Making Horror Coherent
Dead Space! It's an excellent game, no doubt about it, and it achieves this excellence by adhering to old-fashioned principles of purity and unity.
Dead Space is pure because every aspect of it contributes to the core experience: survival horror on a ghost ship (in space!). It's unified because its style, gameplay, and even its cheats cohere in regard both to each other and their constituent parts. Everything from spaceship to spacesuit, from monster design to monster fighting, from plot to cheat focuses on producing a singular thrill. Wandering the chambers of a leviathan spacecraft, a derelict infested with recklessly-hostile, hellishly tormented and malformed former crewmen, a single engineer, slung with wickedly dangerous futuristic power tools, seeks to save the ship—and his ex-girlfriend. The whole game concentrates on intensifying this one brutaltastic narrative.
The Argument from Schwag
Pre-orders of Dead Space included a piece of schwag: The Art of Dead Space: Designing a Nightmare—an apparently unauthoured book that describes the making of much of the game's sets, characters, and creatures. Now, I've discussed some of the economic irrationality involved in providing schwag to people who would've bought a product anyway—at least in regard to video games—in an article at The Escapist. Though this book also makes no fiscal sense, it does, like so many other gaming promotionalia, contribute to the understanding of the game.
Even better, The Art of Dead Space illuminates the greatness of the game, largely by mistake. Whoever wrote the book spotlights a wrong decision and glosses over a right one. Over and over, we read that the design team aimed at “making things relatable,” says art director Ian Milham.
The adjective 'relatable' is rare. Milham and the authour of the Dead Space book use it to mean “having the quality that one can relate to something, that one can find a connection between oneself and the modified noun”. This means more than just “believable”. Dead Space wants to establish a primarily human environment, on the theory that this will facilitate players' immersion in the game.
The strongest example occurs with Dead Space's creature design. “Exotic aliens were out and enemies constructed from tortured victims were in,” says the authour. The argument goes, then, that monsters made of torn-up and reassembled bits of people constitute a more 'relatable' inhabitant of a ghost ship than do giant bugs or lizard men or cat people or demons—or even ghosts. Yet, exotic aliens, like the one in the Alien series (a heavy influence on Dead Space) or the Monolith of 2001 or the Blob, have all starred in films to great effect. It's not the job of the creature to be relatable in itself; 'relatability' comes from how the various components of the work hang together. And it is in this regard that Dead Space succeeds magnificently.
Unity!
Dead Space exemplifies classical unity—a characteristic of art praised since Aristotle. The concept is simple: a work of art should be a whole. No part of it should divide it from itself. Nothing should be out of place or discordant. To give an example: Jar-Jar destroys what little unity Episode I could have hoped to attain. Dead Space is harmonious, and terrifyingly so.
I relate to the foes of Dead Space; I connect with them enough to have soaked my sides with sweat as I played through the game; but Dead Space elicits this reaction from me by weaving together a coherent, unified environment, of which the monsters form the most dynamic part. The game's unique achievement is to establish this unity by turning everything inside out.
Exposing the Ribs
The key ingenuity of Dead Space was to take its cue for ship design from Gothic architecture. Designing the mining ship Ishimura, the central location, the ghost ship, for the game, “the team settled on a look inspired by the ribbing and buttresses of Gothic cathedrals,” says the authour. This is a decision of pure design: stone on earth needs this kind of support; metal in space does not. But the exoskeletal profile of Gothic structures exudes menace, as it plays its necessary role. It suggests, in its osseous bulk, the strange innards that hold us up in our smooth skins, things we usually see only as a result of violence.
The Ishimura reflects our own bodies, and it has an air of historical familiarity, but these reflections themselves don't establish unity. The patterning begins with the way that the main character's outfits mirror the style of the ship. Isaac Clarke, an engineer aboard a rescue ship sent out to aid the silent Ishimura, remains a cypher until the very last scene of the game, when he removes his helmet and we see his face for the first time. We never hear him speak. We know him through his uniform, his work clothes.
It looks like a heavy affair, Isaac's get-up: thick-booted, canvas-like fabric; vacuum-ready, self-sufficient, and exoskeletal in appearance. Crusting all of his several suits are rows of rib-like metal bands. They serve no apparent purpose, but resemble the ribs of the ship. Isaac's main designer, Chi-Wai Lao, justifies this approach as a move away from a military theme and toward an industrial one. Though neither mode necessitates external ribbing, the look quickly becomes symbolic of heavy grunt work.
You can deduce the rest of the elements of the game from this simple formula: Dead Space is about construction and deconstruction, building up and tearing down.
Tools for the Job
The Ishimura 'cracks' planets, destroying them to mine their minerals. The game's villain, a bacterium synthesized by human scientists from alien instructions, dissects dead humans and recombines them in bizarre and deadly forms. Isaac fixes the damaged ship and takes apart his oddly assembled enemies. This last bit is literal: Dead Space provides powerful gameplay incentives for the player to dismember foes. You use far less ammunition and waste less time killing them by cutting off their appendages than by shooting them center mass or even in the head. This tactic is in keeping with the tools at Isaac's disposal, which flow logically from his profession: he attacks with industrial equipment: power saws and plasma cutters, blow torches and force guns designed for moving cargo.
The gothic-industrial motif unifies style and gameplay. Every aspect interlocks with and reflects all of the others. The Ishimura and Isaac's suit suggest structures turned inside out. The creatures embody, rather than suggest, this extroversion—and, because they've been assembled to attack Isaac, it makes sense for Isaac to disassemble their bodies to pacify them.
Even the cheat codes follow a logical course. Dead Space's environments bristle with graffiti, mostly in English, but some in an alien script resembling Thai or Khmer. Shine your gun light on certain of these alien passages, and you'll fluoresce secret writing: an arrow pointing either left or right, which codes to either the y or x button on the controller. Collect twelve of these steganographioc signs hidden across the twelve chapters of the game, each of which corresponds to a particular section of the ship, pause the game, punch them in, and you'll receive a fat, juicy power up.
This echoes the plot, which ultimately concerns a text of this alien script inscribed on an alien artifact. The decoded script reveals how to make the shitty bacterium that got everybody into this mess in the first place. That's unity for you.
