I'm sliding up to the airlock, but before I get there I'm
already dreading what I'll see inside: bodies twisted into horrible shapes,
glimmering tendrils and jagged limbs shaped from protruding, malformed bone in
cruel approximation of appendage, closer to a spear, really, all matched to
dead faces, frozen in rictus. And then
there's me, ponying up to this space ship.
But I'm not afraid of those horrid, twisted creatures. I'm actually bored by them. They're filling up the ship, and I'm the guy
who's going to have to clean this mess up.
Oh well. It's a
living.
The first Dead Space
game was an impressive work of horror gamesmanship, one of the rare horror
games that delivered first rate gore and really made you feel desperate and
powerless as you moved through its blood-stained corridors. From your draining sanity, as you slowly realized
that you were being led around by the hallucinated ghost of your dead
ex-girlfriend, to the terse, frenetic combat, mired in the knowledge that you,
as a protagonist, were not particularly strong or well suited to the fight at
hand, produced a lot of horrifying moments, and some very epic failures. Many's the time I watched myself die horribly
in Dead Space, gave a quick shiver,
then desperately tried to sleep.
Emphasis on tried.
Dead Space 2
kicked it up a notch, doing all it could to make the game feel more actiony
without losing that horror edge, but in kicking everything up a notch, something
was lost. Dead Space 2 employed a great deal of horror schlock, and in doing
so it compromised a lot of the legitimate tension that the original Dead Space delivered: when the game
opens up with you literally getting a needle jammed in your eye and everyone dying
around you, the stakes can only go down.
The first Dead Space game
revolved around slowly uncovering a series of terrible events. It built up tension and, when the game
finally resolved, it did so in a way that earned its payoff. Dead
Space 2 established rules of engagement from the get-go and stuck to them
throughout, asking you to engage in what was effectively a slog, rather than a
horror show. It put players through its
paces and, really, could it do any more?
After the first game, would the slow boil horror have still worked?
I say this so you'll understand me when I say that even
though Dead Space 3 makes the
violence of the previous games seem pabulum and chore-like, I don't actually think
that's a negative thing. Right from the
get-go, where you guide an ancient soldier through a suicide mission in the
prelude, the central concept of the game is apparent: you're the guy that
they've hired to do a very unpleasant job, a sort of "monster
janitor" who will be going through areas filled with horrific creatures,
twisted by science and mysticism. The
expectation is that you're going to die, which is okay. Dying isn't terribly bad in a video
game. It's kind of what you're supposed to
do in a game like Dead Space 3.
When you're hired to literally clean up after the figurative
mess that your ex-girlfriend from the previous game is stuck in, it's actually
sort of funny. The world's least
professional soldier leads you through a series of obstacles as future-Scientologists
attack you with guns - a first for the Dead
Space series. But once that's over
with, the game settles into its comfortable pattern: you enter a poorly lit
spaceship, you shoot the limbs off some monstrosities, stomp some corpses to
get some items, retrieve an especially important item highlighted by your magic
HUD, and then head on to the next area.
You are, in a very real sense, treading through areas that other
characters in the game world are apparently unwilling or incapable of
traversing, but you're doing so with such ease and immediacy that it feels like
this is just a very particular kind of menial job. The effect is not entirely unpleasant.
The Dead Space
fiction is so overwrought that it's impossible for me to take seriously, from
the hilariously scripted love-triangle between Isaac and Ellie and soldier-man
to the constant rising stakes to the emo soliloquies that Isaac occasionally
opines to absolutely no one or, if anyone is still around, someone who is
almost definitely going to die soon.
When faced with such bombast, you can either roll your eyes, or laugh at
(and to some extent with) it. I choose
the latter: it's easy to find enjoyment in just how calculatedly overwrought
the Dead Space series is, and while
horror fans might be disappointed by the relative levity this kind of writing
presents, that's okay. This game doesn't
have to be for them. In fact, I'm pretty
sure it isn't. Dead Space 3, played on normal, is just a very well crafted action
game.
And it is well-crafted, through and through, from its smooth
as silk UI to its easy-breezy controls, Dead
Space 3 wants you to be comfortable in your space-suit. It's here for you to drape around yourself,
like an entrail soaked blanket, while you tear your way through room after room
of unspeakable horrors from beyond. Is
this at odds with the horror aspects of the game? Absolutely.
Is this necessarily a problem? Fuck
no. Dead
Space 3 is fun, and it's fun because it's a well designed shooter with
original ideas that executes on nearly all of them.
I say nearly all of them because the crafting system
introduced in Dead Space 3, apparently
intended to replace the currency system of previous Dead Space games, is clunky
as all getout. While it presents a
laudable variety of toys and a depth of ways to tweak them, there are some major
issues. There's no way to test out how
certain attachments will work after they've been made and assigned, which is a
big deal considering how parsimonious the game is with certain types of
resources, and the fact that not every attachment you replace can be re-used (my
first attempt at crafting ended with me permanently removing an upgrade from a
special item I received for completing other games, a crippling blow
considering the item is just "better than" the other available items
in the game). It took a great deal of
work to figure that out though, because Dead
Space 3 has no easy comparison system for looking at available equipment. Individual components can be compared, sure,
and during the crafting phase you can compare different crafting options, but there
doesn't seem to be any direct comparison system for the weapons themselves once
they've been produced. That's a big
deal, considering how many options are available to me, how many of the items
appear to be minor upgrades of other items, and how many weapons I have in my
bank already.
And I haven't even gotten to the intrusive DLC system yet,
which literally hangs out underneath each transaction, proudly announcing that
I could, for just two dollars, acquire a bunch of resources I'd usually have to
grind or explore for. I understand that
EA has to make money, and that Dead Space
doesn't really lend itself to micro-expansions the way that Mass Effect does, but the whole thing
feels a little absurd. I play
free-to-play games with less obtrusive marketing mechanisms guiding their
transaction frameworks. The DLC messages
proliferate every aspect of the crafting system, which Visceral clearly want to
make a crucial part of my game experience.
Can I ignore them? Sure. Do I feel like I should have to in a product
I've spent sixty dollars on? Absolutely
not.
Of course, it's worth noting that these issues, such as they
are, would be non-issues in a game less superlatively aware of its own
mechanics than Dead Space 3. For the most part, this is the cleanest entry
in the series, gameplay wise, and the feel of the crafting system on the actual
play-end is great. Given how slapdash
the weapons of Dead Space have always
been, it only makes sense to let us duct tape guns to other guns to make double
guns - indeed, this mechanic makes some of the extremely conditional guns in the
game, invaluable by allowing players to account for apparent weaknesses with
each weapon. It's also just cool to be
able to play with equipment in new ways - Dead
Space 3 is all about variety, and it seems to be open to just about any
ideas I might have about how I'd like to play.
So I'll keep working as a space-monster-janitor, that is to
say a janitor who deals with space monsters, not a space monster who is a
janitor. Though that could be a fun
game, too. Visceral Games should take a
stab at designing it - they manage to make pabulum, hum-drum things like
removing limbs from monsters, stomping corpses and spiralling silently through
space feel like plain old good fun, instead of the sort of boring hum-drum work
those tasks usually feel like.
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