Making Dead Space my first horror game might have been a little bit crazy. I only just last year started getting into horror movies, and I've really been enjoying that experience, but games have always seemed out of reach. Simply put, shit's scarier when you're the one who has to deal with it. I don't know what made me decide to play Dead Space.

But I am SO glad I did.

Dead space sometimes feels almost made for me. It is somehow a combination of almost all of my favorite sci-fi horror tropes. Body horror, clunky space tech, and a touch of nightmarish cosmic horror over it all. add a protagonist in a cool looking suit of armor with a bunch of loud guns and you have made Owl a very happy girl.

A basic recap of the story, if you have not played the game: You play as Isaac Clarke, an engineer who is sent with a crew to do maintenance on a "planet cracker" spaceship called the USG Ishimura. His girlfriend, Nicole, is on the ship, and he hopes to see her when they arrive. As you might expect, shit goes very wrong, and they discover that most of the ship's crew have been turned into horrific monsters called necromorphs. Isaac, along with Hammond and Kendra, the other two survivors of his crew, have to find a way off the ship, and fight for their survival with one piece of advice, hastily written on a wall in blood:

CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS.

If there's one thing this game is absolutely masterful at, it's atmosphere. Every room is lit to perfection, and with every step you feel more and more on edge. The longer you go without seeing a necromorph, the worse this unease gets, as you start to look at any and every corner and wonder if the next one is waiting to strike behind it. There are a lot of little fake out moments where you think you saw or heard one approaching, but it's actually in some distant room or crawling through a vent going off to kill some other poor bastard. The whole game is basically an intricately constructed haunted house, that also happens to be a giant decaying spaceship. The game plays to this excellently.

In general, I think the design of the necromorphs rule, and are some of my favorite creature designs I've seen in horror games. They intensely call to mind the body horror monstrosities of John Carpenter's The Thing, which is my favorite horror movie of all time, those designs being a decent part of the reason why. The necromorphs are already nasty at a glance, basic slasher ones having long gangly arms with blades on the ends, but once you get a closer look you see the visceral detail and realize that every part of them is the contorted form of a human body part. Those blades are sharpened bones, the tendrils that the crawlers have are intestines (and the crawlers themselves used to be babies, YIKES!), and the bat-like infectors that create new monsters from the corpses lying around have a very visible human spine, and wings made from stretched flesh from a human torso. They are all absolutely REVOLTING. I LOVE THEM.

I say all of that without even mentioning their primary gimmick, the thing that sets them apart from all the other creepy crawlies, the aforementioned "cut off their limbs." Most video game zombies, you know what to do. Pop them in the head once, maybe twice if needed, they go down. Decapitating a necromorph, however, will barely even break it's sprint. These creatures are not posessing their human hosts, they have completely taken over them, and body parts are no longer used for survival, but for the singular purpose of killing. Body shots do nothing, you might as well spray them with water. The head is simply a leftover part from the human body, so it's removal does nothing. The only way to stop a necromorph is to completely prevent it from moving, remove all the limbs. This makes combat even more stressful, as you no longer have only one weak point to take care of, but four, usually two or three of which have to be hit individually. Good aim is key to success, which made my PC gamer ass have a much scarier experience playing this on xbox, with a controller. With just that change in device I felt much more in tune with Isaac's desperation. At least I've played a shooter before. I'm not sure if Isaac has even held a gun.

All this talk about cutting off limbs, but what are we using to do it? Four words, my friend! Loud ass fucking guns! Dead Space has 5 weapons of necromorph destruction that you can add to Isaac's arsenal, and I dont think there is a single one that I would consider bad. First is the plasma cutter, a gun that falls into one of my favorite shooter tropes that I like to call the Old Reliable. It's your starting weapon in the game, but it remains your primary mode of fire all the way until the end. The other guns are solid, sure, but nothing beats a good old plasma. This gun is actually not intended for combat in lore, instead supposed to be a mining tool. however, its ability to fire shots in straight lines mean that it is the perfect tool for severing limbs at a distance.

The second weapon isaac finds is the pulse rifle, a standard issue military assault rifle type weapon that is the single loudest thing I have ever heard in a video game in my life. While it lacks the cutting power of the plasma, I found it best used in situations where precision was hard, and all I wanted to do was hold down a trigger and hope that it would make whatever was running at me stop after a few seconds.

The next weapon I encountered was the flamethrower, which is... well, it's a flamethrower. It's not great for the usual necromorphs you encounter, but it is EXCELLENT for the tiny bug-like ones that can quickly climb all over and overpower Isaac if not dealt with, as it provides the necessary area of effect to be able to efficiently take a swarm of them out without either having to be extremely precise or wasting way too much ammo. Also it makes me feel like Kurt Russel in The Thing.

The next two are my favorites. The line gun is like the plasma cutter if it took steroids and ate some of popeye's spinach. It fires a similar horizontal projectile (this time having no vertical mode), but packs 10 times the punch. One well timed line gun shot can instantly force multiple necromorphs into a crawl, if it doesn't just kill them outright. It is the ultimate room clear, although it is somewhat balanced by a longer reload and a slower projectile.

And finally, the most ridiculous of them all, the ripper. Or as I like to call it, the bluetooth chainsaw. The ripper fires a sawblade projectile, but instead of just being a saw launcher, these blades stop mid-air after a few feet, and spin in place, moving along with your aim. Effectively, this means it's basically a chainsaw in the form of a gun. A wireless chainsaw. It's both ridiculous in concept and in power. I want to kiss whoever thought of it.

There are two other weapons, the contact beam and the force gun, but until I googled it just now to make sure I hadn't missed anything (clearly I had) I didn't even know they existed in this game. I never even bought them in the store. From what I can tell, the force gun is basically a knockback shotgun and the contact beam is a beefy laser. Fun! Why haven't I tried those?

While it executes its haunted house thrill ride almost perfectly, Dead Space has more to offer in terms of horror than just moment-to-moment scares. The further the story progresses, the more the psychological aspect of Dead Space's horror begins to seep in. As the survivors begin to piece together what happened, they begin to trust each other less, and for some of them their grip on reality begins to slip. The turning point (light spoilers ahead) is the discovery of an artifact the ship found called the Marker, which seems to be the source of the nightmare and becomes everyone's obsession the moment it is first brought up. Once someone thinks about the marker for the first time, they are unable to shake it, and this obsession results in a plethora of twists and turns in the story. On top of this, you begin to uncover another layer to it all, as you are introduced to a survivor of the Ishimura's crew who believes that the necromorphs are the next step in human evolution. An organization you find bits of information about called the Church of Unitology (which has a striking resemblance to Scientology) seems to be almost entirely based around this, but they don't come in properly until DS2. You reach a point where you feel less like you're getting answers, and more like you're just learning that the iceberg goes deeper than you could even imagine. Isaac seems almost broken by the game's end. He gets off the ship, sure, but the hell he clawed his way through on the Ishimura will haunt him forever.

I think Dead Space actually is a fantastic introduction to horror games. I want to play Resident Evil now.