![]() ![]() ![]() This attention-splitting approach is simply not an option in Dead Space, a game that players have sought to make more, not less, immersive. Now, many people play sporadically engaging games alongside second screens and chattering podcasts. Indeed, after 14 years of so-called “ map” games and online multiplayer behemoths-experiences filled with a deluge of non-diegetic information that often points you toward menial busywork-the strengths of Dead Space’s immersion are all the clearer to see. Not even 2013’s The Last of Us, the zombie thriller that arguably built on Dead Space’s lessons in both tense combat and a minimal, unobtrusive HUD, went so far. In the following years, few games adhered to the principle of immersion quite so committedly. Playing the game as a teenager in 2008, all this felt like the most exhilarating, miraculous thing ever-a grind house–indebted horror game with an almost transcendent sense of place. The overall effect is striking, as if you are being sucked through the television screen, your backside firmly planted on the couch but head positioned inside the virtual world, constantly scanning for threats amid the oil rig–like depths of the Ishimura. Its setting, the Ishimura, carries an unshakeable sense of weight, compounded by the relentless clomping of Isaac’s metal boots, while the sound design is perhaps some of the best ever, with the game’s aural horrors swirling deep inside your ear canals. The genuinely heart-pounding gameplay is never broken by cut scenes it is instead presented as a single, continuous take, like 2018’s God of War. Dead Space didn’t exactly innovate in this regard it used a lot of existing tricks, including-most famously-a diegetic heads-up display, or HUD, that relays key information, such as Clarke’s health, via in-game markers (a health bar is visible on the back of his creepily arched spine, for example). Spend any time perusing the game’s marketing materials or reading interviews with its creative leads, and one word crops up over and over again: “immersion.” Applied to video games, this frequently invoked yet wooly term boils down to the extent to which the player remains engrossed in an experience and the various techniques employed by game makers to do so. ![]() If he is utterly focused on survival, then Dead Space is committed to enveloping you within its dank interiors before unleashing a cavalcade of shocks. Fourteen years on, the game feels even fresher: a singular slice of sci-fi horror with tunnel vision to match that of its protagonist, the engineer Isaac Clarke. At the time of its 2008 release, the game scooped numerous industry prizes, including Action Game of the Year at the prestigious D.I.C.E. ![]() How can such an unashamedly derivative game-not only of sci-fi-horror movies Alien and Event Horizon, but also the action-horror video game Resident Evil 4-produce such a gnarly, unforgettable experience? The corridors of its abandoned spaceship are home to many terrors, riddled with groaning monsters called Necromorphs and the reanimated remains of hackneyed horror tropes, but such generic DNA did not hinder Dead Space. This is the paradox that lies at the bloodied heart of Dead Space. You look on as your colleagues are slaughtered by the abomination that has crawled out from the dark. You know how this goes indeed, you have seen this all before. Suddenly, you hear the metallic clanging of something in the vents. Within a few moments, you find yourself inside its sleek, retrofuturist lobby, unintentionally quarantined from your team behind reinforced glass. All of the Ishimura’s lights are out, and the only sound that emanates across the galactic airwaves is garbled static. The skeletal silhouette of the USG Ishimura-a gigantic mining spacecraft referred to colloquially as a “planet cracker”-looms in the distance as your colleagues, a security officer and a technology specialist, prepare to dock the ship. Dead Space opens with a descent cribbed straight from the annals of Hollywood sci-fi history. ![]()
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