Dead Space 2 is the perfect sequel. Not just to Dead Space, but in general. It does absolutely everything a sequel should be and then some.

I sincerely have not been able to stop thinking about Dead Space 2 since I played it.

Dead Space 2 intensely amps up the action in comparison to the first game, and this is something that sounds like a recipe for disaster at first. Many great horror movies and games have fallen into the trap of going bigger with the sequels and losing what made them special in the first place. The immediate comparison that always comes to mind is Alien vs Aliens. I love both movies, and I think Aliens handles this a lot better than some other horror sequels, but I still think it loses the best of the first film's horror as it turns the xenomorph into one of many monsters to be shot at, rather than one looming unkillable threat. Dead Space 2 completely circumvents the issue of power escalation purely because of the genre it exists in. It's a shooter! A genre that demands hordes of enemies to blast! The first game already had a ton of monsters that you had to kill, so the sequel can easily turn up the heat without losing that aspect of the horror.

Amid the bombast of Dead Space 2, it still proves that it understands how to be scary, and that is what helps take it from a fun sequel to a perfect one.

The game opens with a call between Nicole and Isaac, before the events of the first game, and then you're wrenched away and discover that Isaac is watching this video in a mental hospital while talking to a therapist, who he goes over the events of the first game with. Oh, by the way, Isaac actually talks in this game, and he's really fun. He sounds like Aaron Paul. Anyway, the whole time, visions keep appearing, first of Nicole, sitting in the darkness, then flashes of the marker. Then, Nicole appears again, only this time she gets up and walks towards him, revealing empty eye sockets and a face dripping with blood, only for her to then GET ON THE TABLE and sort of scream-whisper "MAKE US WHOLE" as her eyes and mouth start to glow with a blinding white light. It is a fantastic introduction to the psychological element of Dead Space 2's horror.

Before Not-Nicole can get any closer to Isaac, he wakes up, revealed to be having a nightmare, although he is still in the mental hospital, lying on a bed of some kind. A man stands in front of him, shining a light into his eyes, trying to wake him up. He leans into a walkie-talkie and reports that he's found Isaac Clarke. Clearly, Isaac is needed for something, and we'll find out shortly. He helps Isaac, who is in a straitjacket, up, and Isaac asks what's going on, where he is, all that. The man gives him the old "no time to explain," and tells Isaac that he's in terrible, terrible danger-

AND THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN HE IS STABBED THROUGH THE CHEST BY AN INFECTOR WHICH THEN GRABS HIM, SHOVES ITS PROBOSCIS INTO HIS SKULL, AND JUMPS AWAY, LEAVING THE MAN TO SUDDENLY WRITHE IN PAIN BEFORE SPROUTING A SET OF BLADED ARMS ON HIS BACK. HIS NECK ELONGATES AND HIS ENTIRE FACE SPLITS OPEN AND FALLS OFF AND HIS SKULL STILL COVERED IN TENDONS AND MUSCLE AND SQUIRMING TENDRILS LEANS INTO ISAAC'S FACE AND SHRIEKS AT HIM. ISAAC PUSHES HIM AWAY, AND THEN HAS TO MAKE A MAD DASH FOR HIS LIFE AS NECROMORPHS CRASH THROUGH THE WALLS AND KILL EVERYONE IN SIGHT.

Welcome to the action part of the horror.

We're just getting started.

Surprisingly, the first mode of combat this game introduces you to is not the beloved plasma cutter. It's kinesis. In the first Dead Space, kinesis wasn't really used for much beyond puzzles. The most you could do with it in combat was grab enemy drops from a distance, and maybe move a corpse if it was super in the way. Dead Space 2 adds a new layer to it that's almost so obvious that I'm shocked it wasn't in the first game. After you get kinesis, you notice a bunch of metal rods on the ground, and a necromorph bursts through a window. If you pick up one of the rods with kinesis, the sharp end aims forward, and by that point... well, you know what to do. You blast it at the motherfucker and pin it to a wall. If you manage to cut one of its arms off using this method (or using the plasma cutter once you get it a few rooms later), you'll also notice that hey, necromorphs are almost entirely made of sharp blades and spikes! Each necromorph comes with at least two free projectiles when killed! What a deal!

So many of the gameplay changes in Dead Space 2 just... make sense like this. Stomping on enemies (the animation for which is now much faster thanks to Isaac's improved agility since the events of the Ishimura) is now required to loot resources from them, which I honestly was shocked to realize wasn't a part of the first game. It's fun to do, feels like you're making sure those bodies are dead, and it means that you'll get most of your loot from a fight after it's over rather than being able to restock in the middle of it. Resource management is still vital to the game's loop.

One of the biggest things that Dead Space 2 brings to the table, other than the much smoother combat, is how many ridiculously cool action setpieces there are, and how NONE of them detract from the horror. One of the first ones happens when you get on a train, and necromorphs begin crashing through the windows. You advance forward to the front of the train, fighting them off as you go, and then you open one door and the next car is just gone. Isaac looks around, and then jumps up and activates the boosters on his suit, and you're just screaming forward to the next car while debris flies past you and the wheels screech against the tracks. Once you get back on solid ground, the whole train derails, and you slide down, still shooting necromorphs, and then you end up hanging by one leg in the space that it crashed into having to fend off oncoming necromorphs. It is EXHILARATING. And it's not even done, because THEN after you get down a giant necromorph smashes through and Isaac runs for his life as the whole train comes crashing down and crushes it and explodes.

