With the release of Dead Space 3 I decided that I finally needed to play the series. This is a first impressions of Dead Space 1, eventually I will do a full review when I finish it. This post though is a series of things that struck me during the first few hours of game play.
When the game begins the player is asked to lower the brightness of their TV in order to give a more atmospheric feeling to the game. Bioshock did this and it was amazingly atmospheric and scary especially in the first level. Dead Space on the other hand never reaches the same level of creepy, not only is the darkness not dark it is paced horribly. In at least a few sections in Bioschock the anticipation of a splicer jumping out and wrenching my knee caps was enough to keep me on edge. Dr. Steinman's lab in particular had a very horror-ry feel to it and used the atmosphere and crazed splicers made it scary. In Dead Space however the necromorphs make themselves known within the first 15 minutes. Not only known but also in your face, ruining any sense of the unknown. Part of what makes games like Amnesia scary is not the monster but rather the unknown and the knowledge that a monster is out there and is torturing you. Dead Space does neither of these things, it shows all of the monsters in a brightly lit room as they shamble (or sprint) across to rip your face off. Dead Space is not scary, it causes jumps if it is lucky with punishing the player who is busy fighting something else. The atmosphere tries to make itself scary but does not really come to fruition as many people claim.
The Soundtrack, ah yes the sound track. A sound track can mean the difference between a making the atmosphere appropriate or completely breaking it. In a good horror game their should be little sound and that sound should only really be flavor sound, or noise of the world. In Dead Space however the soundtrack is blared every single time an enemy appears on the scene. Now the music can still be done right with basically battle music but Dead Space runs into the problem of smashing an entire orchestra of instruments together to induce more jump scares. If you already expect the monsters though the music makes everything loud and annoying. Personally by the time the music "struck up" I was already annoyed.
During the introduction there are several name drops of Isaac's love interest Nicole. It turns out Issac is looking for his lost girlfriend but sadly she is not there to meet him (surprise surprise). I can only expect that the point of the girlfriend motivation is to give Isaac some motivation other than "shoot the dudes". The problem is that I cannot empathize with him if he has no voice. Yes, there are some games where a silent protagonist works . I feel no attachment to Isaac even though he is supposed to be lost in a horrible environment where he is losing his mind, his family, his friends, and the very ship around him is trying to kill him. Isaac never mentions anything, I know nothing of his motivations besides what other characters tell me, which causes for very awkward dialogue and some potential plot holes. Isaac is not a good character right now, he is like a CODBLOPS protagonist, we push him around and shoot him and it works that is about it, he is flat, uninteresting, bland etc. In the later games he gains a voice which could be interesting, I hope.
At time of writing I am currently on chapter 5 or so I have no sense of the story other than the fact that these things appeared and Isaac needs to get off the ship and the monsters came from the planet and infected the crew. That't it, that is all I know about the story, its a horror story in space that's it.
The setting is in space which is the best setting in my opinion and the application of the zero-g mechanic is appropriately confusing and disorienting. But the ship as a whole is a very good setting for a horror game like this. It gives a sense of confinement that with out an escape plan Isaac will die. The use of a space ship also allows for several convenient plot devices for Isaac to go fix. But I have a soft spot in my heart for anything that takes place in space.
Dead Space is an interesting setting but so far has failed at making me truly scared, there were moments of "jump scares" but nothing of the oppressive horror of Slender.
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