Every October I like to revisit some of my favorite horror games, and this year I went back to the 2008 masterpiece Dead Space. Equal parts Aliens and Event Horizon, Dead Space puts you in the role of Isaac Clarke, an engineer for the Concordance Extraction Corporation in the year 2508. Isaac and a small crew are responding to a distress beacon sent out from the USG Ishimura, a “planet cracker”ship that is designed to harvest resources from planets and moons.
From the second the small group crash lands on the Ishimura, they realize something terrible has happened there. Almost everyone is dead, and there are horrific creatures called necromorphs that are rising from the reanimated tissue of the dead bodies. Isaac has to help his crew mates find a way off the Ishimura, and along the way he begins to discover what exactly occurred on the ship.
I won’t get into any more of the backstory, because through several games, a novel and a slew of comic books, the world of Dead Space is revealed to be pretty complex. It’s probably my favorite game series of the last decade plus for sure, and I spent a lot of time covering both for my ongoing podcasts and when I was a games journalist between 2008-2010.
You can watch the first episode of my playthrough (which is still going) in the player above, and you can see the rest of the series at the Co-Op Critics YouTube page right here.