Video Game / Dead Space

aka: Dead Space

CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS

"Though I know not what you are, twinkle, twinkle, little star..."

Dead Space is a video game released for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2008. It is the first game in the Dead Space series.

The game takes place on the Ishimura, a spaceship of the Planet Cracker class, a series of vessels which find mineral-rich planets and lift whole chunks of them into space for mining. During an excavation on a faraway planet, the miners discover a strange artifact of apparently alien origin. The artifact, dubbed the Marker, was apparently causing problems amongst the colonists who were working on the surface of the planet. Eventually, it's decided to transport the Marker to the Ishimura. It did not end well.

Luckily (or not), a distress call successfully goes off, and a maintenance crew, led by Sergeant Zach Hammond, is sent to assist the ship. Along with him are two engineers, tasked with helping repair any damage done to the Ishimura that might have caused the distress call: systems engineer Kendra Daniels and mechanical/electronic engineer Isaac Clarke (yes, the name is a reference). Clarke also has a personal reason for undertaking the mission: his girlfriend Nicole Brennan is part of the Ishimura's crew, and he fears for her safety.

What Hammond's crew finds is a terrifying deathtrap. The crew of Ishimura has been annihilated by Necromorphs - creations of the Marker who infect dead bodies to reproduce and evolve - and the entire ship is infested with reanimated corpses that refuse to stay down. The name of the game is now not rescue, but survival: Isaac and the rest of the rescue team must now find a way off the ship. Using his engineering skills and whatever hastily-weaponized power tools he can find, Isaac must help his fellow survivors escape this hellish situation... if he doesn't crack first.

Gameplay-wise, Dead Space shares a lot of similarities with Resident Evil 4. There is one button to aim and one button to fire; ammo, health, audio logs, and money are found scattered about the Ishimura, but they are in limited supply, so the player has to ration everything accordingly (though Isaac will almost always manage to find health on corpses when he really needs it); there is also a store where Isaac can buy ammo, new weapons, upgrades for his weapons, and upgrades for his suit, as well as store extra items cluttering up his inventory. Beyond Resident Evil 4 though, Dead Space also takes heavy influence from the System Shock games - to the point of the game originally being proposed as System Shock 3.

An interesting gameplay variation is that Necromorphs are very difficult to kill with head or body shots. Instead, Isaac has to cut several limbs off of each Necromorph in order to disable it. Since the Necromorphs come in many different shapes, each fight becomes an exercise in what might be called "creative marksmanship." Isaac also has a Stasis module which can slow enemies or machinery down to Bullet Time speeds, and a Telekinesis device which can levitate objects to solve puzzles or fling them to further dismember Necromorphs.

A prequel, Dead Space: Extraction, was released in 2009. A sequel, Dead Space 2, was released in 2011. A series' finale, Dead Space 3 was released in 2013.

At EA Play Live 2021, a remake developed by Motive Studios (the same people behind Star Wars: Squadrons) was announced, and was released on January 27, 2023 for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.

---

Tropes:

