As Dead Space Remake nears launch, developers at Motive Studio say the horror game is so scary they cannot stand to play it at night wearing headphones, promising news for Isaac Clarke and Ishimura fans – and the adult diaper industry – as we rocket-boot towards the Dead Space release date.
When’s the last time a horror game made you literally too scared to play it? I personally had a hard time with Alien Isolation – there’s a section, right towards the end, where the lights are out and you’re in a nest of corridors with about five open vent shafts above you, and it feels like every little movement you make might summon the Xenomorph.
Horror in games is a difficult balance. Scare us too much, and we might decide to just walk away. Play too nice, and the whole effect is shot.
One of the best old games, the original Dead Space had a solid blend of action and scares. Its upcoming remake, however, is apparently stepping a lot more heavily on the fear pedal, to the point its own makers are afraid of what they’ve brought into the world.
“When I’m playing it at night, I can’t play it with headphones,” says Dead Space’s technical director, David Robillard, in an interview with Play, published via GamesRadar. “It’s just too f**king scary. Just the amount of realism and, again, atmosphere. Not just visually, right? They really add a lot to this sort of genre and make the whole kind of experience come together even more.”
The scariest section of Dead Space is surely the medical bay, which judging from gameplay trailers will be making a return in Remake. Some sections of the original game however have been altered and reworked, with Motive saying aiming to improve any weaker sections or elements.
“The initial part of the game, if you play them side by side, they’re extremely similar,” says Motive’s senior producer Phillipe Ducharme. “But then as you go through some of the chapters, there’s some objectives that were not as popular.
“We wanted to make sure that if we were making a change, it was actually to reflect on one of our key pillars…not just make changes because we thought we knew better than the original team, because they did an amazing job.”
When you step back onboard the Ishimura, if you want to avoid getting hacked to bits, check out all the new Dead Space weapon upgrades. You might also want to know who’s in and who’s out from the full Dead Space cast, or maybe get the full Dead Space system requirements before the game hits launch.
