Dead Space is a franchise based primarily in Survival HorrorThird Person Shooter video games, developed by Visceral Games (formerly EA Redwood Shores). The series takes place in the future, where humanity has colonized space, telekinesis and the ability to slow down objects are commonplace due to portable, wrist-mounted devices, and resource gathering is carried out with massive starships that break apart entire planets.The crux of the series are the Necromorphs, dead bodies that have been mutated into monsters by an unknown alien virus that seek out and kill everyone (usually in horrific and gruesome ways), creating more Necromorphs. Every story involves a Necromorph outbreak in a closed environment, and the people who try to survive it. Either the survivors are there during the outbreak or show up after the place has gone to Hell.Other important points of the series include the Church of Unitology, the dominant religion in the galaxy, who believe that the Necromorphs are a step in their dogma towards something called “Convergence”; the repurposing of power tools into weapons to fight off Necromorphs; and people wearing Life Meters on their backs.The two main games in the series are:
Dead Space - The first game in the series, released in 2008 for the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. Isaac Clarke is an engineer who has been hired to help repair the USG Ishimura, a planet cracker class starship hovering over Aegis VII that sent out a distress signal. Unfortunately the shuttle Clarke is travelling on is damaged, the team he is with is attacked by Necromorphs that have infested the ship, and he gets seperated from the rest of the team, necessitating the repair of several areas of the ship to reuinite and find a way off. Isaac has a personal stake in fixing the Ishimura; his girlfriend Nicole Brennan is somewhere on the ship and Isaac has to rescue her.
Dead Space 2 - The second game in the series, release in 2011 for the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. Three years after the events of Dead Space, Isaac Clarke finds himself on a massive mining station known as Titan Station (nicknamed The Sprawl) with no memory of how he got there. Another Necromorph outbreak is occuring, and Isaac finds out that he is indrectly responsible for it this time. Isaac decides to go to the source of the Necromorphs and stop them, but is impeded by the head of the Sprawl, Hans Tiedermann, and his own trauma-induced hallucinations.
Dead Space 2: Severed - A DLC released in March, that follows Gabe Weller, one of the main characters of Dead Space: Extraction, as he tries to get himself and his wife off of the Sprawl during the outbreak.
In addition there have been couple of spinoff games covering events before and after the main games:
Dead Space: Extraction - A Rail Shooter released for the Nintendo Wii in 2009 and packaged with the PlayStation 3 version of Dead Space 2. The game follows Nathan McNeill, Gabe Weller, Lexine Murdoch, and Warren Eckhardt as they try to escape from Aegis VII to the Ishimura as Necromorphs infest the colony, only to find the Ishimura is not better off. It is a Prequel to Dead Space.
Dead Space - (Also known as Dead Space: iOS and Dead Space: Mobile) A Prequel to Dead Space 2 released for iOS systems, this game follow a Unitologist agent named Vandal who first sabotages Titan Station, then tries to escape when the Necromorphs start to appear. Because of the same name, tropes for it are kept on the regular Dead Space page.
Dead Space: Ignition - A downloadable game for Play Station Network and Xbox Live Arcade released in 2010. It is a Prequel to Dead Space 2. A police officer named Sarah and and an engineer named Franco Delile are on the Sprawl when the Necromorphs attack. Sarah wants to escape, but Franco has his own agenda. The story is told in a motion comic format with Choose Your Own Adventure options, though the ending is always the same. The actual game is three Hacking Minigames that represent Franco hacking various parts of the Sprawl.
Since the release of the original game there have been several other side stories covered in different media:
Dead Space: Martyr - A Prequel novel, chronologically it is the earliest story in the Dead Space universe. The book focuses on Michael Altman, the head figure of Unitology, and his discovery of the Black Marker in the Gulf of Mexico. As he and other scientists try to figure what the Marker is, everyone starts goin insane, and eventually Necromorphs appear and attack the laboratory they are working out of.
Dead Space - A Comic Book that takes place before the events of Dead Space. On Aegis VII a Red Marker is discovered during a mining operation. As a duplicate of Unitologists sacred Black Marker, plans are made to move the Marker onboard the Ishimura. But as the Red Marker is moved onboard the Ishimura, everyone starts going insane, and eventually Necromorphs appear and attack the colony. The comics focuses primarily on Abraham Neumann, who is anti-Unitologist, and Marla Jansenn who is a Unitologist, as they try to escape Aegis VII. The comic was released retail, and can be unlocked on the Nintendo Wii version of Dead Space: Extraction.
