Remaking the Dead
Less is more. Show don’t tell. Kill your darlings.
The Dead Space Remake adheres to but one of these tired old expressions, and the darlings it kills are less impressive than you might remember.
[WARNING: Unmarked spoilers for the Dead Space Remake and the entire original series]
Best to start with a review: I loved the new Dead Space. The original series was a favourite of mine (barring the atrociously bombastic, micro-transaction heavy third) and to see a beloved world resurrected like its very own necromorphs has been an absolute joy. If ever a remake captured the spirit of its source whilst improving on it in almost every way, it is Dead Space 2023.
But there most definitely is an almost in there, as in one significant area this reimagining falls short: its narrative.
One Rewrite of the Dead
The original Dead Space was a perfectly realised haunted house in space, a B-movie gore-fest with ridiculous monsters, jump scares aplenty and many, many things that went bump in the dark. Its fiendishly unique dismemberment system, still unique today, led to a fun, tactile and oddly tactical combat model that paired perfectly with its atmosphere of mounting tension.
Alongside all that sat its narrative, a schlocky taste of sci-fi horror doled out in chunks through radio messages, audio diaries and occasional character interactions. So far so unremarkable. Where Dead Space really shone however was not in its originality but in the subtle twists it wove into the comfortable sweater of standard horror storytelling.
You weren’t fighting zombies, those were necromorphs. It wasn’t a virus or aliens, it was a mysterious Marker. The bad guy wasn’t an uncaring corporation or military, they were cultists. It brought enough new and interesting ideas to the table to set it apart from other tales of the macabre, and of course you had your best in class art and level design to add even further to the sense of something just slightly ahead of the crowd.
And now there’s a new one! Or at least, a new version. And by and large it is a resounding success. The Ishimura feels fully realised, no longer piecemealed up into video-gamey levels. Its corridors and halls look almost photorealistic, bathed in some of the finest lighting effects I’ve ever seen in a game. The atmosphere of the thing, already superlative in the original, is taken to a level even beyond those solid foundations.
But this is 2023, and we can’t have a blockbuster tentpole release that is unashamedly trope-laden and cliche. We must have real characters, stakes and something to say (the Last of Us has a lot to answer for here). And so of all the changes made in this reissue, the narrative has been altered the most by new hands.
The results are… questionable, and perhaps my greatest disappointment in a product where disappointment did not come easily. The short of it is this: in replacing the gloriously trope-laden dialogue and characters with more realistically drawn personas, the joy of the game is diminished, as is the interplay between the core cast. What was a memorable and enjoyable crew are now largely dull and generic due to the narrative team’s apparent drive for believability of character in a game laden with spider-legged needlemen and tentacle babies.
Crew Shortage
The best example of this are the characters of Hammond and Daniels, the two crewmates of player character Isaac, and his primary contacts throughout the game. The former is a company man, all procedure and process, and the latter the hot-head contractor champing at the bit over her counterpart’s dawdling.
In the original, Hammond is an asshole. He lies, hinders, connives and blusters. In the initial sections of the game he is as much an obstacle to progression as a broken tram system or quarantine lockdown. This served a dual purpose: with the lack of any singular villain it created a focus for the player’s ire and it immediately fostered an atmosphere of distrust. In this first game Isaac is little more than a gofer, doing what he’s told with no reaction or input. Constantly having to do Hammond’s bidding becomes a frustration point, further increasing the rising doubt behind his motives.
I liked the original Hammond because he was a dick. Everyone loves a good jerk because, if done right, they’re memorable in how much you love to hate them. His original character drew clear parallels to Aliens’ Carter Burke and all that implies… and I loved it. His sheer unwillingness to deviate from the plan, and his loyalty to the company, quickly creates suspicion around his true motives and adds that little frisson of tension that, again, helps an otherwise rote story stand out. The twist that he isn’t the crewmember who betrays you is fantastically realised and a real highlight of the plot. He’s also voiced fantastically by Peter Mensah, softly spoken to the point of ASMR-adjacent whispering, and nearly always unflappable.
In the remake however, Hammond is much more rounded. He’s a company man, yes, but he’s not unreasonable. He makes compromises. He adapts. His dialogue paints a man who cares deeply for his crew, including the now characterised Isaac, and this central motivation is anchored to a deep guilt over the loss of another crewmate, Chen. He is humanised and far more real than his previous iteration, with a personality that goes beyond ominously towing a corporate line.
He is also utterly forgettable.
In DS23 he’s just this dude, you know? He’s neither a source of tension, nor of empathy as his constant refrain of “I’m not losing anyone else!” comes across as increasingly facile. Is he a more believable person? Yes. Is he a more interesting character? Absolutely not
The same is true with his counterpart and foil, Daniels. Her 2008 iteration is all piss and vinegar, chastising Hammond at every turn and acting as the player’s voice in place of the silent Isaac. Just when the player is feeling sick and tired of Hammond’s bullshit, Daniels vocalises it. When Hammond once again asks you to perform a task or deflects a pointed question, Daniels is up in his face about it from the very start, or calling you on a private line to empathise and gossip behind his back.
New Daniels is much reduced in vigour. She’s the friendly shoulder, the partner in crime. In the intro, she delicately touches Isaac’s arm several times, cementing the idea that this is someone who likes Isaac, who cares for his safety.
But once again, she’s far less memorable. Her interplay with Hammond, the bickering that comes from pitting fire against ice and the key identity of the game’s moment to moment story, is largely gone. They don’t fight, they cooperate begrudgingly. They’re both far more reasonable and reasoned, reacting to the escalating situation as one might imagine seasoned professionals would.
