There’s a necromorph, sealed into a vent, and only just thankful enough for its newfound freedom to screech once at you before it dives in for the kill. You play God of War Ragnarok and Marvel’s Spider-Man back to back and, with perfect Pavlovian predictability, you start expecting every optional exertion to end in a delicious treat. So, with all the predictable, cavern-mouthed zeal of an emaciated plastic hippo anally attached to a lever, I eagerly and thirstily flung aside those crates with Isaac’s Kinesis module, and rubbed my greasy goblin mitts together in anticipation of the goody I was sure to be rewarded for my fastidious situational awareness.

I replayed Dead Space recently for the first time since release, time and distance granting me fresh eyes. In the corner of this particular lounge is a pile of crates. If Isaac had not chosen engineering as his vocation, he would no doubt be a low-level mobster worth fearing. Through a harsh regime of treat-speckled scarcity, Dead Space has by this point trained the player to rifle, rummage, scrape, scrounge, and otherwise vacuum until each new architectural victim has been shaken down for its valuables, then stomped on a few times for luck. READ MORE: Best horror games: what’s the best horror you can play?īetween assaults by the scythe-limbed alien horrors the game calls necromorphs, Isaac will duck into what looks like a passenger lounge for a light breather.It’s the latest biro scratch on a yellow post-it list of ‘if it can go wrong, it will go wrong’ objectives, each contrived with such transparent honesty – and fresh with promises of more expert scares – that the player can’t help but forgive their Bioshock-ian “fucking really?!”-ness. Towards the final chapters of 2008’s sci-fi horror Dead Space, engineer Isaac Clarke is forced to trundle his way through the halls of a recently crashed military ship named the USM Valor in order to retrieve a Deluxe Mcguffin Meal called a ‘Singularity Core’ with the goal of powering an escape shuttle.

Dead space story makes no sense