enough essential information regarding how the soundtrack/dialogue effects the gamer’s enjoyment, it’s often left out at our expense. It really is extremely significant to the whole mood of playing, and an annoying or inappropiate soundtrack will really kill a game’s atmosphere, even if its the goriest, most addicting, most well-written thing ever created- and vice versa, catchy or intense musical genius can also save a game that’s total shit.
I think it’s a shame you haven’t broken into the gaming industry, as I’m sure you could come up with both hilarious and/or incredibly scary ideas that would rock and challenge us a bit. Perhaps someday you maybe will work on doing a more ‘serious’ science-fiction/ horror illustrated story? Your funny stuff is great, but I think you have the potential to do serious dark plots just as much as you’ve the ability to do serious art when the desire hits you. I’m sure you’ve been given the suggestion too many times before though.
The musical deficit disorder afflicting the film & television industries seems to be seeping into the video game industry, as well. I can’t stand watching something that tries to FORCE its viewers to feel something through blatant Hollywood orchestration (listen: shows like Bones, House, Fringe. Movies: just about anything from Hollywood, i.e. most movies in theaters). The subtly enchancing soundtrack is almost unheard of now. If you’re not being forced to listen to someone else’s favorite “indie” song, then you’re having a dramatic or sappy piano score shoved down your ear holes. “See them crying?! Yeah you hear the piano slowly going UP the scale a little but then pullin’ it back? YEAH pretty sad huh? when that guy finally dies we’ll bring in the violin.” The scene should speak for itself. Let the viewers decide how to feel. You hear me Hollywood?!
You need to play Fallout 3. It’s the ONLY game you need.
just wait for left 4 dead. that game looks bloody amazing.
Yep left 4 dead or tetris…when those blocks start falling fast it is kinda scary.
Eh, I’ll probably just wait for RE5…