"Dead Space (2023)" Review

Available for: Xbox Series X/S, Playstation 5, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

I'm not the kind of person who prides themselves on having a bunch of hot takes, but I do, in fact, have some when it comes to this hobby. I still hold that Bioshock: Infinite's story is only good if you're an imbecile, for instance. Also, The Outer Worlds is just as overrated as Fallout: New Vegas is. But you see, those takes of mine are ones I've been quite vocal about because, obviously, they've been relevant. But until now, I haven't really gotten to bring up another hot take of mine...that Dead Space isn't scary. Now, don't get me wrong, the necromorphs? Absolute nightmare fuel, and the mind behind them deserves both all the praise they've gotten and perhaps a bit of therapy as a cherry on top. But the game itself? Not scary. Who could possibly be jumpscared effectively when literally every one of the million tight corridors you walk down has the potential for one? 

But let me take a step back to give you some background here. I did play the original Dead Space, but I never finished it for reasons that will most likely make sense to most people. See, I got to the chapter involving blasting asteroids to keep them from crashing into the ship, and it was a horrible experience. But, I did get through that...and it left such a bad taste in my mouth that literally the next time I had even the slightest bit of trouble, I decided enough was enough. And that was pretty much the end of it. But then this remake came out and I wondered if my opinion might be a little different after a fresh coat of paint, some quality of life improvements, and several years of maturing on my part. So...how did that work out? Well...Dead Space still isn't scary, but it is an excellent atmospheric journey! 

In case it isn't already clear, Dead Space Remake (or Dead Space 2023) is a remake of the critically-acclaimed survival horror game Dead Space, originally released in 2008. You step into the shoes of Isaac Clark, a systems engineer who is part of a crew assigned to go and perform some maintenance on the USG Ishimura, a deep space mining vessel gathering resources from a distant planet. As a kicker, Isaac's girlfriend, Nicole, serves as a doctor aboard the Ishimura, so this job also serves as some much-needed catch-up time. However, when the crew arrives, they find no welcome aboard the vessel and their ship crash lands into the landing bay. While searching for a way to contact the rest of the Ishimura, a horrific monster appears and kills one of the team. After the dust settles, Isaac and crew realize the whole station is crawling with these "necromorphs," and that their only chance at survival is to fix the myriad issues plaguing the Ishimura's systems and escape. Obviously I didn't finish the original, but from what I understand, the story is pretty much exactly what you'll remember it being, with some little tweaks to characters here and there. That brings me to one of the problems I had with the original in the time that I played it. It's actually a problem I also had with the entire middle section of Bioshock: Infinite and some of 2018's God of War. I can't stand roadblock-dependent stories. Obviously, most stories are going to have characters come across a roadblock they have to circumvent, but it all just seems like padding when literally every bump in the road is "that thing didn't work, go here to get the thing to make it work." There is a villain of sorts in this game, but he is never the cause for any bumps in the road in this plot. It's always some variation of Isaac needing to divert power from x system to y system, but when he gets to x system to start the rerouting, some thing a little bit deeper into that area will be broken and he'll have to go and fix it manually in order to do the thing he came here to do. In moderation, that's fine, but it's every objective. And it fits, given that Isaac is an engineer, so this is kinda what his job is, but I just found it irritating. With that in mind, like I said, this plot is largely unchanged from the original, so how do I feel now? This is where that point about getting a couple more years to mature comes into play. Did I still roll my eyes and sometimes exhale when I had to go an manually fix a thingamajigger for the millionth time? Yes. But this time around I viewed it less as a story I was trying to get through and more as just part of the process of engaging with this world. Kind of like the experience of playing Red Dead Redemption 2. As far as I was concerned, I was just enjoying the experience of playing the game, and the frustrating structure of the plot was just a little caveat to the enjoyment.

At this point I've kinda raked the original game over the coals, but I'm not done yet. Gameplay was another thing that just never clicked with me in the original  Dead Space. Some might feel inclined to say that I just don't like survival horror unless it's slightly more actiony survival horror a-la Resident Evil: Village. Those detractors possibly have a point....but I also enjoy straight up actionless horror like Scorn. All-in-all, I just think that the way in which Dead Space approached survival horror gameplay just didn't sit right with me. I'm a Doom Eternal fan, dear reader, movement and freedom of movement is important to me. So stepping into the heavy, clunky boots of this engineer, taking a full second to get started running, turning at a snail's pace, and backing up at a pace that would stroke a snail's ego is perhaps just not the kind of thing that would appeal to me in the first place. But what about this remake? There have been some quality of life improvements for sure, mainly just a slightly-less clunky feeling to everything, but I had another way of getting past the problems I had with the original....

