Playdate: Dead Space (05/18/2020)

I've never played the game, because I thought it will be scary than RE back then.

but all these playthrough, it looks more like action

@bathala: If you play by yourself in the right setting the game can be very suspenseful. There are a lot of jump scares that certainly got me when I was playing over a decade ago and kept me on my toes throughout the entire journey. The sound design is really great which adds to the tension. Of course you kind of need to be onboard with the setting.

@bathala: It's definitely a very action-heavy game, but if you play it in a dark room by yourself, with headphones on, the volume turned up and the difficulty set to Hard or above, it won't exactly be scary, but certainly very atmospheric and tense. Play it while trying to be entertaining for a stream, constantly talking to multiple friends over Skype about unrelated things, rushing through every part of the game and paying no attention to anything going on and you will have the experience seen in these videos.

@bathala: that’s just because it’s being played like an action game. You can enjoy the atmosphere by taking it slow and being alone.

Three people bantering while one person is distracted and rushing through areas doesn’t give you that feeling.

Man that last monster looked like it ate a lot of corn. I remember this being a bummer of a boss, kind of grossed out.

As I remember, The original Prey liked to go this direction, also

This. All day.

The atmosphere isn't coming through due to the format.

I'm also reading The Gone World and was just thinking of re-watching Primer and Upstream Color.

@permanentsigh: I kind of disagree here. I'm not saying Abby isn't playing it like an action game, but I don't think as many of the quality scares in Dead Space work just because they are jump scares. There has been a lot of talk about the atmosphere and how it's being missed by the way she plays, but realistically I feel like it's more that the game kind of expects you to meet it halfway when it comes to the horror for that atmosphere to work. While yes, playing it alone at night can help, it's really more the unsettling nature of the whole environment that I feel like in part is pretty tropey by today's standards.

This game and to be honest now that I'm thinking about it Bioshock as well as a few other notable games of this generation that were super praised for atmosphere and environmental storytelling don't really do a great job of melding the gameplay experience with the overall tone of the game. You get beefy in both games really quickly. On top of that, they both provide a lot of ancillary story telling that if the experience was a cutscene or more on rails would properly have impact. But because they do so in more of an "immersive" free form way, half the time a player can be off picking up an item, or reloading or doing whatever as this big "moment" happens and the camera or framing isn't even remotely lined up for it to impact.

Like even consider a moment in a previous episode where you see a person down to another room who walks off. Your "expected" to slowly walk over and go investigate and be stunned when you turn the corner and the person is not there. But because of the heavy action/overall pace that the game has been played, Abby just looked at it went "fuck you" went over and continued to "play the video game." I guess I just don't think it should be so easy for one to expose the strings of games like these, especially considering that as Abby has clearly shown, one can just action their way through this. The enemies aren't that hard. Dead Space kind of encourages you to tip toe around and play it safe, but if you don't encounter any ammo problems and aren't wasting bullets reacting to noises/things that aren't there it's pretty easy to just upgrade, and own that shit. Even back in the day I feel like less of the scare of the game was on tension due to the survival or gameplay and more on the various unsettling things you were seeing, especially from the non-alien aspects the more dementia and going insane stuff that they presented.

"Do you think you could do a backflip?" Abby then asked Vinny.

Not that uhhh I don't believe in your abilities Vinny.

To echo the other comments, this game was / is WAY scarier+more effective with dread when you don't have two or three other people giggling with you as you kind of drill your way through it, the audio, the plot, the gameplay pacing/mechanics and JUST shoot stuff and talk. That's the format this is being played in, so, it's fine but in doing so, you miss all the atmospherics and the feeling of tense pins-needles/isolation, DIRECTLY tied to audio design, the game definitely nails/ed. Honestly still one of the best horror games making use of audio-cues or lack there-of for the spookage.

Can't quite take in the audio design when you make jokes and over-analyze over probably the strongest and most effective aspect to what makes the game "scary". They are literally talking over demonic voices and audio-pacing-tied-to-your-placement with stories about highschool homework. That might be why it's not "as scary". As interesting as hearing about after-school habits are. No joke, Abby has to ask what is happening every 20 minutes and then 'has thoughts' about the effect or quality of it... which is fine...

