Gaming news: Dead Space 3

Dead Space 3 is an upcoming third-person survival horror video game, developed by Visceral Games.. Announced at E3 2012 on June 4, 2012, it is the sequel to Dead Space 2 and will be the third main entry of the Dead Space series. Primarily set on a frozen planet called Tau Volantis, the game will follow protagonists Isaac Clarke and Sergeant John Carver as they attempt to stop the Necromorph scourge for good. And it is to be released on 5^th Feb.2013

The Dead Space series blends the frigid vacuum of space with the disturbingly organic. Awful, fleshy terrors roam the halls of derelict ships and forgotten rocks. Screams echo through the darkness and blood. And engineer Isaac Clarke continues his fight for survival in Dead Space 3, the latest science-fiction horror game from EA and Visceral.

Dead Space 3 introduces cooperative play to the series proper for the first time when it launches next year. I sat down with freelancer and contrarian Michael Thomsen to play co-op and experience the dynamic between Isaac and Sergeant John Carver, the “brawn” of the pair. What follows are our mutual recollections of this brief -- but bloody -- affair.

 Clements: The original Dead Space had enough scares in its first few hours to frighten me off for good. I blame my bedroom lighting and a killer pair of headphones. So this was my first time coming back to the series. I didn’t quite know what to expect, but I know you had some choice words to level at the original two games, correct?

Thomsen: It’s true, I didn’t like either of the first two Dead Space games (more on thathere and here), but I had a much more positive impression of Dead Space 3. A lot of people have worried that co-op will ruin the sense of horror and isolation in the first two games, and it does, but to me that’s an excellent improvement on what was a dim and shallow foundation. The most interesting parts of the demo to me were the fantastic sequences where we noticed that what was happening on my screen and your screen weren’t actually the same thing.

Midway through the demo there’s a cluttered room with an elevator we were supposed to go down. In my game there were a pile of toy soldiers by the elevator door, but in your game they weren’t there. Playing online, neither of us would know what the other is seeing and we’d just have to go on faith we’re seeing the same thing.

Later in the level, my character Carver went into a full hallucination where it appeared I’d been sucked into a hellish corridor and had to chase a mysterious character to the end. On your screen I was just scrambling around a cold metal hallway, surrounded by Necromorphs that weren’t visible in my hallucination but you had to kill them to keep me alive.

I totally love this idea. I think moving the game away from being a monster-closet jump-scare experience and making it an incongruent negotiation between players who are seeing and doing fundamentally different things is an outstanding risk to take, and a perfect advancement of the best parts of the series.