Dead Space 2 is at its best when it finally shuts down

Dead Space 2 is an annoying game. It’s not a bad game by any means, but one that tests my patience and wears me out for hours on end. It’s due to a backend glitch, but I feel lucky that we currently have our comments turned off. I’m afraid of what some of you would say down there after that first sentence.

The problem with Dead Space 2 is certainly not its gameplay. Dismembering necromorphs, juggling various weapons and powers, and tense fights with numerous enemies feels great. I love all of that. The problem with Dead Space 2 is its horror. More specifically, the game never knows when to shut up.

For most of its playing time, Dead Space 2 is never interested in scaring the player; wants to terrorize them. And it is true that, in the opening sections of the game, this is incredibly effective. The protagonist Issac Clarke wakes up and finds himself tied up in a mental hospital, apparently due to what he has seen and experienced in the first game. However, a man is there, helping him free him. A woman calls you and explains that she is there to help you. You don’t know these people, but if the sounds of destruction outside your room are any indication, there is no other option but to trust them.

It is right at this moment that one of the most viscerally disgusting scenes ever put in a video game takes place. Something small works its way into the man’s head, quickly rendering him incapacitated. It’s unclear what the heck that little friend is doing there, but safe assumptions lead you to believe it’s not great for our new host here. And at that moment, this poor idiot’s face rips apart, exposing tissue, bone, and muscle as he pushes you forward and yells directly at you. It is truly one of the worst things I have ever seen.

Circumstances continue to go downhill for Isaac. Freed from his room, he runs through the hospital and, by extension, the space base that houses him, trying to escape the screaming monsters that now sprout from the walls and from all directions. He’s trapped in a straitjacket, so even if he had a gun, he doesn’t have the hands to use it. All you have to do is run and hope you meet someone, literally anyone, who can help you.

The first person you meet is a doctor. She is clearly losing it, aware of the horrors that creep into this once peaceful community. He has a knife with which he threatens you. It looks like this might be the end for Isaac, which would be an anticlimactic way to go after the other boy had his face ripped apart, but that’s neither here nor there. Instead, man sets you free. And then, as if things weren’t comical enough, he slits his throat and you watch him bleed out. It is a disturbing and effective moment, which highlights the helplessness of everything happening around you.

With your hands free, the game starts more or less correctly. You find a weapon, your armor, you acquire your powers and you go to work fighting the monsters that are apparently in every room, nook and cranny of this building.

Dead Space 2’s opening is fantastic, if only because of how disorienting everything is. Everything described above, is like, the first 20 minutes of the game. Before you have a second to learn the controls, Dead Space 2 assaulted you with more fear and gratuitous violence than your brain knows what to do. It is an incredible way to immediately destroy the player’s nerves and establish the desperation of the situation as soon as possible.

And then the game keeps running at this rate. Where once a Necromorph coming out of a wall, screaming in the vile way they do, was terrifying and unexpected; After three or four hours of this, entering a room no longer carries a sense of dread. In Dead Space 2, something like a jump scare is never a question of whether it will happen. It is a question of when. The game does not create tension between these moments; goes straight to the auction. It gets tiring and monotonous. Dead Space 2 doesn’t know how to shut up, go out of its own way, and take advantage of its haunting atmosphere in ways that will make its scares both won and effective. Instead, it’s loud, cheeky, and obnoxious after a while.

That’s until Ishimura level.

If you’ve played the original Dead Space, then the location should be intimately familiar. It is the setting of the first game, where Isaac first encounters all the horrors that now define his digital life. In video game parlance, going to the location of a previous game is a big deal – for some reason. It’s a way for developers to say to players, “Hey, do you remember what we did a couple of years ago? Here it is! Again!” And by God, there it is! Again! I remember those assets and textures. Boy, how cute! I’m being reductionist, but it’s kind of silly when a single post-entry game treats this as a big reveal. Dead Space and its sequel were released just over two years apart; it’s not like him Ishimura it was ancient history at this point.

