‘Dead Space’ Only Gets Better With Age - The Ringer

Its setting, the Ishimura, carries an unshakeable sense of weight, compounded by the relentless clomping of Isaac’s metal boots, while the sound design is perhaps some of the best ever, with the game’s aural horrors swirling deep inside your ear canals.

The overall effect is striking, as if you are being sucked through the television screen, your backside firmly planted on the couch but head positioned inside the virtual world, constantly scanning for threats amid the oil rig–like depths of the Ishimura.

Nate Ralph, writing for Wired, noted, “The production values couldn’t make up for the uninspired gameplay,” while Ben Fritz asserted for Variety that Dead Space was ultimately “more gory than frightening, more technically adept than substantive.”

Nathan Hamley, creator of the 2021 indie-horror game Chasing Static and the upcoming Hollowbody, sees the early 2010s as a crucial moment for the shifting horror landscape, a period when low-budget and free indie titles were gaining traction and a new middle ground was on the cusp of forming.

According to the accompanying press release, it promises to raise the bar of horror and immersion to “unprecedented heights,” all while improving the “story, characters, gameplay mechanics and more.” What’s striking about the statement is not the content (which hits all of the notes you would expect: “We have a passionate team at Motive who are approaching this remake as a love letter to the franchise”), but the context, which feels eerily familiar to that from which the original Dead Space emerged.

“They get built together like Lego kits—light flickering, smoke generating, enemies spawning.” It will be fascinating to see the extent to which a procedural system can deliver, or perhaps, more accurately, enhance, the oppressive atmosphere of the tightly scripted Dead Space original.