Dead Space™

Played this for the first time in 2025, this game aged amazingly well. DS2 has the gameplay, but OG DS has the Ishimura and the survival horror beginning-to-end. Absolute masterpiece. Very wholesome and family-friendly too.

This was the first time (the year is 2025), that I first played this horror action/adventure game. Never played it before. It still holds up. I played on Intel Core i5 12400 with Intel UHD 730 integrated graphics and I could not believe, that I could turn on all effects, high settings and 2160x1440 pixels resolution and got steady 60 fps on an integrated GPU. Yeah, I know, this game is 17 years old. Still, it surprised me. 😊 It worked without problems on Windows 11 Home 64-bit, 24H2, build 26100.4349.

Great game. The levels are well-designed and there is a tool to make sure you're always going where you need to go (which has both pros and cons...but you don't HAVE to use it). I liked the weapon variety. The monsters get kind of repetitive after a while but considering how smooth the gameplay is it wasn't a chore or anything. As other reviewers have said, play this with a controller. There is lag in the mouse that I guess I could've gotten used to...but it was annoying when I wanted to be precise. I'll just say I didn't use it long enough to get used to it. It took me an 45 minutes to 1.5 hours to complete each chapter and there are 12 of them. Some of the bosses might stump you. One thing I liked about the enemies...is there are no wrong ways to deal with them. There are options and some will be better than others depending what kind of way you'd like to approach the situation. The graphics, while dated today still hold up great for those who don't need the latest/greatest visuals. It's an atmospheric game with nice sounds. The story wasn't that interesting to me. By halfway through the game I didn't really care what was said, I just moved on to where I needed to be next. I was very impressed with this game and all things considered, this game is an 8 and maybe an 8.5 for those who enjoyed aliens, event horizon and similar movies.

"Why?", the protagonist presumably asks his self when encountering yet another engineering and design solution that has no apparent practical purpose, other than to make it difficult for the protagonist to proceed. You might ask yourself the same question, several times, as you progress through Dead Space. From the cliched plot (mad scientists with God delusions, multi-form aliens, a spaceship with umpteen problems) to the platform game on steroids gameplay there is little original here. Dead Space is essentially an exercise in going there to do something, then traipsing back to do something else, only to discover that now there's another problem and you have to go somewhere else to do something, and so on. A cycle of 'ho hum' that even the two main NPC characters complain about in the game. Then there's the absence of horror, and survival, in a horror survival game. The necromorphs you face are neither scary or challenging, while you are so well resourced throughout the game that you rarely encounter a situation where you have insufficient ammo, or other equipment to hand. Throw in a handful of annoying mini-games, the inability to save your game when you want to, a control system designed for controllers rather than keyboards, too many logical inconsistencies to shake a stick at, and you have Dead Space. A competent genre entry that frustrates more than it pleases.

The game is 10 years old, and it holds up perfectly (some technical issues that are fixed by reading pcgamingwiki aside), it is the hallmark of video game horror, and none of the sequels can match this first masterpiece. It's a must-play.