I technically finished this a couple weeks ago, but I had planned to do a replay of the original afterwards in order to refresh myself for a fair comparison. Fast forward to tonight and I realized that I hadn't so much as launched the original because I felt a bit burnt out after playing through the remake and the prospect of playing the whole game again gave me pause.

So instead, I decided to fire up the OG tonight and play just the first half hour and then call it there. Not really enough for a true side by side comparison, I know, but I've played the original enough times that I'm fairly confident in my knowledge of it.

I recall seeing some people say that Dead Space didn't need a remake back when this came out in early 2023. To a certain extent, I agreed with them, but I also would have said that a remaster wouldn't be enough by itself. To be honest, the mobility in the original is clunky as hell. You can chalk it up to "immersion" with Isaac being an engineer, not a soldier, all you want. Point is, it impacts how it feels to play in a very negative way. Dead Space 2 fixed this, so I was glad to see the remake did as well. Remake plays so much more smoothly and also imports some quality of life additions from the aforementioned sequel. These are welcome changes and I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue against them.

Remake also looks spectacular. They really nailed the aesthetic I remembered the game having with my rose-tinted glasses, not what it really was. The halls of the USS Ishimura are more claustrophobia-inducing and foreboding than ever before. The lighting is overall significantly darker as well. I think this latter change is more of a mixed bag rather than a direct improvement, but I do also think it works in favor of the atmosphere of the game more often than it hurts it. ALSO I need to point out that they did Isaac dirty by changing his face in the remake. He's way too young now and looks oddly like Adam Sandler. Every time I saw his face it just rubbed me the wrong way. Give me middle aged grey hair Isaac any day over this.

Putting aside the visual improvements and quality of life changes, they also have opened the game world up a good deal. You now have significantly more freedom to explore the ship and backtrack as you please to find items and some new rooms you may not have had access to when you first passed them. This is probably my favorite change, as it really made the ship feel like a real location rather than a bunch of smaller sub-areas connected by loading screens. I had a lot of fun with the small side quest additions made possible by this as well. They help flesh out many of the main and side characters in a way that feels natural and doesn't detract from the main experience.

The remake makes some significant overhauls to certain boss fights and uh, "sequences" for lack of a better word. The awful meteor shooting minigame section from the original has been replaced by a far more tolerable zero gravity section (where you do still shoot meteors I guess) outside of the ship. The leviathan fight was also altered quite a bit. I found those changes pretty disappointing. The scale of the creature is much less impressive now and the neat circular shape of the room is a nonfactor as well, which changes the dynamic of the fight for the worse. Also the creature's roars and shrieks feel much less impactful in the remake for whatever reason.

That last bit kind of works as a transition into my next gripe. For me, Dead Space was always the king of sound design in horror gaming. I vividly recall being paralyzed with fear as I made my way through the ship's halls way back when I first played it. I actually needed to take breaks because I would get too unnerved by the ambient sounds of the Ishimura. The gasping noises Isaac would make as his oxygen tank ran out made me panic and start to feel like I was running out of air too. It all sounds a bit silly now, but the sound design in the original hit me just right. It was always my gold standard for horror in that respect.

I was a bit disappointed to find that when they redid the SFX and ambient noises, they did not really manage to recapture the magic of the original. I'm sure there's some amount of nostalgia at work here, but even in the 30 minutes of the original I played just before writing this, I found myself jumping in surprise much more than I was while playing the remake, which is a credit to how good that aspect of the original is. It's a shame that my favorite bit of the original game wasn't handled as well as it could be, but at least the sound design in the remake is solid enough to get by.

I think Dead Space (2008) is probably the scarier game overall. It does so much right and the remake manages to upgrade some of those things, sidegrade some others, but also downgrade a couple as well. At the end of the day though, the Dead Space I know and love has a shiny new coat of paint and is mostly intact. I think the remake is the ideal way for a new player to experience the game, but I also strongly recommend that those who enjoy it try playing the original if they can.

(Sorry if this review is jumbled sounding. It's late here and I'm very tired, but wanted to get this written.)

Dead Space is a series that over the years I have heard so many good things about. Well actually, I never heard too many specifics, I only really knew it was a classic survival horror game in space and that it was very scary and very good. Those are all pretty good qualities so I had high expectations but just never got around to giving the series a try. When I heard there was a remake coming out and that it was getting really good reviews even from long-time fans, I figured this was as good an opportunity as any. So given that, I can't really compare this to the original as I don't know what all is new, what is different, or anything about how it holds up against its source material. This review is just based on my fresh playthrough that has the benefit (?) of having no nostalgia goggles involved.

