Some have said Dead Space 2 is not as frightening as its predecessor; that it is somehow less of a horror game than an action title. They are mistaken.
Dead Space 2 is not short on carnage. Unspeakable things happen on-screen, unflinchingly depicted: dismemberment, murder, hideous corruption of the human body, and the destruction of children. Once-human monsters lurk in every looming shadow, implacable and frenzied for blood. And experiencing such things is terrifying.
But Dead Space 2 was written by people who understand fear, and who recognize that self-inflicted wounds cut the deepest. They know that being damaged is worse than being broken. And while there’s a constant parade of physical grotesqueries, it’s the game’s subtler theme of vulnerability and pain that are more ambitious.
Isaac Clarke has not had a good few days. His battle against the undead creatures known as necromorphs in the last Dead Space aboard the doomed USS Ishimura left him deep in the throes of post-traumatic stress disorder. Things don’t improve when he wakes up years later in an insane asylum on the Sprawl, a city built on the remains of the moon Titan. Once again necromorphs are pouring out of the woodwork, and the surviving authorities want to ensure Isaac never escapes the doomed city.
Dead Space 2‘s gameplay is familiar territory. Its controls are nigh-identical to its predecessor; anyone familiar with Resident Evil 5 or 4 won’t have much trouble. Isaac wields an arsenal composed mostly of weaponized tools (a few new ones, a few old standbys), and his suit features zero-G thrusters and an oxygen tank. He rapidly acquires a Kinesis and a Stasis module; the functions are fairly self-evident.
Battles are short and desperate, even with Isaac’s helpful ability to lock charging necromorphs into stasis fields. The once-human creatures are fast, tough, and their natural weapons gruesomely deadly; the developers don’t hesitate to subject Isaac to nightmarish deaths if the player fails. Dismemberment is the only reliable way to stop them. A battle leaves a room strewn with body parts and splattered in blood.
Isaac’s Kinesis module is still a go-to-tool for puzzle-solving (oddly enough, despite most of his weapons being tools, Isaac never uses them as such), but others take advantage of Isaac’s hitherto-undemonstrated engineering skills by rewiring consoles and equipment. Balletic zero-G space sequences featuring stunning vistas of space act as much-needed breathers.
What’s changed the most between games is their protagonist, and through the shift, the nature of the games’ fear.
Dead Space 2 is an excellent lesson in how to give a previously passive character active status. In the first game Isaac never spoke, though some of his body language was eloquent. Reading his logs implied an intelligent and resilient man, but since the logs were a glorified objective list it never really became a part of the main story. And since we didn’t really get to know Isaac very well beyond implied attachments, it was hard to get into his head.
In stark contrast, Dead Space 2 is all about the fracturing landscape of Isaac’s psyche.
Now that he’s broken his vow of silence, our hero is revealed as a quiet, decent, rather unassuming man whose words and actions hint both at a wry sense of humor and fraying resolve. Just looking at his face reveals his exhaustion. Quite understandably for the universe’s apparent chew toy, he’s furious at the way events seem to persecute him, and his experiences with the alien Marker in the prior game left open psychological wounds. It’s not enough that he has to contend with the very real threat of the necromorphs and the hostile authorities; he has an inner tormentor in the form of a hallucination of his girlfriend Nicole’s corpse.
For most of the game it’s difficult to determine whether the corpse-Nicole is a manifestation of Isaac’s guilt and trauma, or some projection of another Marker. Certainly she is linked to both, but it’s Isaac’s guilt that gives her ammunition. She’s a horrible contrast with an early recording of a loving conversation between the couple: a shrieking banshee constantly taunting him, probing him about his inability to move past her death, and even at times threatening his life- an early scene makes it very clear that even though she isn’t real, she can still kill him.
The use of a hallucinatory antagonist allows Dead Space 2 to transcend the rather commonplace threat of hostile creatures. Hallucinations imply madness; madness is a self-inflicted wound that destroys our most basic assumptions about how much we can trust our own senses. And madness is a constant theme of Dead Space 2, especially in homes belonging to the corrupt Unitologist church, whose doctrine heralds the necromorphs as a divine transcendence.
Isaac is hurting. His outward resolve never needs to be questioned by invasive internal monologues, because the hallucinations are evidence enough that he approaches the limits of what he can bear. It’s eloquently stated in his body language, in the air of weariness in his voice and his grim resolve to finish things before the death he obviously expects claims him.
His greater characterization in the second game allows him to acquire an air of frightening vulnerability. His physical vulnerability is nothing new, of course, and certainly not insurmountable; Isaac is just as capable of mangling and dismembering mere necromorphs as they are of tearing him apart. But his mental vulnerability can’t be banished so easily; it hangs over him like the Sword of Damocles, dipping close and closer as the finale looms.
And that’s what people who say Dead Space 2 has lost some of its horror miss. Horror isn’t found in gruesome death. The player obviously is never in any physical danger. Horror comes solely from the mind; from the dread the game can convince the player to feel safe behind the television.
Horror is in the helpless anticipation of disaster, and that’s everywhere in Dead Space 2.