The necromorphs are spindly, Carpenter-esque creations and now have a more tangible (and disgusting) appearance. And one that the remake takes advantage of by carving in some extra rooms and side-missions as Isaac works to repair the ship, find his partner Nicole and discover just what’s up with the rest of the crew turning into skittering, sharp-clawed monstrosities. It is seamless now too where the limitations of the time saw the original carve its areas into stage-based sections, here you will loop around and return to areas until you start to develop an understanding of the layout. This was true of the original but it has, naturally, never looked better. But for the horrors unfolding, you might even believe the Ishimura as a place to live and work in the depths of space.

The warren-like, tram-linked corridors make for a disorientating but authentic place. The crash-landing is a stomach-flipping pirouette and, once inside, the guts of the ageing spaceship are a blend of rusted, busted engines, perilous walkways and pristine holographic screens. As engineer Isaac and his crew approach the Ishimura on an apparent repair mission, its brutalist angles cut across a glittering galaxy, light glinting off its hull. So why the glow-up? Besides, perhaps, to get the Dead Space name fresh in the mind again? It certainly lets Dead Space’s monolithic ‘planet-cracker’ setting, liberally inspired by Event Horizon and Alien’s Nostromo, shine. It’s been 14 years since the original game, which is somehow more horrifying than anything the game could possibly throw at me, but it was made with a forward looking mentality and has held up admirably.

The return of Dead Space is confidently the latter rebuilt from the ground-up with new technology, but faithfully revisiting Isaac Clarke’s first encounter with toothy ‘necromorphs’ and his own mental trauma on the sprawling spaceship USG Ishimura. In an era of hardware able to do fleshy monsters and flickering darkness a horrible justice, developers have turned to past successes to either inspire ( The Callisto Protocol) or remake (Resident Evil 4, System Shock). No doubt buoyed by Capcom’s tremendous Resident Evil 2 remake in 2019, the revival of the solo survival horror has become a welcome vogue for video games.

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