Dead Space (no spoliarz)

I give this line five starts out of five. :)

I think it’s spelled diegetic? I dunno, might be an American spelling thing.

Well, that’ll teach me to try to use fancy words without paying attention to autocorrect… :) Seriously, though, thanks for the correction. I probably could have spent another decade thinking it was spelled the other way!

Wrapped up the game! Really enjoyed it, and will be tackling NG+ at some point. About 16hrs total with the side quests.

Late game pacing wasnt perfect, and the lack of enemy variety got a little monotonous. Atmosphere was great throughout, but once i got more upgrades and anno i never truly felt like i was that much at risk for dying. And when i did, the game is lretty generous with checkpoints.

Plot was good enough. I enjoyed a lot of the supplementary text and audio logs; while the ship might not have felt super lived in i thought the logs added a lot of character

Near the end of Chapter 3 now. I’m really enjoying this. I’m still going for the one gun achievement on my first run on Hard, just like I did with the original, so I’m still selling all other ammo and most of the health kits I find, and buying Plasma Cutter ammo. (So far that means selling pulse rifle ammo, ripper ammo, and flamethrower ammo). I still ran out of ammo the other night, but it was on the last enemy, and I was able to step on them to finish them off. So satisfying and terrifying at the same time. Then the game gave me access to a shop, where I was able to sell things and get ammo for the plasma cutter again.

Perfect!

I did leave my Dead Space 2 run incomplete last summer, so once I finish this game, it will be good to jump back into Dead Space 2 to try to finish that.

By the way, it’s strange to be playing a relatively faithful remake like this. It’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten the details, so all the tension and excitement are still there. But during the actual action, my memory gets pinged hard, with that feeling that you remember doing something before. “Oh yeah, I remember this”.

Yeah they put plenty of callbacks to the original game, stuff that makes me go ‘oh yeah, I remember that’, like the guy banging his head against the wall as you turn a corner. But enough is different, or maybe my memory is just faded enough, that it seems interesting and fresh.

Almost done with my first playthrough (on medium) and really enjoyed the ride so far. Just about the only minuses I can list are the sporadic frame drops that occur seemingly at random (with DLSS enabled, haven’t tested w/o) and that the game heats up the CPU like we’re not living in an energy crisis world. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my 5600x reach 80 degrees before.

I can’t even tell what the “woke” changes are, everything fits naturally into the cutscenes/story.

Also, Plasma Cutter continues to be one of the best weapons in any game, period.

I’m really interested in playing the remake. Is it a scene for scene remake, or are there new sections? Are there any changes to the gameplay mechanics?

I don’t remember much of the original, but some sections are definitely new (anti-grav especially feels different). As for mechanics, weapons now have to be carried in inventory, not sure if that was the case before, and they have added secondary tasks that flesh out the lore a bit. The game is also ported entirely to Frostbite and I would have never guessed if I hadn’t read about it. It still plays the same but the lighting is superb (especially with RTAO) and the dark sections are really dark now. Overall I really enjoyed it and will attempt an Impossible (Ironman essentially) run once they fix the frame drops.

We’ve discussed this extensively upthread but there are quite a few changes. Most significant I think is that the Ishimura is now a fairly open design. Originally, the game was broken into discrete levels, you would take the tram at the end of one to the beginning of the next. Now you can move freely between sections of the ship as you like. The game also has subquests now, though the ones I’ve seen don’t seem terribly deep. They’ve added a little depth to the characters, obviously Isaac speaks now and Kendra doesn’t seem quite so abrasive. Upgrading weapons is slightly different; there are no empty nodes, which I am a big fan of the change, and there are upgrades you can find for the weapons that open up new functions. That’s just a bunch of stuff off the top of my head.

Yes, all relatively minor changes in the grand scheme of things, but all that are to the betterment of the game, I think. What’s weird is that I still haven’t gotten on the tram, even though I’ve had the opportunity to do so a couple of times now. I guess I’m using the “on-foot” route. Not on purpose, I just like to explore everything before I get on the tram, like in the original, but here in the remake, I never have to.

Thanks all. Sounds like the developers made a lot of sound decisions. Looking forward to trying it out.

I was on the fence about picking this up, but I’m sure glad I did. I’m so used to open-world sprawl and random lootathons being the default for AAA action-adventures that it is refreshing to have tight, satisfying, one-hour chapters moving me through the game.

I had completely forgotten about the empty nodes! But now I remember hating them!

I am curious how the dynamic resource management will feel closer to the end. In the original, I remember the final gauntlet requiring close ammo counting, but I suspect it’ll be a lot friendlier now.

What’s the consensus here for those of us who never played the original, but like survival horror action games? Should we just play the original, or stick to the remake?

I’m maybe halfway through the remake at this point, but so far the only advantage I can see for playing the original is that it’s cheaper.

Both are excellent options, but the original is finnicky on modern systems (mouse lag, vsync), so I’d go with the remake.

This may not amount to a hill of beans, but I figured I’d mention - I just got an email from EA asking me to fill out a questionnaire about Dead Space. Your basic “how did you feel about x” and “would you recommend the game to others” kind of stuff. But toward the end, they also asked how I would feel about a similar sort of remake for both Dead Space 2 and 3. And then they asked how I would feel about an entirely new Dead Space game (I replied somewhat interested to the remakes, very interested a new game). Which of course does not mean these games are imminent, but they do seem to be looking into the possibility.

Not a fan of this new trailer.

I don’t like that style of interrupting a song with metaphorical razor blades on chalkboards.