While it’s always looked like the Dead Space remake developed by EA Motive was always going to be a decent rendition ofVisceral Studios'2008 horror classic, it’s probably safe to say that most of us weren’t expecting the sheer level of quality that the developer put into it. This new version of Dead Space is fantastic in terms of both the visual and mechanical embellishments the team made to the original.
Honestly, it’d probably have been more than enough to make Dead Space the visual feast that it is, but Motive went further than that. It set out to solve the age-old problem that’s plagued horror games since the genre’s inception: players getting used to it. Once players learn things like enemy spawn patterns and audio cues, the horror tends to melt out of the experience. EA Motive’s solution to this is the “Intensity Director,” and it solves this problem brilliantly.
Much as fans might remember otherwise, the original Dead Space, like most horror games, got quickly predictable. Once one figured out that the Necromorphs always spawn from the vents, it became easy to just fall into a pattern of finding all the vents in a room and then either catching the creatures as they spawned or trying to bait out the spawns in order to clear the room and make it safe for looting. The same was often true in Dead Space 2 and most ofDead Space 3too. In other words, the games were actually only tense and scary for a short time.
This is probably still true of the Dead Space remake, but EA Motive’s “Intensity Director” does a great job of slowing it down. It might even outright eliminate this problem thanks to how it handles enemy spawns. As described ina developer blog postfrom a few weeks ago, the Intensity Director is always working behind the scenes to keep players from getting comfortable.
Necromorphs still burst from vents with all the fury of a 2008 jump-scare, but that’s not the only trick anymore. Sometimes those vents will burst open, but nothing will be there. Sometimes the monster will come running up to Isaac, loudly snarling all the way, and sometimes they’ll creep up silently from behind. Sometimes a room will be filled with the sounds of nearby Necromorphs, but there are none to be found. With this Intensity Director, EA Motive has developed a way to procedurally toy with players’ expectations and use them tokeep Dead Space scary.
While playing, there can even be long stretches of eerie quiet. It’s nice at first, but the expectation for action keeps growing in the back of one’s mind. Something should happen shortly, one thinks. So, when it doesn’t, the entire situation grows even more uncomfortable. It’s tempting to say that it’s a relief when the enemy finally appears, but that’s often when the Director throws in another one of its favorite tricks: the “but wait, there’s more!”
It’s exactly like what is sounds like: somehow there’s always one more Necromorph to deal with at the end of a typical encounter. Maybe that’s something one can get used to, but having to account for one more hostile after burning through a bunch of health and ammo is often much more surprising/scarier than it sounds on paper. These are just a couple of ways that the Intensity Director keeps players off-balance too; there are plenty more tricks employed that perhaps many players haven’t even encountered yet.
In an odd way, it actually makes the situation aboard USG Ishimura more believable too. In real life, scares and confrontations wouldn’t come in clean intervals like they tend to do in horror games. Real life is so much more chaotic and unpredictable than most video game worlds, so to have a similar level of unpredictability inDead Space makes it all feel that much more dangerousand compelling.
EA Motive has crafted something truly special with its Dead Space remake. The game itself is largely the same, but with innovations like the Intensity Director, the studio has basically done the impossible and madea version of Dead Space that matches fans' memories of the game.That is, it looks like how us nostalgia goggles-wearing fans imagine it did, and it’s just as scary.
It might even be scarier than those rose-colored memories, since the original Dead Space was never actually as tense an experience as fans remember, but this remake actually is thanks to features like the Intensity Director. Here’s hoping more horror titles get something likeAmnesia: The BunkerorResident Evil 4 Remakeget something similar in the future.
