When I heard the news that EA was working on a remake of Dead Space, I thought they were crazy. Well, no, I thought they were greedy, but still I found the idea of remaking it absurd. Aside from a lousy PC port, the original game is fucking magical in how well it’s aged. A remaster might do it some good, but a ground up remake? What for? You could touch up the graphics, give them a modern boost, but there’s not much to improve on. The atmosphere makes up for any dated graphics, and the gameplay itself is nearly perfect. You’d just be trying to live up to the original.

When Dead Space (2023) released, I was actually in the middle of my first playthrough of the original. As I experienced all the delightful spooks and scares it had in store, while my friends got to relive them, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the remake was quite good. EA is not exactly a company I trust with any series, especially not Dead Space, so I had my bar quite low. A few months later, I decided, alright, I wanna replay this on PC anyway, I might as well get this remake. See what the buzz is about.

I didn’t expect it to blow me away.

Dead Space (2023) is not a moment for moment scene for scene remake of its predecessor, but also not a complete reimagining. Rather, it is more like an evolution. Dead Space as it felt in 2008, buffed up by modern technology. It feels like what Visceral Games would have made at the time if video game technology was more advanced by 15 years.

I, of course, have to get the obvious and least consequential out of the way first: these graphics are stunning. I’m rarely in touch with the AAA gaming scene, so I don’t get much exposure to whatever the latest developments in graphical fidelity are outside of trailers at the game awards, resulting in this being a fucking treat. When I see these top notch graphics in whatever bullshit Call of Duty game, I don’t care. I am displeased by it, even. It is another story to see it in a game with art direction and visual design as good as Dead Space. Immediately obvious is the Ishimura itself, given an incredible boost in feeling like an even more oppressive and haunting behemoth drifting across the stars. Light shafts. Fog. All the good stuff. It’s easy to fall into a trap of over detailing, especially with sci-fi, but Dead Space (2023) never crosses that line. It has this perfect chunky industrial vibe, harkening back to the Nostromo from Alien in its design even more than the original already did.

Isaac’s suit is also redesigned fantastically, as shown in this screenshot, absolutely nailing the clunky, functional aesthetic of the engineer suit. A fun little design choice that I really like is that the upgraded suits past the third one keep the iconic three slit visor helmet, whereas in the original the mask would change along with the rest of the suit. I was sad to give up the box art look with my upgrades when I played the original game, and I was delighted to get to keep it in the remake. On top of keeping a consistent character design, it also makes the suit upgrades feel more continuous, and it makes more sense from an in-universe perspective for them to be stronger, more armored versions of each other rather than feeling like complete redesigns.

Just as important as the environment itself is its inhabitants, or at least what’s left of them. If, like me, you saw Doom Eternal’s destructible demons system and hoped that more gore-heavy games would do something like that, you will find Dead Space (2023) DELIGHTFULLY gnarly. The dismemberment system was already revolutionary in 2008, and 15 years later it’s still incredibly satisfying… but we can do better. We can do more.

In Dead Space (2023), your shots cut through the monsters in layers. Your first shot rips through the skin. Next shot tears away the muscle, leaving a limb dangling just by a bone, before your final shot rips it clean off. I’m not sure if the necromorphs of the remake are stronger than in the original, or if I just misremembered, but the new system absolutely makes every shot feel like it has incredible punch. Nowhere is this more present than in the absolutely devastating force gun, a gravity-based shotgun that I missed on my playthrough of the original but picked up here, since weapons are now found in the world rather than bought at the store. Shooting a necromorph using it will stop it in its tracks and push it away from you… and in this game, it will tear off its fucking skin.

(there's supposed to be a video here but i can't host it on my site so its currently fucked)

Getting me shocked by gore in a game that is entirely based around brutal limb dismemberment is a fucking achievement. These developers deserve a medal.

Also, you can get Isaac’s suit to be covered in blood if you kill enemies at close range! This game gets me.