The newly-added "story" difficulty! See, I've been giving out my hot take in this review, but I haven't been giving the whole thing. The whole take is "Dead Space isn't scary...it's just annoying." Whereas most people experienced fear as they struggled against the game's systems trying to stay alive while necromorphs tried to eviscerate them, I was sitting there thinking "Goddamn it, MOVE!!!" But with the newly-added story difficulty, being boxed in by enemies and moving at a snail's pace is no longer a precursor to having to start a section over again. Some GamersTM will probably be mad about that or think that the following is some kind of faint praise damnation, but seriously, I actually had fun playing this remake. Now, obviously the inclusion of this mode was done for the purposes of inclusivity for players with motor function problems and the like, not for little sissy baby Doom Eternal fans like myself, but I still have to say that its inclusion actively helped me love this game! I'm literally on a new game plus playthrough right now, now that I can just enjoy the immense atmosphere and detail and everything else that the rest of the world got to see in the original. 

But for those not necessarily familiar with the original game, I suppose I should actually talk a bit about what gameplay entails. See, given that you play as an engineer, you aren't some kind of super soldier with an arsenal of guns to use. Rather, you stumble across various handheld mining tools that you use to defend yourself. The necromorphs that serve as the game's enemies can't be killed by pumping them full of space lead, rather, you have to cut off their limbs in order to put them down. That's a task well-suited for handheld mining equipment, wouldn't you say? So in a given combat encounter, you'll use tools like a plasma cutter or a space circular saw, aim precisely at the parts of these monsters' long, gangly limbs, and try to sever them with as little ammunition as possible. The necromorphs tend to move erratically, so it's a bit more of a test of skill than you might think. Thankfully though, you also have the ability to use "stasis" and telekinesis. Telekinesis is exactly what it sounds like: you pick up objects (usually sharp ones) and can use them to crush or impale enemies if the opportunity presents itself. This power has unlimited energy, but it isn't always going to be helpful, it just depends on what's lying around. On the other hand, you have stasis, which allows you to freeze an enemy and line your shots up that way. This power has limited uses that can be recharged either by items you carry in your inventory or by recharging stations scattered throughout the ship, but it's obviously useful in any combat encounter. So, survival in Dead Space is a balancing act of conserving ammo and using your powers smartly. On that note, it's important to realize that inventory space is limited in a realistic way. 

Each weapon you carry takes up one slot, and within that one slot, it also carries a full clip/magazine/whatever else. One you get ammunition beyond that, however, it starts to take up additional inventory space. So if a plasma cutter can carry 10 rounds, once you get that 11th round, another inventory slot will be filled with 1 round. If you pick up 10 more rounds from that point, that first additional inventory slot will be filled with 10 rounds, and a new inventory slot will contain that 1 round that's over the limit for that weapon. Make sense? So you can probably see how the conservation of ammo comes into play now, given that description. But it's obviously not just ammo and weapons you'll be carrying. There are also health packs, stasis energy packs, valuable items that you can sell at shops, and schematics for important upgrades to your suit and/or weapons. So at any given point, no matter how much you upgrade your inventory space, you'll be balancing how much ammo you carry with how much stasis use you can have with how much health padding you want to keep on hand, and if you don't account for those valuable items or schematics, you're likely to find yourself in a pickle! A valuable item could give you the money you need to purchase an important upgrade, or a schematic could get you access to a new suit with more inventory space. You constantly have to be thinking about what could lie ahead and what kind of loadout you're going to feel the most confident with....and even for veteran players, that's going to be a guess at best. A much-touted feature of this remake that the developers were keen to put in the public eye is the somewhat procedurally-generated enemy encounter AI/Algorithm/whatever. I can't say for sure if that was actually a thing, obviously I didn't make it all the way through the original and barely remembered how enemy encounters played out. But from what I understand, apart from some set-in-stone encounter types necessary to introduce new breeds of necromorph, when and where a jumpscare will occur and what monsters that jumpscare will consist of is randomly determined. So in hallway x, you might encounter 1 monster, or you might encounter 3: two who jump out in front of you, and one who pops up a distance behind you and sneaks up behind you. Again, that could just be a big fat lie by the developers and I wouldn't know the difference, but it's a thing to consider. 

One last gameplay thing to talk about is upgrades. I could talk about the zero-gravity segments, but I don't really think that's a great use of time, so upgrades it is. In the environment and for a not-insignificant cost at shops, you'll find "nodes." Your suit and your weapons have various upgrade paths, and each upgrade costs one node. So you can spend as you go, pretty much, instead of waiting to have 2 nodes for the next upgrade and 3 for the one after that. For weapons, these upgrades typically consist of ammo capacity, damage, and some form of alternate fire. For your suit, these upgrades are more centered on use increases for your skills and things like that. Much like everything else in this game, it's going to be a matter of choosing what kinds of upgrades you want and doubling down on them. Are you going to rely more on being able to use stasis as much as possible, or do you want to do more damage with your favorite weapon, for instance? Or maybe you've found that reloading times are getting you in sticky situations, so maybe you want to focus on cutting down on that time? Whatever path you choose, you're not going to have enough nodes in a given playthrough to unlock every upgrade on every available piece of equipment, so you'll want to spend your nodes wisely. 

