What's Good About the Dead Space Remake

The original Dead Space is one of the first games that I remember following the news cycle back when it was in development and, at this point, one of my favourite games. It was released during a time when I was branching out and trying out new things in terms of my tastes in games compared to when I was younger and it hit my 17-year-old brain something fierce. I love it for the same reasons that I love the original Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing; you were doing your best to survive an incredibly fucked up situation. And then Dead Space 2 came out and was fantastic, and Dead Space 3, which from what I remember had a bunch of mechanical changes that I personally didn’t care for and bounced off of after the first hour. And then after this, EA shut down Visceral Games, the developer behind them while they were supposedly developing a Star Wars game set in the criminal underworld and I will never not be salty about this.

Nevertheless, when EA announced that they were going to be remaking Dead Space the original, I was personally quite skeptical. Because they were the reason we hadn’t gotten a Dead Space game in over a decade. But then I heard that EA's Motive Studio was gonna be working on it my interest was piqued. Their work on Star Wars has been great, being both responsible for releasing and subsequently turning Star Wars Battlefront 2 around and Star Wars Squadrons, a game that I previously covered back when it first came out and of the best Star Wars game in the last few years not named Jedi Fallen Order. I remember at the time I was seeing the screenshots for this one, I went “If The Callisto Protocol doesn't do anything for me, I can at least see how this has changed.” Fast forward two months and here I am talking to you about my time with the Dead Space remake so far.

For me, remakes are a weird thing because whenever I play them, they are usually games that I never had the chance to play when they first came out. The most recent examples in my head are the remakes of Final Fantasy 7 and Resident Evil 2 and 3, and they’re so radically different from their initial incarnations that they might as well be completely new games at this point. And while the Dead Space remake doesn’t change anything to that extent, it’s still a substantial update to the original game while also maintaining what’s good about it. The biggest changes are reserved for the story. While the overall events of Dead Space 1 are still the same, they play out in different manners. But the biggest difference so far: is Isaac talks. Issac fucking talks in this.

Don’t get me wrong, Isaac talks in the later games and it was weird when you first heard him talking consistently in Dead Space 2, but in the original game, he was a straight-up silent protagonist in the original game. While the change seems to be made for the sake of internal consistency. The most prominent has to be when instead of being talked to by Kendra and Hammond regarding repair jobs, Isaac…simply details what’s wrong, identifies a fix for it and explains the solution himself. It actually fixes my most significant problem either the original of “why are the computer specialist and security chief explaining the engineering stuff to the engineer?” And these small writing changes extend to the way of the game as well. Kendra and Hammond, your main voices with an internet connection, act more like coworkers instead of constantly swiping at each other, and other things I can’t talk about.

The gameplay is more or less exactly the same as it was in 2008. This is good because it’s a carbon copy of Resident Evil 4’s gameplay loop of “run, stop, shoot”, a formula that is probably the most mechanically important gameplay loop of the 21st Century so far. The spin is through both the puzzles and the enemies fought. The main force of terror is the Necromorphs: human corpses reanimated by an alien virus that exists for the sole purpose of creating more dead bodies and more Necromorphs, and so on and so forth. The main way to kill them is to dismember them. This is where the main gimmick comes into play. Isaac is an engineer who has access to a litany of futuristic mining tools to get that job done. The main issue is that in the original game, most of those tools…kind of…sucked. The only weapons worth using n the first game were the starting Plasma Cutter and the Ripper; a high-tech circular saw that you could shoot out to ricochet off of stuff. The remake goes a long way to fixing my misgivings about Dead Space’s arsenal. The Force Gun is a great crowd control weapon that softens enemies up, the flamethrower actually does damage now and its new alternate fire is a wall of fire that decimates anything in its path, and the Pulse Rifle is more like the Dead Space 2 Pulse Rifle in that the alternate fire is a makeshift explosive round, but isn’t as powerful because Dead Space 1 doesn’t have Necromorphs that die from body shots. And they also included the mechanic from Dead Space 2 where you can take sharp objects and enemy parts and use them to impale enemies using your Kinesis module, so thumbs up on that. They also made the Zero Gravity section work more like in the later games, having you fly around in Zero-G as opposed to jumping from spot to spot. It's an interesting change.

The main thing that still gets me is the setting. The USG Ishimura is still the same wonderfully derelict Planet Cracker that I remember from my time there all those years ago. From the engineering deck to Medical, to Hydroponics, it’s all been lovingly updated, with a change that I wish was in the first game. Throughout the ship, you’ll find doors that require you to get higher security clearances to open them and circuit breakers. I love the circuit breakers so goddamn much because they offer up some incredibly sadistic choices for how you want to progress. Do you want to open this door? Gotta shut off either life support or lights in the room to do it. These combined with the AI director that can tell how well you’re doing and can change the amount of ammo and health you can get, and the Ishimura being fully explorable from the get-go, all make for a new spin on how to progress and I love it. And since this is my first time basically playing through it since high school, it’s also fucking with my memory of the original game in a good way. These changes are actively subverting my expectations and giving me a new experience and I love it. Plus, the old game is still there, so I can load it up whenever I want the old experience.

Even after these first few hours, I was impressed with how Dead Space was updated and how well it holds up. The stuff that worked still works and the updates they’ve made enhance the original experience in a great way. It’s not every day that one of your favourite games is given an update this comprehensive. I’m definitely going to be doing a Plasma Cutter Only Run on Hard when I got the chance.