• Abandoned Hospital: Isaac must travel to the Medical Deck twice during the course of the game. There's a lot of body bags and corpses lying around, and you see early on there's some fishy stuff going on there. There are fewer bodies the second time around, although by that point you'll know this is kind of a bad sign.
• Abnormal Ammo: The Ripper can shoot circular sawblades.
• Absent Aliens: In the backstory, at least. Most of humankind believes this, seeing how they've spread into the galaxy and found absolutely jack squat. EarthGov's efforts to cover up the existence of Necromorphs didn't help.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Inverted. For the most part, the artificial intelligence of the ship is the only thing functioning properly and not attempting to deliberately kill you. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to lock doors at the most inconvenient of times - it's supposed to keep people safe but the Necromorphs are either already in there, or climb in through the vents.
  • The single real human-built AI, named "CECL," only appears in the Alternate Reality Game "No Known Survivors" (though one of the recurring whispers you hear in the main Dead Space game is a recording of some of the things she says). CECL is a "Litigious Risk Computer" which can be consulted for survival/accident odds, as well as dating advice odds, and it is even capable of simulating conversations between two people to a remarkable degree. During No Known Survivors' intermission, CECL speaks with rough disdain of the human need to have closure and "happy endings," but it isn't really malevolent.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Both the U.S.G. Ishimura and the U.S.M. Valor are chock full of massive, easily accessible air vents/maintenance tunnels that give the necromorphs virtually free access to anywhere on the ship, bypassing security, lockdowns, and even quarantines with impunity.
• All for Nothing: Everything Isaac goes through to find Nicole ends up meaning nothing when it turns out that she killed herself before he even arrived.
• Almighty Janitor: Isaac rips through hordes of mutated walking corpses, fends off an Asteroid Thicket, destroys three giant things (one of which is apparently the source of all the others)... And this guy isn't even a soldier, just an engineer!
• Alone with the Psycho: Various things in the game show evidence of Doctor Mercer's madness.
• Alternate Reality Game: No Known Survivors, which played like an exploration game a la Myst. Sadly, it is no longer available to play, and footage and images of the game are rather tough to find. The website was purchased and no longer is affiliated with the game.
• An Arm and a Leg: Ferociously enforced. Necromorphs don't die so easily if they lose their heads. You need to cut off the limbs to finish them off, and it's hinted by a message on the walls near the start of the game.
• And I Must Scream: Based on the way they scream, the Guardians are still alive despite everything their bodies have gone through. They even sigh when Isaac kills them.
• An Economy Is You: The items available at the stores onboard Ishimura - futuristic power tools,^note Albeit ones stated by Word of God to have been illegally modified into weaponry by the crew to fight off the Necromorphs ammunition for futuristic power tools, safety equipment suitable for using futuristic power tools, repair/upgrade supplies suitable for futuristic power tools, futuristic first aid supplies (which you would most likely need if you regularly use futuristic power tools) - are things you would expect to find on such a ship, but more in storage lockers than vending machines.
  • The player is left wondering why his compatriots don't try - among all the other things they hack - to hack the store system (or acknowledge they tried) to give him freebies.
• Arc Words: "Make us whole again."
• Artifact of Doom: The Marker. Bonus points for also being a Brown Note in physical form.
• Artificial Gravity: It's an actual gameplay feature; more so when it's not available. Some instances have the grav-plating break, causing gravity to reverse and become more powerful over the broken panel. Walking into it throws Isaac/necromorphs so fast that it gibs them. This also occurs on the Valor - you find a soldier pinned to the ceiling who's still alive and groaning in pain.
• Artificial Limbs: Of a decidedly morally gray variety. You visit a body part cloning farm at one point.