And that brings us to the technical side of things, which is impressive but not perfect. Let's start with the positives. For starters, a big part of what made the original game not scary is the fact that it looked like complete s**t. I say that as a Dragon Age fan, and I defy you to tell me otherwise. So this remake didn't exactly have big shoes to fill in the graphics department, but my god did they go above and beyond anyway. While the game still isn't scary, it is an absolute atmospheric triumph because of the graphical overhaul. The high-contrast lighting makes it so that certain corners of rooms can be shrouded in complete darkness despite the lights being on, and when the lights all go out and the flashlight is all you have to go by, you can see nothing except for what's directly in the light, the itty bitty lights on the fronts of lockers and containers, and the faint glimmer in the eyes of necromorphs moving to flank you out of the corner of your eyes. Add in some randomly-dispersed fog effects in certain environments, an added layer of fleshiness and gore to the necromorphs, and just the higher-fidelity look of the Ishimura in general, and you have an environment that is just enthralling to walk and fight through. Speaking of atmosphere, the sound design in this remake is (understandably) excellent. In fact, I'd say the single scariest thing about this remake is its use of sound. You never truly feel like you're alone, even in a room that you've walked all the way around in with no jumpscares. The constant thudding and distant screams of the necromorphs, the knowledge that they could come out at any time, and the false-but-ever-present feeling that every necromorph you hear screaming is somewhere in this ship all come together to do the heavy lifting in terms of the game's atmosphere. Then there's the soundtrack, which is sparse but fitting wherever it is. In enemy encounters it's your standard flair of screeching violins and the like, but there are also little situational tracks like the dark trumpet fanfare that plays when you get an upgrade to your suit. Like the sounds of enemies and the like, music is used specifically to bolster the overall feel of the game to great effect. But there are some missteps here. For one thing, the pick up prompt for items in the environment is pretty frequently "off," and you'll spend more than a little bit of time circling around the item until the prompt finally pops up. There doesn't seem to be a consistent sweet spot for that, so just be ready for it. Also, there were one or two times when I would load the game and something like a door would be broken (showing "no access" or the like), and I would have to restart to fix. So it's not like there's a whole ton of things wrong, but there is enough wrong to warrant a bit of caution.

Folks, if you're like me and Dead Space wasn't your cup of tea back in the day, I'd say this remake does enough different and enough right to be worth a revisiting. While I still think it isn't "scary," it's an excellent experience if you're like me and great atmosphere is enough to float your boat. Parts of the original that were objectively horrible have been remade into actually fun sections, and the new procedural scare system will probably give veteran players something new to experience. What's more, though I haven't reached it yet, this remake actually features an alternative ending if you go through new game plus and gather each of the new collectibles introduced in this mode. For veteran players, newbies, and in-betweeners such as myself, Dead Space has *IGN Voice* a little something for everyone. With that said, even though I'm not a veteran, the fact that I've played a chunk of the original game makes scoring it a bit tricky. There's the obvious line, "If you liked Dead Space, then you'll like Dead Space," but where does that leave me as someone who didn't like it but liked this remake? I kinda just have to go with my normal system. So I guess if you're on the fence about buying this remake and are waiting on my recommendation, I do recommend it, but keep in mind that that recommendation and the score I'm giving are based on a playthrough on story difficulty with a predisposition to not liking the systems at play here on regular people difficulties. Because, well, with all those things in mind, there's only really one qualm that I have with this remake.

Let us review:

Technical problems - 0.5

The final score for Dead Space (2023) is...

9.5/10 - Near Masterpiece

Excellent job, EA Motive, excellent job!

Still here? Well, in that case, let's get something else out of the way with little as little fanfare as possible. I'm not like most people. When it comes to helping others, most people, regardless of whether or not they do the big things, do the little things. I'm not like that. When it comes to helping others, I typically do the big things no questions asked, but not necessarily the little things unless I personally see good reason to do it. In other words, whether or not something is "easy" or "simple" has absolutely no bearing on my decisions. To me, being a good friend/person is about doing the things that actually make a difference, and the things that don't are just opinions. It's also about not drawing attention to myself while doing these things (well...except when I get really really really angry about it and end up on a tirade...), because even though most would agree that doing so would probably make others feel like I'm a safe person to talk to, it always just feels self-important and performative to me. It has taken a long, long time and more than a little time in therapy to realize that about myself, to see why I find myself butting heads with people over things I deem arbitrary or whatever. I recognize that's not in line with how most people see things, but for whatever reason, my brain is simply not wired the same way in this regard. To some, this might make me an imperfect friend. To others it might even make me a bad one. And I'm at peace with that.  So why do I bring this up? Because I've seen a lot of people get defensive in reeeeally not great ways when it comes to online discourse lately, so I wanted to make sure that I don't come off that way and accidentally draw in the readership of people with american flags or the word "patriot" next to their twitter handles. It's also to give some insight into my head to explain why "don't buy this entertainment product you think looks good" doesn't fly with me but "don't give it a big old stage with its own song and dance or give it its own place in the navbar" is fair.  

So anyway, "The Wizard Game."

Pros: excellent recreation of the source material, combat and flying has a good feel, some of the quests involving the dark arts are actually super-interesting, was invested enough in the world to reach 100% completion.

Cons: actually had to play on hard mode because there's literally no challenge, not-good-but-inoffensive gear system, technical problems where it matters, borderline unfair completion criteria.

Final score: 7.0/10