did anyone know dead space actually had a really good story?

[Stark]

I didn't - until I played Dead Space 2, the failures of which cast Dead Space itself in a very favourable light.

Take the A plot; Isaac is going to the Ishimura to be with his girlfriend. Now - spoiler warning - she's dead, and he knows that. He's unable to deal with her death, however, and has volunteered for this mission into the unknown in hopes of 'finding' her and 'saving' her. This story is about death, denial, and Isaac's relationship with reality, which from the start of the game is pretty tenuous. How much of what we experience is coloured by Isaac's complete denial of his most pressing reality?

Or even the B plot; the scientologists and their marker. They can be seen as a representation of Isaac's inner struggle with denial. The scientologists seek the marker - which they know is extremely personally dangerous and a challenge to their worldview, in much the same way that Isaac seeks to 'find' someone he secretly knows is dead. The marker is the secret of the Ishimura; nobody outside knows it's there, just like the end of the recording Nicole has sent to Isaac. It is also the direct cause of all the death aboard the ship and the harrowing experiences Isaac passes through. In a sense, all the death on the ship is Nicole's death, and the quest for the marker is Isaac's struggle to accept it. The marker both helps and hinders Isaac, because Isaac himself is torn between his desire to 'save' Nicole and his need to deal with her death. Once this metaphorical secret is destroyed and the death is ended, we are shown the entire message Isaac could never show himself - clearly demonstrating his personal victory over his denial. He is blown into space, literally reborn.

In Dead Space 2 this is all pissed away, of course, with Nicole/the marker turned into the scary girl from FEAR telling Isaac he has a small dick, Isaac's personal harrowing rendered irrelevant by hordes of exploding babies, and a return to the Ishimura more an excuse to cut and paste level design than to explore Isaac's state of mind.

[Vendetta]

It also had a better structure, with openly wanderable levels that were small enough and repeated frequently enough that you got used to them and didn't wander around lost and confused. Whereas DS2 was a straight line between loud crashy setpieces.

Actually, it's quite common that the best stories in games are in horror games, rather than in the allegedly more story driven RPGs. Silent Hill 2 and Project Zero 2 (Fatal Frame, yankee) both have really good stories with underlying layers of detail behind their protagonists and the choices they have to make.

Even Alan Wake could have had a really good story if they hadn't spoiled it in the first five minutes of the tutorial.

[Vendetta]

Although now I come to think of it, and I hadn't before because I was distracted by how much Dead Space is blatant System Shock fanfiction, Isaac's story in Dead Space is basically just Silent Hill 2 in space. $Dude goes to $SpookyPlace at the behest of a communication from $DeadWife, he is assailed by horrid monsters and simulacra of $DeadWife until he comes to terms with the fact that she is actually dead.

Though I think Silent Hill 2 was better at it, because it retains a tighter focus. The story is just about James exploring his guilt, and other characters are only present as mirrors to contrast him to.

[Stark]

Its particularly sad because after a game where Isaac starts off a bit flakey and has a series of terrible experiences, he turns out in the second game to be Super Sane, and his personal insecurity is transposed into a terrible boss battle. The only time his state of mind is communicated well is when he returns to the Ishimura and he seems uncertain that he has the strength to revisit this place.

Speaking of Silent Hill 2, I kinda wish the SH/RE format wasn't so terrible. I thought SH2 was awful when I played it at 19, but maybe the plot would be more effective for me now and the side characters less wholly irrelevant. Dead Space even takes musical cues from those games.

Western 'horror' games seem to really suffer from laboring the point, whereas Japanese games in the genre seem to be sometimes wholly abstract. If SH2 had the entire last third of the game a ghost woman saying YOU KILLED YOUR WIFE OH NOES it would be on the level of Dead Space 2. That game has a common combination of assuming the player is stupid and thus making the protaganist stupid (ie everything Isaac does is outrageously stupid 'must do what current titty NPC tells me, no noes it was a mistake' stuff) and endlessly repeating the last plot point in spooky messages for hours.

There's actually a point in DS2 where Isaac's objective pointer doesn't work (because he has no woman to tell him what to do, lol) and his reaction is the sort of thing they really should have explored more.

