Outer space is a place both filled with wondrous opportunities and terrifying uncertainties. Beyond our small pocket in the universe exists so much that it’s become many people’s default response to accept the possibility of extraterrestrial life just because it feels like it has to be statistically true. The enormity of the unknowable is what makes space such a hotbed for horror, and Dead Space taps that vein for its survival horror story set amongst the stars.

A distress signal has been sent out by the USG Ishimura, a spaceship designed to mine entire planets, and engineer Isaac Clarke has been sent out with a team to investigate. The source of the trouble becomes immediately apparent when strange alien lifeforms attack the team, in the process revealing the horrifying way they proliferate. By taking the corpses of the dead aboard the Ishimura, this alien force creates twisted undead creatures known as Necromorphs. Dead Space does give the player weapons to shoot these creatures with, but to further emphasize how alien they are, the usual weaknesses found in most every video game aren’t present. If you blast off a Necromorphs head, the creature will keep coming at you, and while blasting it enough in the body will eventually take it down, it’s a big waste of valuable ammunition. Instead, to take down a Necromorph, you must cut off its limbs, their twisted bodies often bearing thin scythe-like appendages that can be sliced off one at a time until you’ve finally done the damage needed to get them to stop coming at you in a murderous rush. Most of the Necromorph forms come from a small batch that repeats the easier ones and tosses in the special types to break up the pace, but a Necromorph encounter isn’t just about shooting down an enemy. These alien monsters will sprout from inert corpses, come bursting out of walls or falling in from above, and sometimes when you’re in the middle of a hallway, you’ll be accosted suddenly on both sides by the fearsome creatures. Many of the bosses, an area where the game could have gotten creative with the twisted human form design, just end up being giant flesh masses with tentacles, but those ones are at least fought differently each time so they aren’t full on rehashes.

For the purposes of fighting Necromorphs, Isaac has a selection of weapons that break away from the typical shooting game staples. His default pistol is already a special weapon called the plasma cutter that fires either vertical or horizontal lines of energy tailor made for cutting through limbs, and blasting off the limbs is a visceral and satisfying experience as not only are the damage animations impactful, but it pushes you towards victory in combat while also making your foe less likely to take you down. From there, the weapons only get more exciting, like the line gun that fires a much wider beam perfect for quick removal of the odder limb arrangements and the rotary saw where you hover a spinning sawblade in the air and can ram it in and out of your foe to cut deep into their necrotic flesh. There is an automatic weapon that is basically the sci-fi stand-in for a machine gun, but the focus on limb removal means you can’t just spray and pray. Some weapons do seem to go a little bit away from the combat concept though, like a shotgun equivalent that is basically just a short-range powerful blast and a flamethrower that is probably best reserved for the rare aliens that come in stranger forms where a different tactic than blasting off arms is required. You can carry up to four of the weapons you unlock, the game only handing out ammo for the ones you’re carrying, but don’t expect the game to be generous with it.

Dead Space does a lot to emphasize both halves of its survival horror genre tag, and one way it succeeds at the survival aspect is by limiting your inventory quite a bit. You start off able to carry very little, having to devote space mostly to healing items and the ammo for whatever weapons you have, but there are in-game stores where you can purchase upgrades and items you think you need. Despite this, the cash is handed out at a pace that tries to guarantee you’ll always be making decisions on what to carry and what to leave behind, and the ammo you find seems to be distributed in a way to make you work a weapon down to its last reserves before being forced into using your other tools for combat. If you do run out, your left with weak melee attacks, but Necromorphs are the most common source for resources besides scouring the environment. Regardless, it’s hard to get complacent in Dead Space as the game pushes the player to use ammo intelligently, save your money for what you’d benefit from in the long term, and to plan your upgrades at the workbench to accommodate your problem areas. The upgrade system even has a secondary layer where you can avoid improving your armors and weapons by spending the items required for it to open rooms filled with ammo or other helpful items. Difficulty settings can mean that the balance can be shifted to potentially make it less oppressive or more challenging, but one thing that doesn’t go away is one of Dead Space’s failings in establishing its atmosphere of dread: the rather tiny penalty for dying.

