Just for Avery: Dead Space
By Obscure 0 Comments
I enjoyed doing me earlier Let's Play of Amnesia, and since I had another "horror" game on my to-play list, I figured I might as well do the same for Dead Space. I fucked up and lost the first episode, then later fucked up again and lost the final episode, but the bulk of the game is still contained herein.
Part 1 is not the beginning, but I never intend to fix this, because Dead Space is pretty bad, and I don't want to play it for any longer than I have to.
In Part 2, I continue my horrifying battle against shitty mouse acceleration and tonal inconsistency.
In Part 3, while otherwise grumbling as usual, I finally get a surprising moment of effective horror!
For Part 4, I finally fix the aiming issue, and suddenly Dead Space is fun again!
In Part 5, once again, I refuse to shut the fuck up while failing to solve simple puzzles.
In Part 6, the story finally steps up, I continue my grand tradition of claiming to know more about design than I do, and I fuck up some more simple "puzzles" and die.
And finally, in the penultimate/ultimate episode, I finish on a cliffhanger, only to corrupt the footage of the ending – AGAIN.
Dead Space doesn't merit a second play through, so this is all the ending you get. If you really wanted my comments on the ending, though, there are spoilers below:
So, there was a big twist when the one support character reveals that she was informed in advance about the marker and the necromorphs, and that she's been sent here to retrieve it. I was actually pretty pleased, since this explained her previously irrational hostility to Hammond (not completely, but it helps, at least). There were also some final stages that were pretty interesting – more elaborate terrain and a variety of bad guys, combined with a running kinesis activity. So, between the step up in storytelling between this episode and that one, plus those solid mechanical challenges, I was ready to give Dead Space a passing grade.
And then it all went to shit. They made a huge goddamn show of revealing that Nicole was DEAD ALL ALONG, even though that had been abundantly, ridiculously obvious from the start of the game. I was legitimately offended that they would try to pass that off as a twist, and it pretty well undermined any and all brownie points they had managed to earn up to that point. This was followed with a boss fight with a giant tentacle monster, which was the final straw in the general horror failure – the entire reason a giant space monster is horrifying is because it's unstoppable: if a single engineer armed with a plasma cutter can kill it, then there's absolutely nothing to fear.
So fuck Dead Space.