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Developer: EA Redwood Shores (“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”)
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Available on: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
Reviewed on: Xbox 360
While video games have long taken inspiration from movies—every World War II first-person shooter, for example, owes a debt to “Saving Private Ryan”—few have been so deeply inspired by cinema as “Dead Space.”
A third-person, sci-fi survival horror action game in the vein of the “Resident Evil” series, “Dead Space” fuses elements of “Alien” and “Event Horizon,” with creatures that look like the titular monster from John Carpenter’s version of “The Thing.” Electronic Arts even commissioned an animated prequel movie, “Dead Space: Downfall,” which will be released on DVD and Blu-ray October 28, while iconic horror director Dario Argento (“Suspiria”) did a voice for the Italian version of the game.
In “Dead Space,” you play as Isaac Clarke, a mechanic who goes to fix his girlfriend’s spaceship, only to find that it’s been overrun by freaky creatures that, like the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” keep coming even after you’ve remove a limb or two with laser cutting tools normally used for mining. While trying to survive this horror, you must use your wits to solve situational puzzles, with the goal of figuring out what happened to the ship, its crew and Clarke’s main squeeze.
Action-wise, “Dead Space” is a first-rate third-person shooter. The creatures are no pushovers, and your situation gets quite hairy when there’s a bunch of them coming at you at once. As an added challenge, damage to the ship often makes it hard to keep going. Rooms without gravity are especially inventive--you have to leap from one metal surface to the other (good thing Clarke packed his magnetic boots), often while creatures float in wait for you.
“Dead Space” has plenty of great shooting action and “Resident Evil”-esque problem solving, but it’s the scare factor that makes it more than just a typical third-person shooter. The game uses a popular cinematic trick of lulling you into a false sense of security…and then having things jump out at you. It’s easily the most frightening game since 2001’s “Silent Hill 2,” and boasts a similar freaky vibe. There’s a cinematic sparseness to the music and lighting that ramps up the uneasy feeling, much like what Carpenter did in “Halloween.” All of which makes “Dead Space” not just the scariest game of the year, but also one of the best.
Bottom Line: In “Space,” everyone will hear you scream. A lot.
