Visceral Games took on that name after the success of Dead Space. Before that, they were EA Redwood Shores, working on The Sims, golf sims, and Simpsons. Their first zombies-on-a-spaceship game’s success was big enough for them to earn a more fitting rebadging to go with it. Sure enough, Dead Space 2 has viscera everywhere. It’s not actually the most blood-flecked #1 game of early 2011, but makes up for it with a whole line in stomping on corpses, animated or otherwise, with their various fleshy bits exposed alongside ammo and cash.
Continuing the bodily theme, dismemberment is a key mechanic, the only way to stop most of the horrors flailing their way towards you. There are numerous bits of eye-related horror, culminating in the infamous sequence towards the end where you have to direct a needle into the main character’s eye. You can also use telekinesis powers to pick up spikey bits once they are removed from enemies, and fling them at further enemies, the best bit of The Force Unleashed continuing to pop up in other games.
The mechanics, limb-shooting in particular, have some obvious natural alignment with the careful, calm precision required in the Resident Evil era of survival horror games. You can use stasis powers to slow the necromonstrosities to a crawl in front of you, but you still have to shoot their arms and legs off before they unfreeze and rip you to pieces. When things run and scream towards you much faster than you can move, you have to act quickly and correctly.
By 2011, though, even Resident Evil itself had moved away from that model, and Dead Space 2 takes the over-the-shoulder shooter approach of Resident Evil 4 and 5 and goes further still from the original template. I am a terrible shot, but on standard difficulty I didn’t find Dead Space 2 punishing. Its smart futuristic AI has none of the deliberate awkwardness of games past. Ammo splats its way out of innards plentifully enough that there is never not very much resource pressure, and firing in blind panic is frequently a viable strategy. At worst, a failure means watching a drawn-out bit of gore before a quick restart to a generous checkpoint.
As a result, as a horror game it actually isn’t all that visceral. No matter how much repulsive splatter is on the screen, it gets easy to view it in an abstract way when you’re staring at the same screaming freak doing the exact same routine for the third time in the space of a minute. In my experience of Resident Evil 2 and 3, losing a significant chunk of invested time would be its own horror that added to the threat, but Dead Space 2 has no such synergy. It does have spaced out save points, but the only thing they dictate is the length of each session with the game. Even when it throws in a surprise enemy next to a save point, there is no sense of sanctuary lost.
The changes make sense in a context where expectations for single player games were largely moving to experiences most players would play all the way through. There are ways that Dead Space 2 approaches this to try to compensate in different types of thrill. One is psychological horror, with an emphasis on unsettling nursery rhymes and the video game kind of hallucinations where you can move around things in the setting that clearly don’t exist. None of that broke through cliché to me, though perhaps having played the first game would have helped.
More effective is a move towards action movie dynamics, with some apparent influence from Uncharted 2. Dead Space 2 is highly linear by design, and Visceral use that in service of a series of excellent setpieces, mostly of the lights-turning-out-and-doors-locking variety but including a zero-gravity rush through a train that ends with a breathless upside-down battle. It was far from alone in turning genre into mere trappings laid over the same basic game underneath, and at least does so with knowledge that there needs to be something else writhing inside of there too.
Top of the charts for week ending 29 January 2011:
Top of the charts for week ending 5 February 2011:
WCRobinson
Haha, that headline made me laugh. Dead Space is one of those franchises that passed me by, as I was a dedicated Wii gamer at the time. When I eventually get a PS5, I should really get that new remake, I heard it is excellent. 🙂
iain.mew
I’m interested to play the remake eventually too! Glad it made you laugh, it was one of those times when I see something in-game and immediately know I have to use it.