Jacob Geller, had a great explanation of why this scene works. In his video, Dead Space 2 Still Feels Like A New Game, which I am trying so hard to not copy from, he described it as keeping the "survival" aspect of survival horror, in that the whole time you're still worrying about your resources and you never feel like a badass during the sequence, rather you feel like you're just barely hanging on. While there are some almost badass moments in the game, and Isaac is much more of an action hero here, that feeling of just barely making it is always there.

I'm linking the video because it's a great watch, but as I said it is taking me a lot of effort to not just say basically the things in this review that he said in that video. I have already done it a few times. I will do it again. I can't help it, I'm sorry, he just keeps being right.

The opening of that train sequence also marks a very key difference between Dead Space 1 and 2. In Dead Space 1, trains are known to mark the ends of levels. You get on a train, go to your next location, do whatever you need to do there, then get back on and go to the next location. Dead Space 2 pulls out its train almost as a bait and switch. The camera doesn't zoom into a loading screen. The train starts moving, and you stay on it. There are chapters in Dead Space 2, but no real levels. The entire game, to an even further extent than the first, takes place in one continuous camera shot. Actually, not exactly, there's one scene where Isaac is thrown through a wall and there's a really abrupt camera cut as it happens, but since it's already a disorienting moment for him it mostly gets away with it. That's like, the only one though. The entire rest of the game is one shot. 7 years later, God of War did this same trick, and while it still feels almost like magic in that game, Dead Space's usage of completely diagetic UI means that for me it still clears.

Dead Space 2's setting does a great job of facilitating this difference in level design. Rather than intricately exploring different segments of one massive spaceship, this game takes place on a residential space station orbiting Saturn called the Sprawl. You do not explore every inch of it in detail. You blast through it. You are constantly on the move, running from location to location, trying to survive and maybe, just maybe, destroy the marker and end the nightmare. You are sometimes in huge malls, sometimes in homes, stores, and two of the standout locations of the game, a church and a kindergarten. At one point you find yourself way far above it entirely, fixing a solar array, and then have to rocket yourself back down in one of the coolest sequences in the whole game. If Dead Space 1 is a haunted house, Dead Space 2 is more like a haunted rollercoaster.

While all of these action setpieces are incredible, Dead Space 2 still never loses sight of the quiet tension that the first game was known for. Two of these areas I mentioned before: the church and the kindergarten. The church is fantastic, but the kindergarten needs to be talked about in full. It's just as horrific as you might be imagining it is.

Immediately, going in, you know that whatever is about to happen you are not gonna like. You have already fought swarms of infected toddlers, and one of the major enemy types in the first game was a necromorph baby. This series does not shy away from this subject material, and it will not tone itself down. As you walk down one hallway, you encounter the first nightmare. In a window, you see a room where a woman is on her knees calling to a baby to walk towards her. Not a living one, though. The baby's back is horribly swollen, and pulsating with a green-yellow glow. The woman acts as if she doesn't see it. The baby cries as it crawls. For a game that is already full of nasty gore and body horror, this is easily the most grotesque it has ever been up to this point. The baby crawls into her arms, and she hugs it, like it's still a human being and not an animated collection of flesh and bone with only the instinct to kill. A split second later there's a loud BANG and the window is painted with red.

The babies fucking explode.

The church isn't as viscerally creepy as the kindergarten, but it is unnerving for another reason. Cults! Cults that feel very real and possible! I joked in my Dead Space 1 review that the church of Unitology felt suspiciously similar to the real church of Scientology, and that continues hard in this game. You discover that these aren't just some crackpot weirdos, they have power. They are firm in their beliefs, their numbers are in the billions, and they WILL achieve their goals. They refer to a prophesized event called the Convergence, where all of humanity will sort of combine into a single unit and all suffering will be over. They speak of this like it will be a great utopia, and they probably genuinely believe that. But Isaac has seen what the alien relics they worship do. If it is anything even remotely similar to the horrific necromorphs, then the Unitologists are planning to create hell.

Aside from the deliciously creepy lore, the church also introduces one of my favorite necromorphs in the whole game: the stalker. As one of your allies is trying to bypass a locked door for you, you realize that you are not alone in the room... but there are no necromorphs in sight. Nothing is screaming and running at you. You cautiously walk forward, and out of the corner of your eye something darts between two pillars. You start to realize that the room is full of necromorphs.

They're just hiding from you.

In a series full of mindless killing machines as monsters, it is suddenly very primally scary to encounter something that is hunting you. Not just trying to kill you. Hunting you. They're not too hard to dispatch once you understand how they work, but every time you realize they're in a room the entire dynamic changes. It rules.

There is so much more about this game I could talk about. The gorgeous environment design, Isaac's excellent dialogue, the chapter where you actually go BACK to the USG Ishimura, the fucking needle scene. But at a certain point, I think I would just be explaining the entire game.

Dead Space 2 is an unforgettable experience in both horror and action. It delivers everything you could ever want from a sequel, going bigger and bolder while still respecting the original. I highly recommend it.