• Artificial Brilliance/Artificial Stupidity: Zig-Zagged. Due to some rather loose scripting, it's possible to make Necromorphs jump in and out of vents endlessly, force The Hunter to kill itself, and make Brutes totally ignore you, among other things. Many Necormorphs also seem to be tied to their room (unless scripted otherwise). On the Brilliance side, however, that same loose scripting means that necromorphs will use tactics like playing dead mid-battle, retreating out of sight until the player stops to reload, and remaining silent while sneaking up on Isaac. In a more subtle touch, the game occasionally breaks script for the benefit of players who get overly clever by throwing in bonus encounters in random places, delaying expected ones like vent-ambushes for a few seconds, exploiting Cat Scares and distractions, and generally screwing with the player. While a player is busy toying with the Necromorph playing peekaboo in the air vents, it's entirely possible they are oblivious to the other one sneaking up behind them.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: Zig-Zagged with Isaac's use of a 'thermite bomb' to destroy a metal barricade. Thermite would only flow down the surface of the barricade and through the floor. But thermate, a formula variation of thermite, is hotter and faster burning, and commonly used for exactly this purpose.
• The Asteroid Thicket: The chunks of rock that Isaac must deal with in one chapter come from the planet the Ishimura is orbiting, having been thrown up when they tore the first chunk of of the planet from the surface.
• Attack Its Weak Point: To kill almost every enemy you encounter, you have to shoot off An Arm and a Leg. (Exceptions include Dividers and Swarmers.) Since every form of Necromorph has a different weak spot, most of which are discovered via Trial-and-Error Gameplay, basically every enemy in the game also qualifies as a Puzzle Mook.
• Automatic Door Malfunction: The player receives the stasis module just before the door which rapidly opens and closes. The stasis module slows down the door's movement allowing Isaac to pass.
• Backtracking: Apart from copious doors to before, three levels - the Flight Deck, the Medical Deck, and the Bridge - are used twice (though your objectives are in different parts of the level the second time around).
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Several times. For instance, Isaac encounters a man who headbutts a wall until his skull is pulped. Nicole kills herself via lethal injection prior to Isaac's arrival.
  • There's also the log you can pick up of the man who shoots his own limbs off with a Plasma Cutter so that he couldn't hurt anyone after coming back as a Necromorph. It doesn't work.
• BFG: The Contact Beam. To get an idea of how powerful this weapon is, the damage from most weapons range from 5 to 20. The damage from the contact beam without any upgrades is 100, and 175 when fully upgraded.
• Bigger on the Inside: Due to a Special Effect Failure, the version of the Ishimura shown in the introduction is vastly smaller than its own interior, to the point where it could comfortably fit inside itself several times over.
• Bilingual Bonus: The PA system occasionally plays public addresses in French. One of those translates to "Attention please, we would like to remind you that body searches may be performed at any moment. Body damage suffered in these searches is not covered by health insurance." Some of them are also in Spanish.
  • Among the graffiti phrases on the walls of the Med Lab, there is a Japanese phrase mixed in with everything else. Translated, it reads "The Ishimura is dead."
  • Whenever Isaac gets near the Marker, strange chanting can be heard emanating from it. It's very difficult to make out, but fans have guessed that the chanting is "Nostra sanctus deus... Sumus hic mortem...", which, translated from Latin, reads "Our holy god... We are here in death..."
• Bittersweet Ending: You live, but all of your companions are dead, as well as everybody on the Ishimura and Valor. You find out that your girlfriend killed herself long before you arrived, and the Marker's been sending you hallucinations of her, you may have been driven insane, you didn't successfully replace the Marker... and there's a sequel.
• Bizarrchitecture: The Ishimura, while designed as a mining ship and possessing the logical layout of one, has some weird design elements.
  • The ship's tram system is not dual tracked, and the platforms are only on one side of the ship, meaning somebody who would need to go from the Bridge to the Crew Deck would have to take a tram that would then loop around the entirety of the ship, before circling back to the Crew Deck (which is technically one stop behind the Bridge), as trams going towards the bow would be in the way.
  • The Medical Deck's Zero-G Therapy area is accessing by using Kinesis to pull a piece of medical equipment between two separate gaps, which makes no sense and only serves to impede foot traffic for personnel, especially if an operation or procedure is underway.
  • No alternate method to access the different decks on foot appears to exist in the ship's design; the only way is via tram or via the tramway, which, if the tram is offline, essentially isolates decks from each other (and traversing via the tramway can also be dangerous, impractical, or impossible given no access points exist in every location to get from the tramway up to the deck itself).
• Blatant Lies: One of Dr. Mercer's audio logs has him go on and on about how his patient (who most likely became the Hunter) is "resting comfortably", "trusts me with his life", etc. All the while, the terrified man is hysterically screaming for help in the background.