Dead Space: Aftermath - A second Direct-to-Video movie, this time an Interquel between Dead Space and Dead Space 2. The survivors of the USG O'Bannon are brought onboard USM Abraxis and interrogated about what happened on their ship. Most of the movie is told in flashback, as the surviving crewmembers relate how their ship was assigned the mission of bringing back a shard of the Red Marker Isaac Clarke blew up in the first game. Even before the shard is moved to the O'Bannon everyone starts going insane, and Necromorphs appear and kill everyone on the O'Bannon, and the rest of the movie is how the survivors: Nickolas Kuttner, Alejandro Borges, Nolan Stross, and Isabella Cho, lasted long enough.
Dead Space: Salvage - A SequelComic Book to Dead Space. Miners discover the remains of the Ishimura out in space and decide to sell it, but get in trouble when they discover shards of the Red Marker, and have to deal with new Necromorphs and government agents that also want the ship.
Although only three main games (one of them being a prequel with a vastly differing game style) and, two side games, and some other media have been released so far, Dead Space is quickly becoming a premier Survival Horror franchise, with widespread critical acclaim, strong sales, and many fans considering it the best since Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
Tropes the entire series has:
Artifact of Doom: The Black Marker on Earth and the Red Marker on Aegis VII, as well as the Golden Marker on Titan Station. All of them are sentient and cause people to hallucinate their loved ones, hurt themselves, write strange writing on the walls in anything they can, kill themselves, and somehow make Necromorphs appear.
Note that the Red and Black markers only show horrific visions as a form of communication, and mostly try to prevent Necromorph outbreaks; it's stated a few times that one need a high level of intelligence to properly interpret the visions and not go insane. The Golden Marker, on the other hand, seems actively malevolent. The visions of Nicole that it shows Isaac taunt, lie and manipulate him, and want him to kill himself in the end. The Golden Marker seems built to begin Necromorph outbreaks and trigger Convergence events, unlike the others, who work to prevent them.
Bittersweet Ending: How some stories end if the protagonists are lucky. Usually they will accomplish some goal before getting ripped to shreds.
Blatant Item Placement: Enemies will often drop health when the main character is about to die, and often drop the right ammo needed for whatever weapons are being carried.
Body Horror: And how! Horrifically mutilated and contorted corpses trying to tear you to pieces? Yep. Horrific death scenes? Yep. Peng? Yep.
In order to get inspiration for the Necromorphs, the design team studied photographs of car accident victims. That somehow makes both the necromorphs, and the design team, a hell of a lot creepier.
Crapsack World: Even without the Necromorphs, the mankind in the Dead Space-verse is pretty banged up: Unitology is the dominant religion of dubious moral values, bureaucrats tend to use employees as tools in far worse ways than in Real Life, etc. The sad story of Howard, the caretaker of the Sprawl's solar arrays is example enough.
There is evidence that humanity itself is circling the drain. Planetcracking came as a saving grace at a time when economic collapse and subsequent extinction due to resource starvation were very close at hand. Furthermore, that solution isn't sustainable, and humanity is still limping on its way to disaster. In many ways, the horrifically unethical experiments that EarthGov has repeatedly performed on the Markers are the only hope humanity has of long-term survival.
Darkness Equals Death: Averted half the time. While Necromorphs do attack in the dark, and it is scary, they also attack in the light, which is also scary.
Our Ghosts Are Different: Not actual ghosts, but the Marker is capable of making people hallucinate dead loved ones, and only dead ones.
Planet Looters: Humanity. We need natural resources, having depleted all of Earth's, and go out breaking down random planets in space to get them; only a matter of time before we pick up an unexpected guest along with our resources.
And the first crack is one of Saturn's moons, which is where the sequel takes place.
The background logs state that Planet Cracking is actually believed by some to de-stabilize entire star systems because of the gravity imbalance of one planet going missing all of a sudden. The CEC denies this, though, and states that the planets are always carefully chosen.
Digging at Aegis VII was prohibited in the first place, but the CEC broke the laws because the planet was abnormally mineral-rich. Now, had the EarthGovplaced their Red Marker on a resource-barren moon somewhere, things might have turned out differently.
Red Shirt Army: Kinda necessary to increase the Necromorph bunch.
Special mention has to be given to the army platoon in Dead Space that is taken out by a single Necromorph.
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