With the above predisposition, I found the game exceptionally disappointing. I admit, this may have to do with my those high expectations for the game given its reputation and that survival horror is very much a genre I tend to enjoy. I initially was planning to give the game 2 stars as for a while I was just not having fun with it at all and each chapter felt like a chore, but I did get more into it gradually and mostly enjoyed "okay" the last third or so of the game. It still took a push to finish it, but I enjoyed those parts enough that I'd be willing to bump up my rating to a 2.5 or so that I'll round to 3.

First the good: The game does a lot to achieve its atmosphere and immersion. You play Isaac, an engineer on a fairly massive ship called the Ishimura where things quickly go to hell and you're one of the only people capable of keeping the ship from complete haywire and destruction while it's being swarmed with the monstrous mutations of its dead crew who are tearing things to shreds. Almost every mission has you addressing this or that technical issue and finding solutions to rig things to work for a while longer despite all hell breaking loose. There is a constant reminder of his role on the ship and why he's specially placed to solve these problems. You also get several "powers" (okay they're supposed to be tech but are basically magic like telekinesis and the ability to slow down time) that are pretty cool both as tools of combat and in puzzle-solving. Zero gravity took some getting used to, but was also used many times to good effect to remind you of the space setting, especially a few scenes on the ship exterior that were fittingly climactic. Further, the visuals of the game are constantly pushing you into deep darkness and cramped corridors fitting for the space setting and making the enemies all the more threatening. Even aside from the design choices, the graphics for this game are pretty incredible and it's likely in the top 5 for graphical detail of games I've played to date. The fact Isaac's suit takes the place of a HUD to supply info on your health and resources was also really neat and well done. I also enjoyed some of the chapters that felt like they really focused on a particular character or world element like the one with the doctor, it reminded me a bit of the structure in the initial Bioshock, in a good way.

All that said, I think the game constantly undercuts that very same immersive quality for the sake of gameplay in a way that really pulled me out of it, chasing the two proverbial hares of immersion and action gameplay while catching neither. Like sure, it's extra creepy that you can't see in the dark unless you're aiming your flashlight. But if you're going for this gritty amazing engineer theme, am I really to believe even his level 5 suit doesn't have a chest or head-mounted flashlight? For an engineer, in SPACE, where shadows mean near pitch blackness? Further, why is it that not only do several rooms on the Ishimura have random biohazard lockdowns, but they shut off the lights every single time? Simply because boo, it's scawy! And beyond that, if Isaac is just (an apparently very talented) engineer, why is he also John McClane? It feels like the game is trying to have its cake and eat it too by marketing itself as this grounded survival experience, but then requiring you to take on HORDES of enemies relying not on your intellect or tech, but on his ability to shoot and beat the mess out of anything that comes his way? There are definitely games where the tone is such that I don't really care if average Joe is somehow a bad ass when push comes to shove. In fact, that could be said for a ton of games, including some of my favorites. But when the game is so dedicated to this grounded tone and characterizing Isaac as "the engineer," it feels like it's failing either goal. There was so much nonsense for the sake of cheap "scares" (more on those mean quotation marks in a bit), that it really hurt one of the best things I felt it had going for it and I never really felt too immersed.

I also felt the combat was kind of eh. It wasn't awful and sometimes combining your powers with a number of unique weaponry could be cool, but the few repetitive enemy types were just not very fun to fight, most especially because not only were they super bullet spongey even on Normal, but there seemed to be a lot of randomness to the damage. I think this was to make the enemies more intimidating since you couldn't just roughly count shots but it got ridiculous how some enemies I'd blast three times and they're out and others that look just like them I'm using a full reload of ammo on before they finally stop. I kind of see the rationale but I found it much more irritating than interesting. Another thing I really didn't like was how incredibly random the drops seemed. There was decent challenge to the game but most of the parts I got stuck (mostly early on), the time I beat a section was simply because I got better items from the random drops scattered in the arena, which I don't consider very satisfying and made the difficult parts feel more frustrating than fair.

Okay, it's been a bit, the other thing is that the game just does not feel remotely scary. I'm not just trying to sound tough and be all "heh, kid, nothin' scares me." I am probably a little jaded after years of horror games that not much really gets to me anymore, but for a game I've heard was one of the scariest out there, the horror aspects of the game at pretty much no point even felt like an actual horror game. At most, it's an action game with a horror aesthetic. Most of the game, you go into a room and you hear a bunch of loud and gross noises, the monsters come out and you kill them, then the doors unlock and you move on. There was some tension but most of the jump scares were really predictable and rote and I weirdly felt like the game came closest to being creepy when it was featuring the messed up environment and twisted crew members and the pressure valve was quickly released when the next zergling or whatever jumped out of a vent for the 30th time. I'm not sure how much of this is because it duplicated scares from the original that was in fairly novel territory at the time but has since become more standard. That's my best theory. Most of the parts that seemed they were supposed to be scary I found just kind of boring. In a lot of ways, I was reminded more of that first flood mission from the original Halo where it was somewhat disturbing and eerie, but not ultimately very scary, you're still just mostly plowing through globby gross hordes of monsters. Actually no, that Halo level was scarier than anything in this game now that I think about it, thus the title of this review.

