Dead Space (PS3, 2008)

Like adventure games and Indian food, survival horror games are usually good even when they're pretty bad.  Even Dino Crisis couldn't really go wrong, though it certainly tried.  However, aside from a brief flirtation with Fatal Frame, which might be the scariest game of its generation, I largely abandoned the genre after the Silent Hill series stopped being developed in Japan.  Getting into the Halloween spirit, I decided to give Dead Space a shot this October.

Dead Space is firmly in the post-Resident Evil 4 tradition of horror games, which is to say that it tries a little too hard to satisfy the action gamer's itch.   What was lost in this transition was the true feeling of helplessness that games like Silent Hill fostered, where bad aiming and horrible controls were as much your enemy as the monsters.  Isaac Clarke, the protagonist of Dead Space, is a one-man army.

Although each weapon is interestingly flawed, you get to carry four of them, so it's not too hard to find a strategy that will let you stay in control.  Ammo wasn't too hard to find, even in Hard mode, after I discovered (late in the game) that the green boxes were breakable, and I always had enough credits to buy what I was low on, at the plentiful stores spread throughout the map.  None of this stopped me from getting horribly dismembered every two minutes, but the checkpoint system kept this from being too frustrating, and made the save points largely anachronistic.

Speaking of dismemberment, the game has a weird fetish about it.  Any weapon can tear apart limbs like cottage cheese, and it's usually the fastest way to kill monsters (a back-of-the-box bullet point calls it "Strategic Dismemberment", which might be what the Republican party is considering these days).

The monsters are called necromorphs, which take over a mining spaceship after they bring aboard some big rock called the "Marker".  Isaac is part of the rescue party, which gets predictably separated after it arrives.  Most of the character interaction is over one-sided radio transmission, which keeps you from getting too attached.  Some of the rescuers may or may not be secretly working for the government, and there's some nonsense about a cult with a denigrating and completely unnecessary parallel to Scientology.

All of this is to set up some "big reveals", like the fact that the Marker was created by the government as a replica of the actual alien marker.  Not that there's an important distinction there.  Also, the appearances of your wife are hallucinations caused by the aliens (or whatever), a blindingly obvious fact that somehow needs to be confirmed by video evidence.

With all of its faults, though, Dead Space was still a pretty fun game.  It has some cool innovations, like having all map and inventory interactions be via holograms, instead of time-stopping menu screens.  There's a scary subplot involving a monster that can't be killed, an obvious but effective ploy since Resident Evil 3.  Most importantly, on a dark Boston night, with the lights out and the headphones plugged in, it's capable of freaking you out, and that's really all that matters.

(Dead Space is out for PS3, 360, and PC.  I would encourage you to play a console version; I hear the controls on the PC are no good.)