Dead Space 2
Dead Space is one of the finest horror games ever made. It’s scary, of course–the creature designs and scripted events are genuinely disturbing. More importantly though, it’s fun to play–the elegant controls and fully-realized environment allow it to avoid the tedium that many horror games fall into. The game as a whole is an enjoyably traumatic experience. I remember well my time spent exploring the spaceship Ishimura. It’s so well-designed that I’d be able to navigate my way through if I found myself there in real life, attempting to survive the events of the game.
And so of course I was excited about Dead Space 2. My hope was that it would tread that line that a successful sequel needs to: Enough of the same that it would feel familiar, but different enough that it would be a novel and fresh experience. I make a point of deliberately avoiding previews, so I went into the game knowing exactly one thing: The game’s setting, rather than a single spaceship, would be expanded to cover an entire city called The Sprawl. Much of the pleasure of horror games comes from learning about an environment after it’s been destroyed–the larger and more detailed, the better. I was looking forward to The Sprawl because I assumed it would cover more territory with that same attention to detail.
I shouldn’t have hyped myself up. While I enjoyed Dead Space 2 while I was playing it, and in fact found myself so frightened during a couple segments that I was almost too scared to continue–there was something somehow toothless about the whole experience. Over the course of the month since I’ve played Dead Space 2, my initially eager feelings about it have cooled into disappointment.
So why the dissonance? The designers did not seem to be interested in putting the same effort into The Sprawl as they did the Ishimura. The former feels more like a collection of videogame levels than an actual environment. The sense of timing and pacing are still good–things jump out at exactly the right time, and I did yelp and whimper while playing–but ultimately, suspending disbelief isn’t as easy when I could almost see the hand of a designer looking at an environment and placing enemies and rooms and items with little regard for how realistic the placement is. Dead Space may be structured like a traditional haunted house, but its sense of architecture and attention to detail help that haunted house feel more realistic and more frightening. Dead Space 2, instead of taking the player through an actual city, simply slaps together a few rooms, populates them with enemies that jump out and scream “boo” at you, and hopes for the best.
An old trick that game designers often use to make their world seem bigger than it is is the judicious use of locked doors. Proper use of this technique allows designers to imply the interiors of unseen rooms or buildings without spending the resources to render them–the world is a lot bigger than the one you actually see, but these areas are simply unimportant to the plot. And so Dead Space 2 locks a few doors and hopes that you’ll infer that they lead to other parts of the city. This worked in Dead Space–by the time you’re finished, you get a working knowledge of the bulk of the ship’s layout, enough to allow you to figure out the general areas that are missing and what they might include. We only see a fraction of The Sprawl, however; there do not appear to be enough doors to imply the full city, and I never got the sense that the developers know a single thing about the areas that are not covered in-game.
In addition, it’s fairly impossible to map the city, and the game doesn’t encourage you to think about how far you’ve traveled or where any building is in relation to another. When traveling between sections of the Ishimura, you go by tram, and as you do you see a map of the ship which highlights your route. That goes a long way towards making the Ishimura feel real–you can fairly accurately see the layout of the ship. No map of The Sprawl exists in the game as far as I can find. The developers don’t seem to think it’s important. Most of the game is based on forward motion; aside from a few exceptions, I remember the path through the game as “the next room” and “a side room where you get a powerup”. You get occasional glimpses of the cityscape, but they’re fairly useless from an orienteering standpoint. You can’t point to any one building and recognize it as one you were just in.
There may be more variety to the areas, but most of them simply feel like new skins on the same types of twisting corridors. The mall is the claustrophobic maze with the storefronts. The school is the claustrophobic maze with the pasted-up drawings. The Unitologist church–the prettiest of the lot–is the claustrophobic maze with the impressive statue and blue glass ceiling. There is no understanding that the architecture of these places would all be different; it feels maddeningly consistent and, as a result, dull.
While playing through Dead Space 2, I wondered if perhaps my fondness for the Ishimura were due to a faulty memory or a haze of nostalgia. A late game chapter demonstrated that this was not the case: In one of the game’s most effective sequences, you reenter the Ishimura, which has been moved to the Sprawl for study. Most of the walls have been covered with tarps and it’s been cleaned up a bit, but it’s recognizable. Your route through is much more direct this time–but it takes you through several very significant rooms. You visit the bridge several times through the course of the first game, and each time something more and more horrible happens. When I entered the bridge this time around, I froze for a second. What happened there has burned itself into my brain. Simply being in this room was enough to scare me. That’s how you create a place. Frankly, I think the Ishimura’s presence dulls a lot of the impact of The Sprawl, which stands meekly and embarrassed around this much-better-realized environment.
I did find myself scared during many of Dead Space 2’s sections, but they’re not scares that stuck with me. There was none of the sense of dread that I felt during the first game, where it seemed that I could be attacked and killed at any time. I was able to suspend my disbelief easily during Dead Space–I was unable do to so as strongly in the sequel. It doesn’t feel like a world. And if the world doesn’t feel real, it’ll remind me that I’m sitting in my apartment with a controller in my hand–it’ll be enough to break down the illusion and make me feel safe–which is the last thing I look for in a horror game. Dead Space was an enjoyably traumatic experience. Dead Space 2 is a fun videogame. Dead Space doesn’t really give us any opportunity to mitigate its terror by saying “It’s only a videogame”. Dead Space 2 could only feel safer if it flashed that mantra in the corner of the screen at all times.
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