The Ishimura recently for the game mechanically. You don’t do anything on the ship that you can’t do on any other level. Narratively, it’s a bit interesting to put Issac, who clearly suffers from PTSD because of what happened in the Ishimura in the first game, back to the crime scene. It doesn’t do much with the setting in the grand scheme of the general story, but it is novel enough for what it is, albeit a bit contrived.

This is all to explain my mental space when entering the level. After hours of being exhausted with the game’s approach to horror, being asked to fulfill some half-hearted attempt at fan service, as I saw it, was a bit too much for me. But all that changed when I started walking.

The most notable of the Ishimura it’s how quiet it is compared to the rest of the game; For what seems like an eternity, you walk through the abandoned corridors and rooms of the ship, all dark as night, waiting for something to jump towards you, to scare you. But it never does. At least not for a while. You are alone for the first time in the game, accompanied only by the sound of your steps and the fear of what sounds at night. In a game that has tried as hard as possible to scare the player and most of the time has failed to be anything other than exhausting, this was the moment fear finally appeared: six hours after the start of the game. play. Real fear. Afraid. Anxiety.

There is a very specific feeling that produces intense anxiety. It feels hot, like an explosion of heat on your chest. As I walked through the Ishimura, I could feel that heat creeping through my body. The longer the silence lasted, the more I was forced to wait for hell at the end of this journey, the more I felt real dread, real fear for what was to come. Just taking steps forward, Sisyphean felt. It took me two days to finish the level certainly short because it scared me so much. It was incredible.

There is a common saying in horror movies that the scariest thing you can show is nothing at all; what’s on the viewer’s mind is far worse than anything you can show on the screen. I don’t buy this philosophy 100 percent of the time *, but I think it’s true in many cases. That is why a movie like The Blair Witch Project it is effective. You never actually see the witch in the movie, but I bet you imagined her, and it was terrifying. The movie works wholeheartedly assuming that you yourself will fill in the gaps on what the witch looks like and then rely on the solid tension on screen to do the rest.

This is more difficult to do than simply creating a spooky monster and having it come out at unexpected times, giving the audience a quick surprise. And that’s why most, but not all, mainstream horror movies tend to rely on cheap scares. Sinister, Insidious, The spell Serie, Halloween reboot series etc are great for making you jump. But none of them have the time, patience, or restraint to create an atmosphere that is truly scary like movies like, for example, Possession, The regret, or Lake mungo do. None of them are willing to take the time. Mainly because money talks and these movies make a lot more money than thoughtful horror movies; they’re all terrible movies anyway, but you can’t argue with the color of a dollar.

For most of its runtime, Dead Space 2 works like the previous movies in the previous paragraph. But for a brilliant level, it moves last. I wish it was the game I was playing because when finally, after what must have been 10 or 20 minutes, the monsters came for me in the Ishimura, he felt won. He made these monstrosities, in all their grotesque forms, the climax of a brutal nightmare.

The Ishimura The section made me love Dead Space 2. It’s an hour-long level in an otherwise annoying and exhausting game, but I’m serious, I love Dead Space 2. It all comes down to this level. But that’s the power of good horror. I think horror is one of the most important art forms we have for several reasons, but one of the main ones is that it is a rare form of medium that appeals to our basic human instincts **; fear and self-preservation are encoded in our DNA. When Dead Space 2 finally fell silent, when he finally committed to being scary, which he apparently set out to do in the first place, it worked incredibly well. It terrified me more than I was prepared for. I love it for that. I just wish the rest of the game is engaged in the same way.

* What I disagree on here is that humans or humanity-based monsters will always be scarier than the typical monster movie and thus they work when shown. Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist, Asami from Hearing, Mamiya in Cureetc., are deformed versions of an average human, which means that the brain can easily recognize them and recognize how they are deformed. They become terrifying because we easily understand them, and that is much more effective than hiding them in the shadows.

** Pornography is too. But that’s an article Game informer he will not let me write.