Still, love you and thanks for playing Dead Space, though not exactly in what I consider an optimal appreciation mode; truly do whatever is fun for you over all. Even if it isn't the game as intended, this format kind of nullifies the chances of that, and that's okay but, yeah, that's why it's "not as scary as people make it out to be".

In other words, in the dark on your own, this game is a VERY different experience, but hey, goofin is fun too, but that's more the crew, not the game.

Personally I think I'll likely be tuning out of this play-through because it does become a little obnoxious at times when this run is essentially a skype call with Abby idly playing Dead Space in the background.

Oh man, sorry you had a bad time with that boss. I loved it, but I was already using kinesis a lot up to that point. It's super useful for saving ammo.

@devise22: @knoxt: I just want to echo these fine folks' comments. Thank you guys, those are some great thoughts on this feature.

And honestly, again, much like what happened with the RE4 playdate, I'll be opting not to watch these videos because the format just isn't my cup of tea. The idea of multiple people talking over everything that's happening, with the player not even really actively engaged with the game -- it's just not for me. Certainly not for games like RE4 and Dead Space. Maybe something button-mash heavy like a Dynasty Warriors (even though I occasionally like those stories too.)

Regardless, I do love the crew and mostly everything they do!

These playdates are kinda wild, I can get that if Abby doesn't like the game, then maybe just stop playing it? I'd rather watch these three hang out playing something a little more in her style (I'm down for a AC: Syndicate playdate) then just playing Dead Space to fill the void of hanging out.

Whilst not a direct comparison, imagine playing through Outer Wilds for the first time with two other people casually talking during every story moment and just pushing through to finish the game. Hardly the same I know, but attention and willingness to engage in the game feels like it directly affects your enjoyment.

I also don't watch these live so maybe I'm missing out on the chat environment and everything, I just want Abby to at least enjoy playing something whilst hanging out with the duders!

Dead space

I disagree with whatever these comments are saying.

Edit: lmao at future Vinny the fertility statue.

edit: Also, again, this game was never scary to me. Others at the time echoed my thoughts. Don't wanna gaslight people, but some of you might be misremembering.

Exactly. I certainly don't mind this playthrough as the entertaining Content™ it is. Or maybe background noise. But no one should take this to be representative at all of the experience you'd have playing through the game normally.

The struggle with streaming games is finding a balance between being entertaining while engaging with your community (or in this case, your friends/coworkers) versus focusing on the experience both you and the audience are having with the game.

Too far into the entertainment/distractions and you have this. Too far into the game experience and you have boring quiet lets plays. There's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. Which Abby and the rest of the GB crew regularly hit elsewhere.

Hell, any game loses something played this way. Even a game as simple as Astroneer falls apart when you spend 75% of the time bullshitting and not really paying attention to what's happening. But an atmospheric "horror" game like this loses everything but the action. It's like chatting and playing with your phone through a suspense thriller the whole first watch then being like, "Yeah it didn't do anything for me." at the end.

Hard to fault Abby here for how she's playing because the game was always designed with a tilt towards more action than outright survival horror. Ammo isn't all that scarce and the enemies don't become serious threats until way later in the game unless you play at higher difficulties.

That plus the waypoint feature lets you make a beeline through the progression without forcing you to pay attention at all to what's happening in the story. That's what leads to the issues I'm having with this feature's format. The unique spin this game had was the intricate audio design that's completely fallen by the wayside here, to put it lightly.

I always took it way slower because at the time I enjoyed drinking in what was basically a better, more realized 'Event Horizon' like, environment but I can't expect anyone to play it exactly how I played it either, at that point I'll just replay it myself.

That said, although I appreciate that they took up the community's requests to play this, I just can't bring myself to keep watching these. Sorry.