I think the story was decent. It at times is kind of predictable and cliche and it relies a bit heavily on Isaac being really oblivious such as when Nicole keeps offhandedly saying weird presumably out-of-character stuff and despite her being like the love of his life, he doesn't even seem to notice or lampshade it at all. I get the impression he was semi-brainwashed but if that's the case, it makes you wonder why the need for deception at all. That said, there were some twists that were interesting and exploring the mysteries behind the various character motivations and faction goals could be compelling at times. I'm also open to the possibility that I probably misunderstood some things that may have made the game less nonsensical, but I also didn't really feel compelled to follow it more closely and that is a problem in itself.

All in all, I think this one was a pretty big miss for me. I don't regret playing it, but I was at risk of that for a good while near the beginning. To me, there's no way this is Game of the Year as I've heard a few suggest, but at this point I'm also quite sure this is very much a "it's not you, it's me" type of thing so most will probably enjoy it more than I did. I also think this may be a game the nostalgia goggles would've helped with. If I'd played a game like it in 2008, the horror would've at least been a lot more novel than it is now and replaying the touched up version would probably be a lot of fun. So maybe I'm wrong, but without any real knowledge of the original, I think you'd probably enjoy this a lot more than I did if you're a fan of the original. I can't really recommend this one to anyone else.

I was never a fan of the original Dead Space. Resident Evil in space is a good pitch, but the game didn't have enough ideas to sustain its runtime. I found myself tiring of running around the USG Ishimura dismembering necromorphs. I had to force myself to finish it, and it wasn't worth seeing the credits. A few years later, I got Dead Space 2 in a Steam sale. The game ended up being so good I played it again right after beating it. It's one of my all-time favorite games. Since the release of Dead Space 2, the original game takes up the entire conversation around the series. I didn't get it. Dead Space 2 was going underrated and underappreciated leading me to hold a grudge against the first game. With EA and Motive Studios remaking Dead Space, it's an opportunity to give the game a second shot. I hoped improvements could be made to help the game shine in a way to show me what other people saw in the original. Well, I played it. I took my time. I played it at night in bed to create the optimal horror experience. I still don't get it.

The Dead Space remake was starting out at an advantage. Since I didn't like the original, I didn't remember much from it. The remake was almost a completely new experience. Early on in the game, I picked up a text log detailing Isaac's backstory. The intriguing details I learned were either all new ideas from Motive Studios or information I forgot from the first game, but it grabbed my curiosity. Isaac's mother was a Unitologist. She gave away all the family money to the church. It's reminiscent of Scientology which probably was an influence for the Unitology religion. Isaac's father was an award-winning engineer who went away on a mysterious, classified mission. Both of them died under mysterious circumstances, and the Church of Unitology owns their bodies. One of the moments I remember from the original Dead Space was the big twist, I do not remember any mysteries around Isaac's parents. I dig it. It's more fuel to keep me going.

Isaac Clarke is an engineer hired to by a company called CEC to help fix one of their ships the USG Ishimura. With him are three CEC members including the captain Hammond and a computer specialist named Kendra Daniels. When he arrives with the rest of the crew on the CEC ship Kellion, they find the USG Ishimura out in space next to planet Aegis VII. They try to contact the ship, but no one is answering. They attempt to board, but the tractor beam of the Ishimura malfunctions and causes them to crash in the hangar bay. As they head deeper into the Ishimura, they find it to be a ghost ship except for the hostile monsters trying to kill them. They need to get systems fixed and online to find out what happened here. The game is split up between main missions and side missions. The main missions focus on Isaac fixing the ship while Daniels uncovers the events that took place before they arrived. The side missions involve finding out what happened to Isaac's girlfriend Nicole who is a doctor assigned to the Ishimura. It's a split that makes sense. Isaac does the job he was hired to do for the main story while looking for his girlfriend on his own time in the side missions. The mystery around both had me on the hook. The remake plays around with the details of the story to deliver some surprises to players of the original game as I was hoping. I appreciate the changes, but it's never elevated higher than a solid mystery.