• Body Horror: Oh golly yes. The things the necromorph life form does to humans are...imaginative.
  • The developers actually viewed images of burn victims and car crash images for inspiration. That's how brutal it is. Think The Thing (1982) on acid.
  • Dismemberment is the entire main gimmick of the game, with body shots doing jack shit to enemies. You need to cut them to pieces to even stand a chance.
  • Putting aside necromorphs, there's plenty of the stuff that happens to normal humans. A highlight is someone bashing their head against a wall, over and over again, while they have a gigantic cavity in their torso.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Plasma Cutter and the Line Gun are all the player needs to utterly dominate the game on any difficulty setting. The Plasma Cutter is the first weapon as well as the only free one, but both appear early on and can perform the job of any of the more Awesome, but Impractical weapons faster, more cheaply, and without encumbering Isaac. There's even an achievement for completing the game using only the Plasma Cutter. The Plasma Cutter's only failing is that it is impractical in killing Swarmers, a situation rare enough (assuming you aren't popping Pregnants each time they show up) that the ammo you waste doing it is easily earned back.
    • In addition, weapons all have an Alt Fire mode that usually involves a different kind of shot, allowing for strategic use of each weapon for different purposes. The Plasma Cutter...simply rotates its firing trajectory from vertically to horizontally. Sounds useless on paper but actually makes aiming for certain body parts on necromorphs that much easier and is quite possibly one of the most useful Alt Fires available.
  • The Pulse Rifle once it gets a few nodes put into it becomes a good go-to weapon especially due to it's ammo being so prevalent.
• Book Ends: The game begins and ends with Isaac listening to Nicole's last recording.
• Boss Room: If one constantly checks their map screen, they can almost flawlessly predict when a big encounter of some kind is about to occur.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Normally you would find suit upgrades throughout the game, each one more expensive than the last. However, you can pay a few real-life dollars to have any number of max-level suits right away, giving you maximum defense and inventory space (and there's one suit that has even more defense on top of that). There are also more powerful versions of the standard weapons you can buy as well.
• Broken Bridge: Thank you, Ishimura Security System. Sealing off all the doors in an emergency always helps.
• Cardboard Prison: One of the logs unlocked after beating the game describes the fall of the first colony in Aegis VII. The author was observing a pair of infected corpses turn into an Infector and a Leaper respectively inside a quarantine cell, when suddenly the Leaper jumped to the ceiling and smashed through an air vent allowing them both to escape.
• Cat Scare: The game loves to do this to you: you'll hear the Scare Chord and only see a box falling from a shelf, it's only until several seconds later that a hideous alien baby jumps out of the dark at you. This is sometimes due to the game's line of sight detection thinking the monster is in view when it isn't, but just as often seems intentional, possibly making this a case of Throw It In!.
• The Cavalry. The USM Valor which shocks in at the introduction of Chapter 8. Of course, by the beginning of the next chapter, almost all of the Valor's crew has been brutally slaughtered. There is good reason to believe (due to text logs and the Valor's complement of nuclear missiles) that if the crew succeeded in their original objective, a Cavalry Betrayal would have occurred for everyone but Kendra Daniels.
• Chainsaw Good: The Ripper is frequently used as a gun that shoots sawblades, but the primary firing mode certainly qualifies. It's a maglev chainsaw for high-tech remote limb-lopping or for cutting live power lines in an emergency without the operator getting electrocuted.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: Mostly averted, in that the game does not pause when accessing the inventory. It's not a good idea to open it up when a Necromorph is trying to chew your face off.
• Cherry Tapping: Isaac's Curb Stomp of DOOM.
• Chekhov's Gun: Hammond traps a Slasher in a escape pod and latter sends it flying away from the Ishimura when he realizes the creature is still alive. The escape pod is picked up by a nearby military ship, the Valor, thinking it's a survivor from the Aegis VII colony. The crew gets slaughtered and the ship crashes into the Ishimura as a result. Because things that you shoot off into space disappear...right?.
• Closed Circle: After they arrive on the Ishimura, the USG Kellion blows up as Isaac attempts to load up a damage report - in preparation for leaving, in fact.