@devise22: I think a lot of the things you cite as not working really comes down to the format of this feature. With most horror games (or any horror media, really) if you engage with it outside of the expected user experience, it falls apart quickly. Dead Space needs to be taken whole cloth, and your argument about the game needing you to meet it halfway is reflective of all horror media. Horror as a genre is really tricky to pull off because you have to fool an audience that knows it is being fooled. I think Dead Space's sound design, visual aesthetic, in-world user interface, how much of the screen Isaac takes up, the disturbing nature of the enemy design, music score, etc etc all have to work perfectly in tandem in order to achieve what the developers want. While there might be a couple jump scares too many, all of those elements work together, way more often than not, to create a really chilling and claustrophobic experience that easily unsettles willing players.

@robo: But that means she isnt really interested and should maybe play something else right? :')(and I say maybe because she can do whatever the fuck she wants as far as I care :P, if she wants to rush through a game to fill the time while talking about random stuff and enjoys that more...go for it^^)

If random bullshit conversations are more interesting to me than 75%(I got this from the chat, I havent actually watched this feature, I know myself and skip most GB-east content. SO knowing chat its probably way less worse than theyve made it out to be haha) of the game im playing id conclude i might not be very intrested in the first place but maybe thats weird of me?

I do also think its bullshit when people talk as if you HAVE to play games worse when talking to other people at the same time though. I for example always do way better when theres someone to talk to with me as then I dont have the time to overthink literally everything which i otherwise do. I pay attention to practically everything at the same time when playing games on my own and thats to a huuuge detriment to my skill and how long I take :') To me, having someone disrupt that is a great help. Everyones different.

Riggs... I'm too old for this ship.

*insert lethal weapon sax*

@devise22: You are absolutely right that you do have to meet it halfway and that standards have generally shifted a bit in terms of horror and dread in modern gaming. Maybe this is just not Abby's cup of tea, with the sci-fi setting and all. I can't explain why Abby would jump and scream when simply opening doors in past Halloween features of extremely bad Steam games, but she barely raises an eyebrow playing Dead Space. I suppose there must be something inherently not all that interesting for her in it. I have to admit that as a big fan of this game I do at times find this feature annoying at how they talk over everything and absolutely ignore the game, opting to mechanically soldier on through it like some sort of speedrun, only to later on incredulously ask "what is going on? what should we be doing?" - but of course I fully realize this is a ME thing since I have personal investment in the game for a variety of reasons.

Still the banter is fun and I enjoy revisiting the game! I'm not the type of person to play through the same game multiple times even if I really liked it, so it's cool to set my memory straight on a few things watching this playthrough. Definitely forgot a lot about it.

There are a lot of things being discussed in this comments section, and I don't have a good opinion on that, but I do have this to say:

Abby, you gotta shoot the limbs and dangly parts. It's, like, it's how they designed the combat.

*video starts*

" hellooooOooo, welcome to this SpOooOkkkkY game, its so SPooOoookkkKKkky"

*2 hours and 28 minutes later*

"fucking hemorrrhage you piece of SHIT!"

I am really enjoying these videos. Well done crew :)

Yes, I remember this game being very creepy, atmospheric and tense. But I also remember being an unstoppable, immortal, nuclear battle-tank by the end of it.

@ybbaaabby You've tagged first two videos on the franchise page instead of the game's page, making them harder to find. :(

Edit: just noticed this one is tagged on a mobile port also...

@humanity: I feel this game plays more like an action game ala RE4, a game that didn’t seem to scare Abby that much either where they’d also talk a lot and ignore the game. I’d never found the Dead Space games scary all that much.

@devise22: Abby had Dan, Alex and Vinny around when she played RE2 Remake which still scared her quite a bit. I think her playthrough here just says a lot about how its horror aspect isn’t all that effective anymore. Or maybe she just doesn’t find this game all that scary, which is pretty different from person to person on which horror game is more scary.

@vinny - what is the name of the book you finished, that you talk about early in this video?

@swilson1985:if it's the time travel novel then it's The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch

@humanity: Perfect, thank you.

Yeah, I remember having a bad time with this boss. I really disliked fighting it, and it just destroyed me over and over. Uuugh. Worst pasrt of the game from what I recall.

Oh, and love this feature, keep going Abby!

I agree with all the comments and would like to add, I've never seen somebody hold the run button the entire time playing Dead Space.

