Dead Space pt i: Girlfriends

If you're reading this and you haven't played through Dead Space, then stop. Give yourself a weekend, burn through it, and then come back-- it saves me from explaining plot points and you from spoilers. Or if you don't care, just wiki the plot and follow along.

To preface, I really enjoyed Dead Space. The controls have a nice, weighty feel and the gameplay is fun. There were just a few points that I felt could have been better, particularly the character Nicole, Isaac Clarke's girlfriend.

In Dead Space's finale, it's revealed that Nicole was a psychic manifestation of the spire. The spire uses her as a guise to lead you through the ship and return the spire to the planet. Or something like that.

It's evident early on that she's either an hallucination or batshit crazy, and neither of those possibilities is very endearing. As a result, the player doesn't form any attachment to Nicole. She's just a plot device, as opposed to your terrified girlfriend whom you're trying to save. I think that part of the story could have been done in a more meaningful way.

When the first message players receive from Nicole is the cryptic "make us whole again, Isaac", they're immediately keyed into the ruse. One of the complaints about Dead Space is that Nicole is a throwaway character, and this is why; the player is never given a chance to develop the relationship. If the player's interactions with her were frequent and entirely normal for the first few hours of play, then the discovery of her true fate becomes all the more potent-- by that time the player has (hopefully) formed an attachment and worked hard towards her rescue.

Trying to find Nicole would then become a game of cat and mouse for the player's subconscious. When Isaac finds something that points to her true fate, like the fact that she's never where she says she'll be or how neither Hammond nor Daniels can pick up her comm signal, his subconscious immediately fabricates an explanation that allows the ruse to continue. For example, Nicole explains to you that her access to the meeting area was blocked off, or that she's using a coded signal and that's why Daniels can't pick it up. Further into the game, the player's suspicions are raised by being continually stymied and by Hammond and Daniels' increasingly worried communications, asking if you're alright etc. At first, the player should feel resolute over Nicole and suspicious towards Hammond and Daniels, but by the end it should be clear that things aren't quite right. It would take incontravertable evidence to dispel Isaac's delirium, such as the discovery of Nicole's clearly long-dead body or access to footage of himself talking to a vidscreen that isn't there. Hopefully this discovery would come as a severe shock to the player and help the game to climax in a more meaningful way.

The thing is, I don't think Dead Space (with the exception of the last 10 seconds of the game) really addressed how traumatizing the experience of surviving the USG Ishimura would've been for the Isaac, the player character. Understandably Dead Space as a game is first about the combat and second about the story, but I think that little changes such as what I've suggested here could have gone a long way towards getting players more involved in the plot and happenings within the Dead Space universe.

As I said, I enjoyed Dead Space. I only wish that the horror plot could have had a more significant and emotional impact.