• Colony Drop: Though not exactly a colony, a massive portion of Aegis VII comes crashing down after Isaac accidentally shuts down the only thing holding it in position. He then has to not only race Kendra Daniels to the only still-functioning space ship on the planet, but also defeat the Hive Mind, start up the shuttle, and after all that, get far enough away before the Aegis VII Shattering Kaboom.
• Combat Tentacles: A bunch of Necromorphs have tentacles - most notably the ones that grab you and drag you towards your doom.
• Critical Existence Failure: Averted. Isaac doesn't die until that last sliver of blue is gone, but his heart rate increases, his breath becomes heavier, and he slumps over while moving if badly injured. Also, while having no lasting side-effects, Isaac starts panting and gasping heavily with increasing intensity as his air reserves run out.
  • On the higher difficulty levels, the Necromorphs can dismember and kill Isaac even if the Life Meter is halfway full.
  • Guardians have a One-Hit Kill attack on all difficulty levels if you get too close to them. And it always works, even if you use Stasis to slow them down, which would logically render their One-Hit Kill attack harmless. It even works if Isaac melees them to death (Isaac is immune to certain forms of death during the melee animation, but his head will explode as soon as he stops).
• Corridor Cubbyhole Run: Chapters 3 and 4. First, you have to run a circle through a now-active centrifuge to reach an elevator and leave the area, ducking into large niches in the walls when the arm goes past to avoid getting torn to shreds. In the next chapter, you have to run over the outside of the Ishimura and hide behind metal walls to avoid getting splattered by asteroid impacts. Made interesting as you are exposed to space in both cases, so if you take too long, you asphyxiate - Chapter 4 is especially tight - while Chapter 3 also has Necromorphs pop up in each cubby-hole.
  • While in Chapter 4, you also have to run back after dealing with the asteroids, and since the hull is no longer being pounded, you're pursued by multiple Necromorphs. You could hang around and kill them, but in the circumstances it's less risky to just keep running and leave them on the outside of the ship.
• Continuous Decompression: Averted. When an airlock opens, the air will rush out in a second or so.
• Cutscene Incompetence: Aside from the Valor, there are several instances where a door won't open until after some poor schmuck gets killed - including the guy banging on the door when you get the plasma cutter (he gets killed by a Slasher), the scientist pinned to a wall and killed by a Lurker, Hammond being ripped apart by a Brute, and Jacob Temple being stabbed to death by Dr. Mercer. Why can't you just break the windows in the latter two instances when you're carrying weapons made for cutting metal and pulverizing rock?
• Cypher Language: You see strange text scrawled on the walls in this language. The decoding information is likewise scribbled on the walls, if a bit smeared.
• Dangerous Windows: The Ishimura doesn't have many windows. But it does have chest high vents that act the same way as windows for incoming monsters.
• Darkness Equals Death: Sometimes you are forced to kill enemies in pitch blackness (Isaac's tools have mounted flashlights).
  • The remake makes this the default experience. Jumping two console generations means there's resources for dynamic lighting that the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 could never have dreamed of. As a result, the Ishamura has been made much darker by default. Additionally, many power breaker puzzles have added a Sadistic Choice. An early section presents a power breaker with life support, lights, and elevators, but only enough energy for two...and you need the elevators to progress.
• Dead All Along: If you take the first letter of each chapter name and put them together, they spell NICOLE IS DEAD. The "Nicole" you see throughout the game is just a hallucination created by the Marker to manipulate Isaac into putting it back on the Pedestal they took it from.
• Decontamination Chamber: Which takes exactly as long as it takes for Isaac to kill several Necromorphs. However, the ship's AI rightfully considers Necromorphs to be biohazards, so it isn't much of a stretch for the AI to wait until they have been dealt with. After all, each time a Necromorph enters the chamber, there's another body that needs to be decontaminated.
• Dead Character Walking: A glitch that sometimes causes Necromorphs to endlessly run around in circles, making them invincible until you block their path.
  • Enabling an invincibility cheat or mod in Dead Space will cause Isaac Clark to turn into a walking and shooting mutilated pair of hips if he takes damage past what his life bar says he should die from.