People here have rose-tinted glasses. This game was always a fast-paced action game. 2 even went full Uncharted with it, for the most part and is a better game because of it.

1 was way spooky back in the day but that was all due to the audio design which you aren't going to experience while talking to other people.

folks, this game is NOT scary.

I was the biggest horror baby when i played it at launch and was able to get through it no problem.

Yeah it’s gruesome, and loud, and really wants to make you feel unease but honestly they give you enough tools and abilities to make you feel wholly capable the entire game. The first weapon you get is strong and impactful enough to see you through the whole game, it just FEELS powerful to chop up the guys in this one.

I love this game, was my first platinum, but it undercuts its spookiness all by itself, regardless of who you have around.

@badsmalltalker: By the time I played this game I had absorbed so much of the marketing that the “cut off their limbs” gimmick was second nature. I imagine coming to the game fresh, playing it in chunks once a week in front of an audience, you’re bound to forget to do that or just not be thinking about it at all. Yeah it makes the game more manageable but Abby is doing fine regardless.

There's a lot of very valid criticism about what holds up and what doesn't in Dead Space. It's a game from 12 years ago. A lot about game design has changed since then, as has game direction.

That said, this is definitively the wrong way to be playing a game like this if your goal is to engage with the "horror" element. Constant crosstalk is going to remove any tension from the game, ignoring the story and dialogue and relying solely on "the basketball" to get you from point A to point B removes any sense of place, playing in weekly spurts and forgetting the basic controls each time leads to never developing any strategies beyond shooting-that-thing (Little to no stasis, no use of telekinesis outside of puzzles), and the default difficulty is simply balanced to allow you to move through the game in a relatively combat-stress-free way (And so, no need for strategies or ammo management).

There's a play through of this game that does show the horror elements; this simply isn't it. And even as someone who enjoyed the game, I think that's fine. It's just not a fair judgement of what this game was going for.

I have a real fondness of all the horror streams, but I do think they would be better off playing something else though. Watching Sea Beasts for example is a much better fusion of fun banter and a game they're more engaged with. These streams remain entertaining though!

I'm not all the way through the video yet, but do they not know that you can kinesis things and then use it as a projectile? Like all the explosive canisters lying around. Or am I mistaking it for Dead Space 3?

you're doing fine @ybbaaabby. this game is supposed to/designed to frustrate the player a bit. also, i remember running out of ammo a lot and you seemed to be doing fine on that end, up until this boss fight where it mattered the most but it was still fun to see you getting frustrated =).

i bought this and the second one way back when on some summer sale on steam. already finished the first one (maybe even twice) but i couldn't get myself to finish the second one. anyways, probably at that summer, on vacation, i got so bored with nothing to do so i looked up some games to play on my laptop. i remembered that i didn't finish dead space 2 so downloaded the whole game with my cellular wi-fi. it cost me more than what i paid for the game itself but hey, i was bored. and now i had this obligation to finish it for good.

nope, even then i couldn't finish it. whatever slider they had on the first game between action and survival horror, they pushed it up way too much on the action side for the second game. i didn't even play the third one.

I'm having fun watching this, even if Abby's playing this a tad differently than I would! I just hope she won't get frustrated out of her mind later on, because I recall there being at least a couple of sections that were sorta painful to get through.

Love this series!

@glots: yah one thing I noticed is that games 10 years back weren’t very shy about being complete dicks to the player. I feel like today’s games are a lot more gentle even at the worst of times which is why when a modern game like DMC5 comes along and it still has no checkpoints or anything it can feel super jarring.

Jeez I forgot how arduous that boss fight was

@thechris: Oh it's absolutely different for person to person. Even the Remake of RE2 I didn't find that scary, but to me tension doesn't equal scares. Mr. X storming around only added to what I needed to be aware of. But I get that to a lot of people there needs to be a gameplay hook to find something scary. For me Silent Hill 2 remains the most scary game because I find things that mess with reality/your sense of space and overall are more unsettling to be more terrifying.

