It was easy to doubt that the remake of 2008’s beloved Dead Space was in caring hands, as it’s been resurrected by the same publisher that so catastrophically meddled with Dead Space 3 prior to its release that the series went into premature dormancy. In short, that publisher swallowed the series’s original developers—at the now defunct Visceral Games studio—whole and spat them out when their Battlefield spinoff crashed and burned sales-wise.
The whole proposition of a new Dead Space felt especially dicey given that one of the its creators was off making a spiritual successor to the game with The Callisto Protocol. But this remake makes it easy to embrace the joy to be so wrong, as the newly risen Dead Space is in the same vaunted masterclass of the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3. That is, it sees its developers offering players both a graphical spitshine—the moodier art direction is absolutely breathtaking—as well as a tightening and streamlining of the gears that made the series run.
This Dead Space is extremely shrewd about how it’s tinkered with the bones of its forebearer. And most of that attention has been paid to the massive planetary mining ship at the center of it all, the USG Ishimura, whose distress call brings our formerly silent protagonist, Isaac Clarke, and his support crew to the ass end of space to be tormented by all sorts of frights.
The original Dead Space consists of a dozen or so areas across the vessel, separated by a loading screen under the conceit of a tram ride. Those barriers have now been removed, with well-placed stage design turning the ship into one seamless location (shades of Metroid and the more recent Resident Evil titles). The ways in which enemies hunt you through the ship’s dark corners and vents have been updated accordingly, and they’re aided by well-implemented moments of player choice, where power and resources sometimes need to be rerouted in a way that may force the player to choose between opening a door to a crucial area or keeping the lights on.
To the surprise of no one, the lights often lose, and it never gets any less nerve-wracking over time, even when Isaac’s ridiculous and fun arsenal of intergalactic power tools starts to expand. The mark of a great horror game is one that can maintain fear no matter how armed and dangerous your protagonist is. The original Dead Space didn’t need much help in that regard, and its big “cut off their limbs” mechanic remains a thrilling and unique one even in this remake. Between the new graphical fidelity, the enemies’ offense and defense moves, and the built-in dynamic sense of suspense, the game pushes things up just enough to keep the thrills coming hard and heavy without numbing the player over a couple dozen hours.
The only real sour note now comes from the final boss, the Hive Mind, but at the very least, Dead Space is far from the only survival horror game to think bigger is better when it comes to monstrosities, even though it’s spent so many hours proving the opposite. Still, it’s a long, terrifying road before you get there, and by then, Dead Space has already done the devil’s work so many times over, giving us some new nightmares in the cold black of space, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that this series should have never died in the first place.
This game was reviewed with code provided by fortyseven communications on January 27.
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