All of this is just the icing on the cake of Dead Space (2023)’s primary design ethos: what’s familiar isn’t scary. A remake will, of course, attract new people, but you can’t deliver a new scary experience to seasoned fans just by making the hallways nicer and the monsters bloodier. Dead Space (2023) adapts. It leads you in the directions you’re familiar with, but right as you go “hey, I know what comes next,” it throws an extra wrench in things to keep you from getting comfortable. Most of the iconic moments are left intact, but every so often it plays one out in a brand new way and it is brilliant every time.

One of the most interesting tricks the original Dead Space pulled was that the entire thing took place in one camera shot. Menus via diegetic holograms, the camera never leaving Isaac’s shoulder, but it always had one limitation: level transitions. At the end of each level, you get on a tram, and the camera zooms into a screen to load before zooming out and showing that you’ve arrived at the next level. It’s clunky, but it keeps the one shot illusion mostly together even when a loading screen is needed. Dead Space 2 would go on to fix this, providing a truly one-shot experience where you walk physically to and from each location. I wondered if the remake would keep the trams or if it would connect everything up.

What they did is so much more interesting.

Motive Studio did not keep the segmented levels of the original, nor did it link everything up into one long perfectly linear path. Rather, they actually went and designed a full layout of the USG Ishimura. Sections of the ship are placed sensibly in areas where they would be realistically. The trams still exist, but they aren’t a consistent marker for the start and end of levels. They’re just trams. If your destination is too far away, you take them. If not, you can just… walk.

The Ishimura was already incredibly designed in 2008, but it’s on another level in the remake. It feels alive in a much deeper way. It doesn’t feel like a series of video game levels, it feels like a real, tangible place, a place where people worked, where they lived. you can feel the way life might have been working on the ship before catastrophe struck.

The trams themselves feel much cleaner, too. You actually get to stay on them as they move, waiting to arrive at your destination. It’s not a blink and you’re there fast travel system, although the trams definitely move much much faster than they would realistically, so that you don’t get bored out of your mind. The tram system holds brand new secrets of its own, as well… but you may find out for yourself.

Honestly, a huge part of why Dead Space (2023) works so well is that all of its biggest changes are just… taken directly from Dead Space 2. So much was improved on in that sequel, and it feels right at home back in the first entry. Necromorph corpses need to be stomped on before they drop loot, sharp objects can be fired back at enemies using kinesis to impale them, you have actual flight in zero gravity, and my absolute favorite…

Isaac fucking talks!!!

A lot of fans weren’t happy with this change when it was announced, claiming that having Isaac silent made for a much scarier atmosphere, but I couldn’t disagree more. I never found Isaac to be a very compelling silent protagonist. He spent the whole game taking orders from others, and those orders always involved putting his life at insane risk. He felt weak, like he had no say in anything and couldn’t make his opinion clear. Dead Space 2 gave him a voice and revealed that his personality heavily consists of deciding on incredibly risky moves that have a slim chance of paying off, and I absolutely adored it. The remake brings this personality back to the Ishimura, and it really heavily improves on the story. Objectives are now plans that Isaac and the other survivors came to together, if not ones that Isaac came up with himself, and it feels way more natural to have him be a major voice in conversations, rather than be completely silent as everyone talks around him. It helps that Gunner Wright does a fantastic job voicing the character, as always, providing so much personality and life. The devs also gave Isaac an updated appearance under the helmet to look more like Wright, and while I wasn’t initially a fan of it I greatly appreciate the love and appreciation for the voice actor that it provides.

If I had to describe the Dead Space remake in one word, it would be flow. It is an experience so finely tuned to flow as smoothly as possible, feel as good as possible, move you from nightmare to nightmare effortlessly and raise a chill up your spine the whole time. It is quite possibly one of the greatest video game remakes ever made. I haven’t even covered everything I love about it in this review. There are brand new puzzles where you divert power and sometimes lose light or life support in the process, making the next encounter just a bit more stressful, the awful turret section got a complete overhaul and is now actually interesting and fun, and there are so many little details added to the story that make it an absolute thrill to re-experience.

I will accept a Dead Space 2 remake on one condition.

Remake Dead Space 3 and redo the whole thing.