I'll admit I don't think it's rose-tinted glasses at all as I really do think this game requires you to play it a certain way to be scary. I don't think Abby is remotely at fault for playing it the way she is playing it, because given the tools it gives you it makes perfect sense to play it that way. I just know when I played it on release, with a friend in a basement lights off we tip toed everywhere. When we died to pass the controller off, it would cause us to play more cautious, not less. It didn't mean we likewise weren't upgraded and could kill things. The scares from this game don't come from getting swarmed by monsters anyways in my opinion. They come from letting the game unsettle you with it's tone, environment and overall setting.

But the game has aged and I don't think anyone can deny that. It's interesting because I don't think the gameplay itself has aged, but the gameplay loop encourages a play style that contrasts completely with specifically how it tries to not only scare you, but unsettle you. Environmental story telling, audio logs, hearing noises all the time, people acting crazy or distraught. But how you engage with all that stuff is entirely up to the player. So much of what this game has done has become a common place thing in the medium, how one engages with all that now coming at it fresh seems a lot different to how people talked to me about it after they had played it all the way back. It's not just the comments section saying it's scary for those who think we are misremembering. Vinny, Alex and Jeff also "recalled" at the start of the series that it'd be a scarier game than RE, but not as scary as Five Nights. Again though all our memories are from playing it, and "how" we played it way back when.

It's one of the reasons I really love them doing features where Abby or someone who is newer/hasn't played something older comes at it fresh. It isn't just about deciding whether something holds up at point blank, it's about examining what aspects of a game hold up, what doesn't. You saw a comment in here to the effect of "I never saw a playthrough of this where someone held run the whole time." Again I don't think that is critical of Abby's playstyle as much as it is "I always met the game halfway, I never thought it was that easy to break it." Even before I played this game the first time way back when I had friends and others in my circle telling me "take your time you'll run out of ammo, watch your health, play it cautiously" etc. I think "when" you play something especially as the gaming medium has evolved so much over the last 12 years can play a huge impact on how a person plays. I also think it's very clear the devs in this instance had an idea in mind of how someone would play the game, that the systems they built around it paid no mind to how one "could" play the game. I think this playthrough and to a lesser extent Abby's RE4 one have shown how when you do engage with the game in a way it doesn't initially expect it to you can kind of nullify a lot of the tension and other things that the devs were going for "assuming" they could get you based on how you were perceived to be playing the game.

I was gonna say this. There was a couple jump scares that got me. But I'm someone who very much does not like the tension and anxiety that comes with playing a horror game and I finished this fine playing in a dark room at night in college.

For reference I got too spooped by SOMA and I don't think people typically find that game very scary.

@devise22: Silent Hill 2 always felt more like a thriller than a horror game to me, the game’s aim seems to be making you uncomfortable rather than scare you kinda like the Fincher movie Se7en. The soul crushing dread of being truly alone is what makes the game so unnerving, along with the triphop based soundtrack which never felt scary in the traditional sense.

Dead Space just has this RE4 thing about it where it starts out promising but after you see the same necromorph predictably pop out an airlock for the 15th time it starts feeling obtuse. The horror just feels so matter of fact, and in your face with how monsters constantly rush at you, and there is a lot of dialogue and banter between the supporting characters like RE4 that it kinda ruined the atmosphere of being alone on a spooky spaceship.

I don’t know, I just never thought the Dead Space games were all that great horror games. But yeah, a lot of horror games don’t age well especially the old Resident Evil games where zombies feel like a joke compared to how they look and sound like now in the Resident Evil 2 Remake. They are terrorfying, and sound horrible in a good way, whereas the zombies in the old games sound like a bunch of old men who just got out of bed. In contrast, I’d say the original Nemesis is way more scarier than his recent incarnation who feels more like a predictable nuisance like the necromorphs than a scary predator. I like Mr X because of how the audio mixing for stomping footsteps, as well as his music (especially the origknap OST) which still works really well with the new game. RE7 is probably the most scary Resident Evil game but definitely think RE2 Remake feels like a proper scary Resident Evil title again.

this style of play ruins the atmosphere of the game without a doubt, would love to see a solo play through of a horror game with Abby ala Jans bloodborne streams.

Unfortunately Abby seems completely checked out. Because she's not really paying attention she uses the basketball as a crutch and uses it a little too much.