But man, they’re boring.
By removing the larger, bolder, more simplistic character archetypes from both Hammond and Daniels you have a vastly less impactful central cast and narrative alongside it. Whereas in the original I hung on every word of their garbled transmissions, in D23 it was often a matter of waiting for them to shut up so I could move on.
A Design for Death
There are also several changes to the narrative design of the game which dulled the pointy end of the game’s scare factor. The most obvious of these relates back to the old Star Wars Expanded Edition issue.
Remember when those new versions of A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were released? Man, that was exciting. New scenes! New graphics! This is going to be great!
And yet. And yet.
It wasn’t. The new scenes added nothing except the realisation they should have remained on the cutting room floor. The CGI was dodgy even at the time and in many cases actively made the scenes they were hammered onto worse (Mos Eisley and Jabba’s Palace, I’m looking at you). Those remasters proved that constraint often leads to innovation and that a limitless budget and vastly improved tech does not good art make.
In Dead Space Remake, the in-game encounters with other characters are, almost to a one, vastly expanded. They’re longer, more showy and they take control away from the player.
I also think they make the game less scary.
Time for another example: the Mercer and Temple scene.
In the original, Isaac has been trailing another couple through the ship. On every new level, he finds audio logs from either Jacob Temple or Elizabeth Cross, who are trying to reunite and escape. When Isaac finally catches up to the pair, they have already been captured by Mercer, and the following scene plays out.
It’s horrifying, and has stuck in my mind ever since.
Compare this to the updated version in the remake
In the original, Mercer kills the bound and struggling Temple by hand, his faith giving him the strength to jam an iron rivet through a grown man’s forehead. Mercer himself talks of nothing but his belief, even going so far as to assign the same faith to his victim, making as if the act of murder itself is a blessing, and robbing the man of his own voice even as as he jams a metal spike into his brain.
In the new version, Mercer monologues. About, well… not much at all. He places Temple at the centre of his frustration at not having been adopted by the necromorphs, for reasons that are unclear. It has been Isaac, not Temple, that has been actively working against the monsters but Mercer seems to regard the player character as little more than an unwanted observer. He also kills Temple with a gun, adding distance to the act that renders it less shocking.
Add in the redundant dialogue from Isaac, which bounces from attempting to delay and distract Mercer to actively antagonising him, and you have a messy scene that feels like a first draft.
This effect of lengthening in-person encounters is consistent across the game and makes each less effective and more expository. It dials down the horror in service of plot and the plot it serves is more explicit and therefore less scary. Fear of the unknown and all that, but in the original Mercer appears from nowhere, performs several horrible acts while talking religious nonsense and then sacrifices himself to the creatures taking over the ship. We never get to know him because that’s not the point his character serves. He is the representative of the unknown, and knowing his story robs the player of the void where horror may fester.
In this way, the remake is a victim of it’s predecessor’s success. The story and encounters in the original were so effective, the remake could only copy them verbatim or expand on them, with the latter being a clear path to distinguishing this new version from the last. It was almost inevitable they would be changed. I just wish they’d changed for the better.
So, that’s my review of Dead Space Remake’s narrative. Worse, but not terrible, and wedded to an otherwise incredible experience. I did have a bunch of other observations on this topic, but this is already way too long a piece so I’ve bullet-pointed them down below.
Go play this game. It’s fun, it’s nasty, and it still has the best stomp in games.
Narrative Niggles
- The new vidcalls are crystal clear and gorgeous and not half as atmospheric as the muddy, VHS versions in the original. They are also, bizarrely, a lot less effectively staged (the joy of the originals was seeing the characters in the calls interacting with their surroundings, here they’re little more than talking heads).
- I got into this up in the main piece, but retroactively giving Isaac a character and voice adds nothing. It was almost certainly a necessity, given the current state of AAA game narratives, but it’s a little disappointing to see how little they actually did with him.
- They changed Mercer’s death and it’s probably the single oddest narrative choice in the game. In the original he gives himself over to an Infector in the game’s single most horrific scene. Here, he gets carried away by a tentacle, alive, never to be seen again. Unless they’re planning on bringing him back in a sequel, this makes no sense whatsoever.
- Still on Mercer, they changed his character from zealot to sulking preacher wondering why he hasn’t got his invitation to the necromorph party. In seeking to give him more motivation, they’ve instead robbed him of the purity of thought present in the original and made the Marker’s influence all the less scary.
- Nicole gets a lot more screen time and an added backstory (she’s a Unitology deprogrammer who tried to help Isaac’s mum). However, again, she’s really rather dull and she worked much better as a motivation rather than a stand-alone character.
- The full version of her vidcall is also expanded into exposition territory, and is way, way less shocking.
- Kendra killing Elizabeth Cross comes from nowhere and feels like a beat from her previous character iteration. It’s extremely jarring and didn’t work for me at all (Cross should absolutely have killed herself upon coming to her senses).
- The central plot still makes no sense when compared to the other games. The Markers want to create the Hive Minds/Brethren Moons, not stop them. I’m surprised they didn’t address this in the Remake (there is a throwaway line about Nicole asking the Red Marker to stop Convergence and it going “Ok!”, which comes in the last moments of the game and makes even less sense so I suppose they actually made the situation worse somehow).
- Saying all this, it’s really not a bad plot at all! Just… I wish the changes they made had made it better than the original. Which they don’t. OH WELL.
