If you know me, you should know I´m a big fan of the Survival Horror genre in videogames, not only in videogames, I´m big horror fan in all media in general like films, books and of course, this applies to videogames too, since you can see I´ve talked about Silent Hill or Resident Evil on my previous posts. This time I want to talk about Dead Space and how scared a lot of people in its time.
We will take the role of Isaac Clarke, the space engineer of a rescue team who comes to the rescue of the USG Ishimura, a large space mining base that has stopped sending signs of life after unearthing a strange object on a distant planet. It will not be long before the topic of the genre is fulfilled and we separate from the rescue team, dividing it at a certain moment before the first attack of the mysterious creatures that populate the ship.
Basically, we´ll open our way through USG Ishimura, the space ship that will give us ¨shelter¨ throughout the adventure. Its metallic entrails dotted with narrow corridors and gigantic rooms will be the claustrophobic framework of the video game, and each corner that we turn or door that we open will hide behind it a new challenge.
In Dead Space we´ll have a good variety of enemies that are inspired in the creations of Lovecraft or films like Alien, so believe when I tell you those monsters are really scary and strong, the environment makes it even scarier since we are talking about claustrophic scenaries, sometimes it´s better to run away because of the limited utensils. When we defeat an enemie, we must be sure to disember it by stomping him, this is neccesary if you don´t want it to recover again and trust me, you don´t want that.
The premise of Dead Space is that you are not controlling a hero or something like that, you´ll be playing just with an engineer, which moves are sometimes kinda slow and not responsible at all so his weapon handling is not the best, being imprecise too many times, that adding our protagonist doesn´t have a precise pulse at the hour of having a fire weapon. We have several weapons that we can acquire and improve throughout the game, all with two attack systems. The same goes for the suit we wear.
In order to make tension even bigger in this game, when we acces the menu or the map, the time won´t stop in game, so we are in danger whenever we do that, as you can see, this helps to grow the tension between player and monsters, since you have to be agile in order to see the map or the menus and at the same time running away from the monsters. This aspect can be kinda annoying sometimes but it´s understandable the game it´s made that way, so it´s up to you to have patience.
The adventure is dotted with entertaining puzzles that we have to solve using a couple of abilities that the suit gives us: kinesis (a kind of telekinesis) and stasis, which temporarily slows objects and enemies. Those puzzles are not hard to solve at all, and we´ll have the map to guide us through the ship but remember that we are vulnerable by doing it. The stasis is really important on this game so don´t forget to charge it when the time comes.
One of the best aspects of the game has to be the sounds, keep in mind when I say ¨sound¨ I mean the background sounds (metallic knocks, screams, machinery running, grunts, ...) make the hair stand on end. And the silences too. In the airless stages they have chosen to eliminate almost all outside noise so that only what happens inside the suit is heard: Clarke's breathing and the metallic vibration of our steps, which causes a curious and effective "underwater effect".
In survival horror videogames, the sound aspect is too important and this time they won´t forgot about it. Think about it, one of the main reasons Silent Hill was so good it was because of the sounds of the environment, the same goes with Resident Evil, the sound of the monsters coming to us were really scary at that time.
Dead Space looks really great even for graphics standards today. The game knows how to make a good combination between lights and darkness to give us a very terrifying environment, so yes, for a game that has already been years old, it looks pretty good and more if you play it on PC. Of course, it looks already good on another platforms but where it shines the most is on PC.
Soundtracks are very important in a video game as they allow us to fully immerse ourselves in the experience and this is no exception with Dead Space. The game already has a terrifying environment in which to fear monsters, this accompanied by a game of very good sounds and graphics, but the soundtrack adds more of this to the experience since it allows us to feel more in the claustrophobic experience that the game tries to express. I think it doesn´t scale to a Silent Hill level or something but the soundtrack still is really good.
In the seventh generation, let´s say the survival horror genre didn´t get the best treatment of all, for not saying there were almost no survival horror games that were really good. This is no surprise at all, since Resident Evil became an action game in that time and sadly Silent Hill followed that path, I admire Dead Space for not going to that way, at least in this game. Yeah, sure, the game has it touches of action, but it mixes both well survival horror and action in order to be horrorific experience.
This game contains a lot of gore so if you are not good with that..I don´t recommend you to play it, but...If you are good with this, I highly recommend you to play it, easily one of the best survival horror games of the seventh generation, it´s available on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.