There were two advertised changes to the game I knew ahead of time. Isaac now has dialogue after being a silent protagonist in the original game. It makes sense. He's being given a lot of orders from Daniels and Hammond. It's natural to hear him respond. Also a big part of the story is his relationship with his girlfriend Nicole. It's nice to see videos of him having a conversation with her. The other change is in how Isaac traverses the zero gravity sections of the game. In the first game, Isaac would have to jump from one wall to the next in a straight line to get around. In the remake, he has jet boosters to give him full 360-degree control of his movement through these areas. The Dead Space 2 fan in me is side-eying this. These are both features that were introduced in the sequel, and now, they are making Dead Space 1 more like 2. So now people like Dead Space 2? I remember people being upset about Isaac having an voice when the game originally released. Putting my pettiness aside, I'm not quite a fan of the execution of these changes. Isaac lacks personality. I can only describe him as "determined". He's mostly acknowledging orders. His demeanor gets more intense over time as the situation gets more out of control. There isn't enough there to give me a sense of a person. They might as well have left him a silent protagonist. As for the jet boosters, I liked the original way of getting around in the no gravity spaces. Jumping from one wall to another was actually fun in the original game, and I had never seen a game do that before. It's a shame they got rid of it. The game loses some of what made the original game unique.

Progressing through the game, it does bring back one of my issues with the original Dead Space: the USG Ishimura is just dull. There's just a narrow range of look and feel in this ship. I feel no excitement when opening a new door or taking a tram to a new part of the ship because it's all the same metal bars and grating, lockers, tunnel-like hallways, and sliding doors. I used to hate backtracking back in the day, so I definitely had no patience for any of this then. This space isn't memorable. I get the Alien influence, but that ship was smaller and I only had to be in that space for two hours. Dead Space was called "Resident Evil in Space". Resident Evil, which was shorter too, had a wider range of environments: dining rooms, basements, dungeons, laboratories, art rooms, etc. Opening a door in Resident Evil made me pause for a few seconds to take it all in. In Dead Space, I keep moving looking for the loot or the fight not noticing any nuances in the rooms if there are any.

I didn't notice any changes to the combat. It keeps the same dismemberment focus. Shoot off the limbs to kill the necromorphs. The tech behind it is new though, and it's impressive. The best weapon to showcase this is the Force Gun. I'm pretty sure I ignored this gun while playing the original game. It fires a force blast that knocks back the enemy while also doing damage. It's useful because most of the enemies are melee attackers and love to charge at the player. What's cool in the remake is I can see the force blast blowing the skin off the bodies of the necromorphs. It's grotesque, and I love it. I mean, realistic lighting and higher graphical fidelity is nice. They have some fun moments playing with darkness in this game, but knocking the flesh off enemies to expose the red, bloody muscles underneath is what next-gen should be all about.

The downside to combat is it has balance issues. I was fine for most of the game. I even turned up the difficulty from "Normal" to "Hard" because it was too easy. As I get into the back half, the Pulse Rifle and Ripper are useless in some situations. The Pulse Rifle was noticeably weak. It's not the best weapon to use in the game as it's a standard automatic weapon in a combat system focused on cutting. I only pull it out in situations where I'm not cutting my target. One example are the necromorphs with exploding arms. They come at me with a swollen glowing arm, and when they reach me, they slam it down on me to blow it up doing massive damage. Shooting the arm causes it to explode. It's good strategy to shoot the arm when out of the blast radius because it will blow the enemy up along with any other necromorphs around it. Since it's so volatile, I expect blowing it up would only take one or two shots. It does with other weapons, but not with the Pulse Rifle. It takes five or more shots to make the arm explode. It's enough to frustrate me. Then there is the tentacle. Everyone who played the original game remembers it. A large tentacle will surprise Isaac, grab him, and pull him into the hole in the wall it came from to kill him. In order to survive, I have to shoot the swollen, glowing part of the tentacle to get it to let go of me. I died many times in a couple of encounters with the tentacle. The first was because of my lack of ammo and aim. The second time, I wasn't worried at first because I had my Pulse Rifle equipped and it had plenty of ammo. I should've worried. I died several times, and I was nailing those shots. I finally decided to switch to the Contact Beam, and I beat it first try. The Pulse Rifle is too weak to stop the tentacle. Why did they build the game this way? If only some of the weapons are good against this, just automatically equip me with one of those weapons.