[Vendetta]

Yeah, there was a whole long time where horror games were married to rubbish controls because they thought that if you could actually play them they wouldn't be scary any more.

Which is the wrong way to think about the role of enemies in a horror game. Dead Space somewhat falls over as a horror game not because you can control the combat effectively (it is, after all, basically standard TPS, and your weapons are pretty killy) but because there's too much combat. When monsters try to rip your face off every two and a half minutes there's no time to build up the tension between their attempts, and the player isn't thinking "I hope a monster doesn't try and rip my face off", they're thinking about the fiddly details of the combat system.

The threat of imminent face-rippage is more frightening than its presence, no matter how well the player is able to deal with it.

[Stark]

It also shares common problems with 'zombie' games, in that Isaac can trivially blast hundreds or thousands of bad guys casually, only hitting heal every now and again, and a single zombie can wipe out an entire shipload of heavily-armed time-control space marines. The disconnect between the story-danger of the badguys and their game-danger is just too large; the only dangerous badguy in Dead Space are they guys who literally cannot be killed.

[Vendetta]

Yeah. These are problems that Silent Hill and Project Zero don't have.

In Silent Hill 2, for instance, it's implied that only the protagonist sees any monsters at all, and their appearances are drawn from the character of James himself and so they all have some bearing on the story of his character.

PZ is set in an explicitly abandoned location and all the enemies are ghosts anyway.

[Stark]

I think those games are more connected in a game-sense with their theme - SH2 is about guilt, and the badguys are literally guilt, the final boss is guilt, the character's journey is about guilt, etc. In Dead Space, the game is about denial, but all the play is about shooting off arms and legs, and the story is about Typical Scifi Stuff.

This is what I think is the strength of Silent Hill as a setting; its a blank slate of bizarre magical crap that lets a game directly explore the mind of the protaganist. Its like a bubble of Drama Space, whereas much of the surface narrative in Dead Space is either irrelevant or actually terrible.

[Vendetta]

Yeah, the surface narrative of Dead Space is confused as all hell. Especially if you include the sequel. They don't really seem to have decided what they want the marker to be and do, and what they want the necromorphs to be and do, so sometimes the marker turns the necromorphs off, except also it makes them, and sometimes it makes them all cluster round it and sing space-zombie campfire songs.

[Stark]

The second game shows signs of being changed during development; some things seem totally irrelevant, some things go nowhere, some things come from nowhere, etc. Some areas obviously got much more or less work than others. I imagine originally Tiedmann was supposed to be a character and not just an irrelevant QTE.

The whole game coudl have been improved if it explored the idea that Isaac's stupid idea to set the Ishimura adrift to fix a train track (no really) was really just an excuse to cover his compulsion to return to the ship due to his state of mind. The story acheivement for that even talks about 'the shard' which isn't mentioned in this sequence at all.

[Stofsk]

This seems like a fairly decent review/analysis thread on the game. Do you guys want me to kick this up to G&C?

[Nephtys]

One part of Dead Space I found interesting IIRC was that one part near the end, where Issac needs to get across a bridge or something and the control is out of reach on an elevated catwalk. His Girlfriend is up there, apparently alive and says she'll punch in the controls to deploy the bridge, if Isaac can keep the necromorphs off her.

So I start shooting the Necromorphs who are SLOOOWWWLY walking across the walkway. There's a lot of them, and they gain ground. Then one of your shots inevitably will hit this fusebox thing behind the path the necromorphs take. Nicole goes 'Okay, Bridge down!' and then you turn and see the bridge deploying. When you turn back, she's gone. And that's when I had the 'woaaah' moment when I realized that I deployed the bridge by shooting the powerbox. The whole thing was a hallucination.

That, and the first letter of each chapter reads 'NICOLE IS DEAD'.

[Stark]

Its a real shame they didn't do more like that (and they try the same thing in DS2, but its much less effective because Nicole spends all her time squatting on tables and spraying white noise of of monitors) because the 'surface' plot stuff was very generic and uninteresting. There was a lot of mileage to get out of poor Isaac being a fruitcake, but when they tried in DS2 it was deeply silly stuff like 'to access the hidden signal in Isaacs brain you must drive a spike six inches into his brain'.