I can hear his pulse racing when he’s quiet. I blast away babies with tendrils unfurling from their back while they spit some green acid at my Isaac, who ejects a low groan or a gravelly scream in response. I’ve become attached to the Force Gun, a Dead Space 2 acquisition, which uses the game’s gravity manipulation module, Kinesis, to blast away necromorphs until they become piles of rattled bones. Maybe you prefer the Plasma Cutter, Pulse Rifle, or the Ripper, which shoots saw blades. There are options for how you’d like to accomplish this. But, other than that, Dead Space 2023 doesn’t build on Dead Space 2008’s unconvincing story of crazed Unitologist cult members infecting people with their Red Marker in their quest for ascension, and so necromorphs continue to be yowling, sour victims of the Marker, and you need to hack their limbs off. The remake adds rooms you can access with an added security clearance system (you earn Level 1, 2, and 3 clearance naturally as you progress through the game), which sustains exploration even after Ishimura’s halls become familiar, and optional side quests for added context and background on characters.

Those bodies, with their taut, twisted skin, lumpy intestines poking through - like when you stick your thumb into an orange to break it open - belong to Isaac’s main opponent, the necromorphs. This feeling doubles when I re-enter an area I was recently in, not thinking about the bodies I already wasted until noticing, there they are, still piled up. Though I often press my controller’s right stick to prompt a glowing blue line to guide me to my next location, the tram system makes Ishimura’s smallness obvious and more suffocating. It’s glued together by a speedy tram system, which was cut up by loading screens in the original game, but, in this Dead Space, travels smoothly without interruption. I’m immediately impressed by the ship’s engulfing shadows, the only extra dimension, really, to the lightless spine I spend around 16 hours running across and around. As engineer Isaac Clarke, a formerly non-speaking character now imbued with Dead Space 2 and 3 actor Gunner Wright’s cool voice of reason, I crash-land onto it along with my bickering crewmates, including Chief Security Officer Hammond and computer specialist Kendra Daniels. The USG Ishimura itself, at least, lives up to my expectations. If you’d like to read the Kotaku Australia review of Dead Space, you can find it right over here. Editor’s note: You’re reading Kotaku US’ review of Dead Space.

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