• Death by Irony: Hammond. When you first fight a Brute, he warns you that the only way to harm it is to shoot it in the back. Much later in the game, a brute corners him, and he panics and fires right into the creature's front, doing nothing and getting himself torn apart. To be fair to poor Hammond, he was cornered in a confined space up against a vastly tougher version, already wounded and visibly limping.
• Death of a Child: The Necromorphs transform infants as well as adults, with similar results. One log implies that some children have been born to members of the crew, but the majority of the undead mutant space-babies apparently come from the growing tanks that are right next to the racks for storing fully organic replacement limbs. To make things worse, Isaac can also kill them with a melee attack, that has him kicking them into the next wall.
• Developer's Foresight: The flamethrower will not work in the depressurized areas of the ship, due to lack of oxygen.
  • However, its fuel, hydrazine, is hypergolic, meaning it will ignite when in contact with an oxidizer, and is typically used with a liquid oxidizer in a separate tank. EA corrected this error in later games, in which Isaac can use his Flamethrower- even in a vacuum.
• Diegetic Interface: Everything is a Hard Light Holographic Terminal projected either by Isaac's RIG or the equipment he's working on. Your HUD is the indicators on your back (for health), and the ammo counter on your weapon. And you don't see the ammo counter unless you're aiming.
• "Die Hard" on an X: Die Hard On A Spaceship. With zombies!
• Distress Call: Two: one from the Ishimura that gets you out to it in the first place, and another is made by you while you're on the Ishimura.
• Divine Chessboard: The Marker is guiding various people through projections of dead loved ones to destroy the Hive Mind by putting it back on the pedestal. The Hive Mind in turn guides the Necromorphs.
• The Door Slams You: The first necromorph Isaac flees from will try opening the elevator doors, only for the doors to win the power contest and split the necromorph in half.
• Driven to Suicide: The crew of the Ishimura isn't entirely dead when Isaac arrives. When you do find them, most of them will be in the process of committing suicide because they know that the Necromorphs turn human corpses into new Necromorphs. Some of them might be doing this to join them; others apparently found creative ways to kill themselves (like a guy who blasted off all his own limbs!) so they wouldn't add to the threat. Mostly, though, the survivors have all been Driven to Madness, both by the horrible situation and the Mind Rape effect happening to everyone. Oh, and Nicole did it before you and your crew even arrived, rendering your search for her All for Nothing.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The only game in the series where Stasis doesn't recharge on its own, and to feature portable oxygen bottles. Also the only one where you can't set your RIG to lead you to stores, benches, and Save Points (Extraction nonwithstanding, since it's on rails; with vastly simplified gameplay).
  • Infector Necromorphs don't have an enhanced version, and they generate enhanced Slashers (or Twitchers). The following installment would make normal Infectors create normal Slashers, and add an enhanced version of them, which creates the enhanced Slashers.
  • In this game, the Marker suppresses Necromorphs and keeps them in a dormant state. In the later games it's revealed the Markers actively cause Necromorph outbreaks. Word of God says this was deliberately rectonned in later games. It may be because the Red Marker is man made and it's implied the original scientists retooled it to suppress the Hive Mind.
  • Isaac's melee attacks are just terrible in this game, not only they are slow and have weak damage, the stomps also can't be chained. Later games buffed them so they have an use in combat.
  • Isaac being a Heroic Mime. In later games he talks just fine with everyone else and may even make a few comments of his own to try to solve a situation, while in the first game his only stated motivations are trying to survive, find Nicole and nothing else. Mission objectives did have him comment on what's going in his personal journal, but it was mostly generic "I have to do this objective" type of entries.
• Elite Mooks: Dark versions of the Necromorph types are tougher, faster, and deal more damage. They mostly show up in the later levels.
  • The Valor soldiers with their Stasis unit merged in their Necromorph form; they're fast.
• The End... Or Is It?: In the ending cut-scene, Isaac seems to be attacked by his dead girlfriend, who has been made into a basic Necromorph. It's all imagined by Isaac - he survived the encounter and reprises his role, plus actual spoken lines, in the sequel.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: The Ishimura is just as lethal as the Necromorphs in some cases.
• Evil Is Visceral: Purposely uses as many of the related tropes as possible. Even the creatures and bosses that are not man-shaped at all use organic features for maximum Squick factor. The game studio that develops the series is named Visceral Games too.
