The Dead Space remake is up there with Resident Evil 2

USG Ishimura feels more oppresive than you remember it, thanks to the leaps in visual and audio tech showcased in this Dead Space remake.

What strikes me the most when I play the Dead Space remake is how oppressive the spaceship itself – the USG Ishimura, a planet-cracking industrial vessel – is. It sure felt that way in the original too, but advances in graphical and audio technology have ramped that up significantly.

Hissing steam, sparking machines, broken automatic doors angrily slamming together like one of those monkey toys with the cymbals – it’s an assault on your senses. It’s hard to know whether the noises coming from behind you are from some malfunctioning console or an alien made of claws and rotten flesh. Even the water dripping from busted pipes sounds like the patter of necromorph feet.

Dead Space (2023). Picture: Electronic Arts

It’s all around you, bouncing from ear to ear, and that’s without even mentioning the whispers, which sound as if they originate from inside your own head. There’s a certain hollowness to it all that makes you feel like an ant trapped inside a discarded, haunted Pepsi can.

On the visual side, the place is laid out exactly as you remember it, but the improved graphics also lend themselves to the atmosphere of the place. Clouds of steam obscure your view, emergency lights flash, casting ominous shadows, and ventilation fans spin, tricking your mind into thinking there’s something scuttling in the corner of your eye. Dozens of small details all add up to increase the richness of the world.

“There’s a lot of evocative things there,” art director Mike Yazijian says. “In the audio experience, the volumetric lights, and that’s also tied into the gameplay systems.”

“When you have sparks and those little pieces fall on the armour and fall on the ground, each of those are physics-based, and they also cast light and have shadows,” creative director Roman Campos-Oriola adds.

Dead Space (2023). Picture: Electronic Arts

Rather than looking at other survival horror games, the team went right back to the original game’s concept art and inspirations, watching movies like Alien and Event Horizon before thinking up ways that they could improve upon Dead Space’s most beloved elements. This manifests in a few ways, starting with the disgustingly named “peeling system”, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Dead Space’s alien threats aren’t your regular reanimated corpses. When humans are transformed, they spout new appendages – gangly limbs and claws – and it’s these you have to focus on to take them down quickly. Using a range of engineering tools like plasma cutters, you lop off their limbs before stomping them to bits with your heavy gravity boots.

You can still do that in the remake, but there’s another layer to think about: skin. Certain weapons are good for limb lopping, while others are a peely good time. Flesh sloughs off with each pull of the trigger no matter what you hit them with.

Another new feature leans into the main character’s role as an engineer. As well as all the puzzles you remember, now there are a series of fuse-based puzzles, where you have to sacrifice certain ship systems to activate another. Later, this could, for example, allow you to depressurise a room full of enemies. The example I played forced me to sacrifice the lights to power up an elevator.

Dead Space (2023). Picture: Electronic Arts

The most controversial change is the decision to make protagonist Isaac Clarke an actual character this time, to bring him in line with his appearances in later games and the extended universe. Within the first couple of hours, you see his face and hear him speak.

I can take or leave the helmet removal – his face is about as exciting as Mark Zuckerberg’s – but the addition of a voice seems like a good call, based on what I’ve played so far. He isn’t quipping like Nathan Drake. Instead, it reinforces the fact he’s an engineer. They’re stranded on a busted ship, so it makes sense he would be the guy with the plan, instead of being bossed around by everyone else.

“The thing we did not want it to break is the isolation [you feel],” Campos-Oriola explains. “So our rule is that Isaac only talks when he’s being talked to. So you have a discussion, you’re not gonna speak anymore. You’re in that dark corridor, you hear some monster in the wall, Isaac’s not gonna go, ‘Ahh, what the f**k is that?’”

You will, though. Thanks to a new AI ‘intensity director’, Dead Space’s areas will be different every time you go through them. On your first run through a corridor, enemies will arrive in the same way, but there’s a system behind the scenes that ramps up the tension whenever you revisit a place and it thinks you need a little fright. This could come in the form of a necromorph attack, or it could be some environmental or audio scare.

Dead Space (2023). Picture: Electronic Arts

“Sometimes it can be just ambience, like a fan will start to spin, it sparkles, and that’s it,” Campos-Oriola says. “And sometimes there’s actually going to be a monster going through that fan. It will be dynamic. There are also a lot of places in between situations where it’s activated, but it doesn’t necessarily spawn an enemy. It plays with the lights, it plays with the sound.”

One thing the team hasn’t messed with too much is how it plays. Despite feeling more immediate thanks to a slick character controller (I really love how you can push the stick ever so slightly and make him lean) and a smooth frame rate, Isaac still has limited mobility, as you would expect from a guy wearing full armour. You still have to pick your shots and use all your abilities – including telekenisis – to conserve your limited ammo, but there are now more options on the upgrade trees for each weapon.

The development team has recreated the game almost exactly as you remember it while building on its strengths. The real test will be that launch date – January next year – which is a month after another horror game, The Callisto Protocol, comes out. If you’re not aware, that game has the same creative director as the original Dead Space and is essentially a sequel in everything but name. With EA Motive sticking so closely to the original template, it will be interesting to see how the two compare.

Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.