I ran into a similar situation with The Ripper. On the final boss, it was one of my equipped weapons. I ran out of ammo in all other weapons when the boss grabbed me for the final showdown. There's a glowing spot I need to shoot while hanging upside down. I fire ripper blades at the spot, but the blades are too slow and the boss is wiggling around too much to hit the spot. I can't go into my weapons menu to swap it out for an unequipped weapon because I can't see the menu. This game uses a diegetic menu. Pressing the menu button projects a holographic, virtual menu in front of Isaac in the environment. Isaac is too far away from me to see it, and the menu isn't even facing in a direction to make it possible for me to read it even if Isaac was closer. I died of course, and I made sure to unequip the ripper for a weapon better fit for that moment. It feels like Motive didn't give the same amount of attention to the whole arsenal.

Another balancing issue shows up in the resource drops. This is a Survival Horror game. There's supposed to be limited ammo. That's not the issue here. I'm getting a lot of ammo, but it's not giving me ammo I need. If I'm running low on Plasma Cutter ammo, the game isn't making an effort to give me more. I'm just getting more Pulse Rifle ammo or Ripper blades which I have plenty of. Other Survival Horror games like Resident Evil take into account what the player has when it decides what ammo type to drop. There is a store in the game to help with this issue. In hindsight, I feel like I should've just sold all my Pulse Rifle ammo and Ripper blades, used that money to buy ammo for better weapons, and put the Pulse Rifle and Ripper in storage to never be used again, but I didn't know then the game would screw me so bad with those guns. But also, maybe those guns are secretly overpowered when fully leveled up. Which introduces another issue: the node system. Nodes are required to upgrade guns which can be found around the ship or purchased in the shop. The problem is I don't have much of a choice in which aspect of the guns I upgrade. The upgrades exist on an upgrade path. If I want to increase the damage of my Pulse Rifle, I might have to upgrade the capacity or rate of fire first if they are on the path before the damage upgrade. These cost one node each making it feel like I'm wasting nodes on upgrades I don't want to get upgrades I do. This system is in all the games, but I don't remember having such an issue with weapons and ammo in previous games to exacerbate the issue.

The number one reason I hear Dead Space is better than Dead Space 2 is that the first game is scary. It's always odd to me because I didn't find the game scary at all. It's reusing the same jump scares over and over again. I walk into a room and a necromorph pops out of the ceiling or the wall or a glass tank. It never got me. The remake comes with technical improvements to lighting and sound. The enemies are more graphically detailed in their hideousness and gore. So much tech thrown at pushing the horror to the next level, and it still isn't scary. The remake has its own set of tricks it overuses. There were countless times where they grab my attention with a necromorph in front of me only to place one behind me I don't notice. They try to create creepy atmosphere with flickering lights and whispering voices. I remember there was one moment I just hear a woman scream, but no one is there. None of it gets to me other than a pause to register what I’m hearing. Early on, they play with putting the player in pitch black darkness. I had to use the light on my gun to find my path and enemies in the room. The Resident Evil 2 remake already did this, so it couldn't create the same impact. Impressive tech though. They even have a feature where I can hear Isaac's heartbeat when it elevates in response to something "scary" happening. I have no idea what they thought that would do to the player. Hearing another person's heartbeat fast doesn't affect my own. It's not like yawning. It's just an odd choice.

I really tried with Dead Space, but it's still not good. The remake comes with too many frustrating decisions that overshadow any improvements in tech and story it could deliver. The flaws I remember from the original still persist here. I couldn't help but feel I was playing an inferior version of Dead Space 2. Honestly, it made me more interested in replaying the original Dead Space than replaying this remake.

When I heard there would be a dead space remake, I was confused because dead space, one of my favorite games, is still an amazing game to play to this day. So I thought it was not really necessary. Then, I played this game and was proven wrong.

It is obvious the amount of love and care put into this remake by the devs, making it better in every way, with obvious care to the source material. It's still one of the best survival horror ever made.

Some changes are, obviously the graphics are amazing. The care put into more details into the atmosphere of the ishimura make it seem like a real place people once inhabited that's now infested with horror. That combined with no loading times (before chapters were divided by tram sections), unlocking areas organically make the ship feel like one big area you are exploring.

The gameplay feels a bit more refined and, this being a horror game, yes its scary, however the gameplay and combat is very fun to play as well. Instead of doors being opened by upgrade nodes, there are 'security' levels. I definitely prefered this, as now you can prioritize your nodes to upgrade your weapons and suit, and the security levels encourage back tracking and exploring to obtain more materials.

The story has been expanded upon as well, while retaining its original form. There's side missions now, which i was worried about becoming tedious, however they come up naturally and just expand the story. Isaac can now speak, which i think was done well, he does not speak too much and it does give his character more agency which I think improves the story. The story is still told without any "cutscenes", providing the most immersive experience.

Just one of the best horror games out there, if not the best. a must play if you enjoyed the original. If you have not played the original, even more of a must play!!