Since getting my new computer, I’ve been playing the smorgasboard of $10 and under games from Steam’s sales, including, most recently, Dead Space (well, technically, the most recent would be The Void, the game where you start out dead, but I’m going to leave Icepick Lodge’s stuff alone for a bit.)
Dead Space, like Bioshock, is a System Shock 2 successor, but whereas Bioshock took the overall plot design, characters, and combat system, Dead Space takes the RPG elements, setting (it’s a spaceship full of horribly mutated humans who want to convince you to join their superior new species by stabbing you), and loading screen. Yes, the loading screen:
While Bioshock was billed as a “spiritual successor” to the System Shock series, Dead Space feels more like a remake; as I said in my last post, Isaac is the engineering version of the hacker, the mutant human Many have been replaced with the mutant human Necromorphs, and instead of going from medical to engineering to hydroponics to poison an alien lifeform with vials of toxin, you…go from medical to engineering to hydroponics to poison an alien lifeform with vials of toxin. Sorry about that.
Which isn’t to say that it’s a bad idea. Remakes of classic games could be a way to bring the original to a new generation, considering how quickly games become dated. The problem is that they’ve cut out most of the interesting parts. The dialog of System Shock 2 may have felt stilted at times, but in Dead Space it’s just plain repetitive, with characters repeating the same five lines in different configurations. If I had a quarter for every time my sidekick said “Wait a minute, Isaac…” and proceeded to give me a new mission, I’d be able to finance my own game where nobody was allowed to start a sentence with “As you know…” and the characters weren’t all written in the same quasimilitary “just the facts, ma’am” tone.
Let me just get this out of the way first. While Dead Space is by no means the worst-written video game I’ve played (I’m looking at you, Crysis), it’s certainly the one with the least engaging protagonists. The characters in Dead Space aren’t sympathetic, but they’re not unsympathetic and interesting, either–they’re just ciphers. Really, really annoying ciphers.
And by far the worst of these is your protagonist, Isaac. Isaac is a silent first-person protagonist stuffed into a third-person game, which means that not only do you not react in situations where it would be appropriate, you get to actually see yourself not reacting, which raises the embarrassment quotient several notches for all involved. Isaac is so unresponsive that you begin to wonder if he has some kind of developmental problem, or is just incredibly rude, because people will very clearly address him only to have him visibly stare slack-jawed into space. He certainly doesn’t seem particularly worried about anything, least of all the fact that his wife’s ship has become a death trap full of auto-regenerating Necro superiors.
In fact, the only thing Isaac seems to really have strong feelings about is crates. Isaac hates crates, and will stomp on them with unmatched fury and loud grunts (if you try to get him to stomp on an enemy, he will make the same grunt but miss by several feet.) And maybe a pallet killed his parents or something, but you’d think if you could write unmitigated wrath into one part of the game, you could spare a moment of emotion for the woman who is the entire reason you’re there. Instead, we get a one-sided “You really miss her, don’t you?” from a coworker followed by a complete lack of acknowledgment. And not stony acknowledgment either. It’s like Isaac is distracted by dust motes or something.
While Isaac at least reaches some level of ridiculous–the way your coworkers constantly put you in danger is somewhat more understandable when you realize that they probably hate you for ignoring them through the entire space trip–the other characters are simply dull, fading into each other to the point where I wouldn’t be surprised if I were actually in some delusion where the entire cast were just manifestations of a single borglike being. Being about halfway through the game, I’ve started to become actively hostile to my missions, knowing that completing them is just keeping my teammates alive to hound me through another task.
The real problem is just that the gameplay is actually really quite good. It’s a little unbalanced, sure–it’s a bunch of easy-to-kill single enemies followed by a horde of monsters that eat you up in five seconds flat–but the dismemberment-based combat system is a great deal of fun, and slogging through ragdolls of your recently deceased enemies before entering zero gravity to slice up some more monsters in a silent vacuum is a lovely touch. Ammo is at the reasonable side of plentiful, and the Augmented Reality-based heads-up display both makes sense from a story perspective and is simple to use. There’s also a very nifty battery-based upgrade interface:
But back to the writing. The real problem with the writing, I suppose, is that it feels as if the writers came up with a premise (spaceship!) and then proceeded to do nothing until ten minutes before their deadline, at which point they knocked out a generic script with a few interchangeable characters and a bunch of pointless missions. The entire project feels…interchangeable: Aside from your weapons, which are genuinely creative and fun, there’s nothing in the decor to indicate that they know what this ship would do (the answer, incidentally, is crack planets) or what a planet cracker ship would even look like. Sure, you don’t have to make the decor an interior decorator’s nightmare like they did in System Shock (below), but couldn’t we at least have something to distinguish it from the million other spaceships out there?
The Dead Space artistic team obviously has some serious chops: I’ve never seen a game that made such great use of shadows. But the only rooms that don’t seem utterly generic are the bathrooms.
Worst still is the fact that the game explicitly gives us information straight from Isaac’s pen. Our missions are ostensibly written by him, but they don’t give us any sense of his personality or voice:
The man’s diary must read like a ship’s log. No wonder his wife wants to leave him.
I don’t necessarily come to games for the story, but it’s a big part of what keeps me going. I understand that it isn’t the case for everyone. But really, I’m sure there would be a million writers willing to work for peanuts who would put together a comparatively excellent shift. I’ve got an assignment for you, EA. Go to fanfiction.net. Run through video game stories until you find three good ones. Offer those three writers a contract. Congratulations, you’ve just gotten yourself a script for Dead Space 2.
