The Dead Space remake is due to launch in early 2023

The remake of 2008 limb-lopping horror game Dead Space should launch in early 2023, EA have said now. This comes off the back of a developer stream on Friday which showed off (sounded off? hearded off? noised off?) some of the fancy new noises and noise technologies they’re working on. It sounds pretty good. And sounds pretty good, too.

I quite how the stream approached tech. It introduced some fairly basic concepts, complete with good demonstrations, and explained how they’re using it. Here’s the section on sound occlusion:

I particularly enjoyed the section introducing the remake’s ALIVE system (a convoluted backronym), which puts a lot more care and attention into making Isaac’s breathing, heart rate, grunting, and dialogue fit his physical and mental state. He even has different reads on dialogue for when he’s fatigued or injured. nice I’m always up for simulating the many horrors of being a rascally skeleton trapped inside a meat prison.

They also revealed new weapon sounds:

Then all of that thrown together in a vid of someone playing a short work-in-progress section from I remember being very unhappy with in the original:

You can tell they’re demonstrating something in a dev build, not playing a real save, because who could ever afford to be so reckless with ammunition?

For more dev chat, you can watch the full archived stream and yup, early 2023 is the plan. The game’s made by Motive Studios, the mob behind Star Wars: Squadrons.

I don’t think Dead Space is remotely decrepit enough to ‘need’ a remake, but I suppose we live in an age of publishers remaking games two weeks after they were released. At least this one sounds nice.

The first dev stream, in August 2021, included a look at the new ‘peeling system’ which shows damage stripping flesh off the monsters. Charming.