by Personal Pick
In addition to our main Game of the Year 2023 Awards, every member of the PC Gamer team is showing off a game they liked this year. We’ll be launching new personal picks, along with our top prizes, throughout the rest of the month.
I’m not a big fan of scary things, but oddly enough, playing horror games often makes it a much more memorable experience for me. Being a big scaredy cat, I have to psych myself up before tackling a game that I know is going to scare me, but I feel like I’ve gained more from being successful.
Games like Resident Evil, Alien Isolation, and Dead Space are always my favorite, because they balance their horror with other mechanics, which act as a distraction. In Resident Evil, you get that ultimate catharsis from blasting the shit out of what scares you, but Alien Isolation provides some nice little engineering puzzles to occupy yourself with while trying not to think about the xenomorph breathing down your neck .
Dead Space has always been my favorite, though, as a combination of the previous two. You travel through the fully cracked spaceship, USG Ishimura, dispatching monstrous necromorphs by cutting off their limbs with surgical precision – a mini-game in itself. At the same time, playing as engineer Isaac Clarke, you use your mechanical smarts to solve puzzles and progress through the crumbling ships around you. Dead Space never lets you forget that Isaac is an engineer in the first place, but it turns out, well, … that murdering aliens is really good industrial equipment.
This variety of gameplay elements is what makes Dead Space such a different horror game, even now, 15 years after the original release * crumbles to dust*. And it’s one of the reasons why this year’s Dead Space Remake is truly exceptional. Motive doesn’t overstep the bounds of making significant changes to the game, as is often the case with even the best remakes. Instead, it focuses on recreating Ishimura’s memorable atmosphere while building on the game’s fundamentals, primarily; kill necromorphs and solve puzzles.
One of my favorite additions is the “necromorph skinning” system – you know an enemy dismemberment mechanic is good when it gets its own name. Using the newly introduced gun option, you destroy necromorphs layer by layer. As I mentioned in my Review of Dead Space, the best thing is to blast them point blank with the Force Gun and watch as all their flesh is ripped off like a chicken carcass in one of those industrial blow dryers. There were also significant reworks of both the boss fights and puzzles, supporting the introduction of a full Dead Space 2-style Zero-G sequel.
That’s not to say the remake doesn’t add to the story as well. Dead Space is already a pretty intense horror game, offering only brief respites in what is otherwise pure uplifting. You fight your way through the nightmare ship with an eye to escape, but while this was mostly a solo experience in the original, there are now new sidequests, characters, and video logs. Following these sidequests will give you the perspective of Isaac’s girlfriend, Nicole.
Perhaps the most controversial change in the entire remake is that Isaac is now talking. Some might argue that this has a negative effect on the atmosphere, but I think that allowing Isaac to communicate with other characters and the crew of the Ishimura who are still alive achieves even more. You’d never know it in the original, but Isaac’s story is a very personal one, as he tries to find the fate of his partner. Collecting special marker fragments hidden in the extra new game+ mode will even unlock a brand new ending, which is perhaps what excites me the most about this remake: it offers the perfect opportunity to make changes, namely, Rework Dead Space 3 and change success. the previously stagnant series.
Dead Space 2 would have to come first, sure, but I’m sure it would make an excellent remake if given the same treatment as the original. EA already discussed the idea of remaking the other games shortly after the release of Dead Space Remake – understandable, considering how successful it was. If we could get to a point where a Dead Space 3 Remake was on the cards, it would be a great opportunity to improve upon the least popular entry in the series.
Who knows, the success might even lead to new Dead Space games – we can only hope. For now, though, it’s enough to have a new Dead Space to play, even if it’s technically an old Dead Space.
