I'm a big fan of the series, even more now that its world has been further fleshed out and expanded upon. It is blossoming into a horrible version of Mass Effect or to a lesser extent, Star Wars, where out there in the not too distant universe, horrible things pulse and grow in the darkness.
The entire game is a maddening roller coaster of terror after terror. In pre-release interviews, the developers talked about giving the player moments of triumph when the player feels in control. I think this happens sort of, but most of the time I had the impression that I was simply a miserable victim pinballing my way through a living nightmare.
I was at first uncertain about the bleak violence and gore aesthetic that surrounds the game, more so in this one, as the madness increases. But I started to realize something different about the horror genre in general (well, at least the well crafted, respectable horrors): a good horror piece does not glorify or even justify violence and gore, it presents it as part of the terrible nightmare that reality can present. A good horror piece allows you the very real sensation of what it is to be prey, what it is to strive in a completely hostile and insane environment. Horror's niche in creative art is to show us a perspective that we don't always experience, in this case, it brings us face to face with the reality that strange, hostile entities can grow in the dark corners of the universe, and sometimes we experience them.
Dead Space brings this experience to a higher level of vibrancy. And this is done with loads and loads of startling techniques.
Many have talked about the game's sound engineering and for good reason. The sounds in the game are brilliantly, universally, unsettling. The developers do an incredible job of undermining every potential source of safety and stability. I'm not just talking about the moans and bellows of monsters in distant cabins (and the sound travels with a strange, muffled, metallic sheen, as you would imagine sounds travel in a space station). I'm talking about the sounds of doors and elevators and appliances. Everything makes strange unsettling noises that make your stomach drop, and so you are reduced to darting from room to room in dread, wondering, good god, what is that noise?
And in between the bouts of horrible suspense and horrifying action are segments of even more heightened breathlessness, sections that are almost psychedelic in nature. A series of frantic events will abrubtly unravel at rapid fire in strange, tangential sequences, leaving you literally fighting for your life for indefinite periods of time, lending an even more unnerving edge to the story's pace.
Any sense of consistency is eroded as well. Often you are treated to visual tricks and fakes and soon you can't tell threats from shadows and vice versa. This destroys your ability to calculate and anticipate, key ingredients that dissolve in the true horror mood. The creatures themselves move hideously and grotesquely. Their appendages wave like spider's legs. Their movements switch erratically from slow to rapid. So much attention to detail in every facet of the experience. Every little touch is done in the demonic discipline of triggering our evolutionary fear and disgust responses.
Even the characters themselves are given an emotional edge that I haven't seen yet in a videogame. They react understandably adversely to a malevolent world that is quickly deteriorating. They exhibit real, tormented fear. Some of them undertake that agonizing struggle against madness. Most of them succumb, and you genuinely feel for them. Granted, the developers do add a new character that I really enjoy, a sort of anchor for sanity and hope. I won't say too much for fear of spoiling.
Does all this violence affect me negatively? Sometimes it does. But as I got used to it I felt less like a desensitized bloodluster and more like a sort of desperate cancer surgeon, diligently snipping away at nature's more malevolent anomalies.
Still, we have to back away and ask, "Is the experience of prey an experience we should artificially recreate for entertainment?" On that I am not sure, but generally want to believe this: that art and legend are simulation devices. These are artificial creations that allow us to safely experience a multitude of perspectives while contemplating and absorbing, maybe even being instructed in subconscious ways in the meantime. Horror plays into an old survival instinct, an instinct we would rather not have to use, but given the nature of reality, possibly have use for.
Good horror is honest in its depiction of the horrible. I think Dead Space is very honest. A fictional world is created that is believable, and a scourge is introduced into that world that given the conditions, events unfold exactly as they should, in all their terribleness. The protagonist is a likeable every day kind of guy who is forced inadvertently into a survival trip for the rest of his poor life. But he attacks every problem pragmatically and scientifically (he is an engineer) even as his peers are dropping around him like flies.
Dead Space is a never ending nightmare, but within that nightmare is modern (or eh, future) humanity attempting to solve cascading problems, even in the face of opposing forces of humanity itself, such as the church and corrupt government and corporate predators. Dead Space is very much a timeless horror.