The USG Ishimura is a wonderful setting for feeling like you’re in a hostile and grimy world where danger can burst out from anywhere. Necromorphs have plenty of places to hide and there are bodies from their initial attack before your arrival scattered everywhere that can serve as new hosts or fake-outs. While some set-ups are obvious, a hole in the wall might contain a Necromorph, be safe on the first visit but not the next, or might not ever be a danger at all, meaning you can’t rest assured you’re truly safe as you follow the story forward. You’ll find the mad scrawling on the walls and notes of the crew as they fall into despair, and surprisingly some find their dire situation plays into an odd religious fervor. The game even goes the extra effort to immerse the player, putting nothing on the screen that doesn’t have a root in the game world. Health is expressed through a meter on Isaac’s spine, and menus pop up through hologram technology. For feeling like a place you just don’t want to be, the spaceship’s interior is grounded yet off-putting with its industrial design but at the same time the alien menace has given it a supernaturally dark quality with their bloody mark on its brown and grey walls. Some areas are a bit repetitive in design due to a commitment to believability in the layout of the starship, but Dead Space does try to send you to different segments of the ship like the medbay, control bridge, hydroponics, and so on to add some variety to the exploration. For all that work into the design though and making the Necromorphs such a unique video game horror, Dead Space hurts its tone a little with surprisingly abundant save points and checkpointing. Sure, the monsters all can dish out grisly deaths to Isaac Clarke, but he’ll only be set back a bit once you click to continue. Not having to repeat too much is a good allowance in a video game but it can hurt horror as it robs any threat of some of its potency. Even being at low health and with few healing items doesn’t feel quite as dire as it likely should because you can rest easy knowing that even an unexpected ambush won’t impact your progress too much.

Dead Space does have some tricks to give it a special kind of horror that you can only find in space though. The damaged Ishimura isn’t completely airtight anymore, and Isaac will have to venture out into the vacuum of space to perform some of his duty searching for survivors and trying to clear out the Necromorph threat. With only a small reserve of air in his suit, the player can’t make Isaac creep along slowly and cautiously to try and anticipate incoming threats, and the aliens have no trouble with the lack of air since they’re already technically dead. With Isaac choking as his air reserves run low, an ambush from a Necromorph can be more shocking than ever, especially since you can’t hear them coming in the silence of space. When zero gravity is added to the mix, the Necromorphs can get even more dangerous, able to come at you from most any angle. While your magnetic boots keep you fixed to surfaces, the aliens can lunge about through the air with ease. You are also able to leap about in zero gravity provided it’s to safe ground, these moments adding some movement puzzles to the game as something more to consider than just how you’re going to shoot the next alien zombie. Some moments with external ship cannons also add some spice, but the last big addition to the gameplay comes in some special abilities used mostly for navigation puzzles.

Isaac Clarke has two very sci-fi skills at his disposal. With Stasis, Isaac is able to slow objects down, an ability often used to clear a safe area for passage but also finding a role in combat as you can essentially freeze a Necromorph to give yourself time for surgical limb removal. It doesn’t last the longest, but the more basic enemies are fairly vulnerable to it. Isaac’s other power is Kinesis, and while it does let you grab and throw objects around, it unfortunately can’t be used on any of your enemies. It does find some use in plucking objects out of zero gravity fields and indulging in a just for fun side challenge, but both skills seem mostly for giving the actions you need to perform to advance more flavor. Most of Dead Space’s enjoyment will come from the tense atmosphere and encounters with the dangerous creatures of course, but the aspects of navigation give it an extra layer that makes it so you aren’t overwhelmed by the constant need to battle the Necromorph menace.

THE VERDICT: Dead Space uses its setting to excellent effect, creating outlandish alien monsters that require an atypical yet satisfying method to kill in a tense, restricted environment. Weapons and skills manage to be empowering to use but limited in their uses to make your resources meaningful and any failures in using them sting. The sci-fi elements allow the game to have special abilities to make exploration more interesting, environments where earthly comforts like air, noise, and gravity are stripped away, and it makes the enemies and the weapons stand out with unique identities. Area layouts and enemy types do grow to be a bit familiar over the course of the game, but Dead Space still manages to include satisfying combat without draining away the horror, although the forgiving save system does lance away a bit of the danger to make it a tinier bit less effective.

And so, I give Dead Space for the Xbox 360…

A GREAT rating. Dead Space establishes its tone wonderfully, making its enemies feel like credible threats as they’re presented through ambushes and come at you with incredible determination. The save system and ease of killing some of them doesn’t rob them of that, but it does feel like the video game elements done to keep the player happy could have been pulled back a bit to let the horror truly shine. Besides that, the game just needs a bit more variety in its core components like room design and enemy types and Dead Space would be on the path to being an amazing title, but it already has an excellent combination of gameplay and atmosphere that can please horror fans and shooting fans both.

Dead Space helped kick off what may be the definitive space horror franchise in gaming, and playing at least its first title, it’s not hard to see why. With creative new gameplay ideas to make its threats truly feel alien, it’s a tale that can only be told in the darkest reaches of space.