• Excessive Steam Syndrome: The USG Ishimura is a mining ship, so the industrial sectors of it are noisy and clanky, with steam and other evidence of heavy processing machinery going on. There's also a rush of visually obstructing gasses when in a room undergoes a change in air pressure, such as an airlock opening.
• Eye Scream: It's no big spoiler that the captain of the ship is already dead, but it's a semi-spoiler when you learn he was stabbed in the eye with a needle by Dr. Kyne in an attempt to calm him down. Becomes a Rewatch Bonus after the sequel.
• Fake Difficulty: Both turret sessions have shades of this in the console versions, and it's mostly because the game has no way to increase aiming speed, so moving the turret until it can shoot the asteroids takes a while, and if another asteroids shows up on the other side of the screen then it'll take a while for the turret to aim at them too, and this can snowball into making the player take too long to shoot the asteroids/objects The Slug has thrown. The PC version averts this by allowing the player to change aim speed, and while aiming with a mouse is generally easier, the capacity to change aiming speed is huge.
• Fetch Quest: Pretty much any level will be about trying to fix some problem by finding some part elsewhere on the ship, with plenty of Necromorphs in between. The rare exceptions are usually on the subject of activating or deactivating a part of the ship.
• Finishing Stomp: A good idea when you're not quite sure whether that Necromorph in front of you is dead yet. Also a good idea when you're not quite sure whether there's an Infector nearby who might make a new Necromorph out of that human corpse in front of you. And finally, a good idea if there's a crate you want opened in front of you. Not a good idea when it comes to certain enemies who happen to be explosive, but in 95% of all cases, stomping the crap out of everything will make your situation better - even if it's just by relieving stress.
• Flatline: This sound is emitted by a RIG if its wearer (e.g. Isaac) dies. When Hammond, and later Kendra, gets killed, Isaac can hear flat-lines. Also, if you listen closely in the beginning, you can hear flat-lines when the two Red Shirts you brought with you are killed.
• Follow the Leader: An excellent demonstration of Tropes Are Not Bad. Dead Space was very obviously inspired by early footage of darkSector, back when the latter game was set in space and featured a protagonist in a similar suit fighting space zombies; even the names are similar. The gameplay also shares many similarities to Resident Evil 4, from the camera angles, to the inventory, to the aiming and shooting. Other obvious influences include System Shock, the Alien franchise, Event Horizon, and The Thing (1982).
• Foreboding Architecture: Is there a time where entirely artificial, metal-based architecture doesn't make one suspect a hideous murder is about to happen?
• Foreshadowing:
  • NICOLE IS DEAD:
    • In one of Nicole's videos that shows up on occasion around the ship, there's a lot of static, and her face briefly gets static and distortion over it that makes it look like a skull.
    • Hammond can listen in on Isaac through his RIG, making a comment when he finds a video log from Nicole, assuring they'll find her. But the few times when Nicole seems to contact Isaac directly, or even when she appears physically to him, neither Hammond or even Kendra say a word. In fact, when Nicole's first physical encounter is over with, Kendra remarks that her communication with Isaac was cut off.
    • Kendra begins telling Isaac that she's seeing her brother on video screens which is "impossible", heavily implying he died before the game. The same as Nicole.
    • Also, Kyne talks to his dead wife Amelia on multiple occasions, as if she was physically present. To him, obviously, Amelia is there, just as Nicole is to Isaac.
    • The first time Nicole helps Isaac and he has to defend them from Necromorphs, they don't even seem to notice the things. Because Nicole isn't really there.
    • Outside of her logs, she never talks normally when she addresses Isaac. Everytime she's on screen with him, she repeats that Isaac needs to "make them whole" and talks poetically about retrieving the Marker. Nicole in her final video did speak dramatically of never expecting to die away from Isaac, but not in the semi-religious tone she uses near the endgame.
    • Meeting her in the flight deck control room in Chapter 11 has the nearby computer screens distort with Unitologist symbols, and when you enter the shuttle to head to Aegis VII, she's not shown going down the walkway and just suddenly appears sitting down beside Isaac.
    • She begs Isaac to bring Kendra's ship back with a button press even though she's in the room beforehand and could easily press the button herself.
  • Kendra being an undercover EarthGov agent:
    • Upon first encountering the Necromorphs, Kendra's first reaction is to assume they're mutated crew members, whereas everyone else in the Dead Space franchise who first sees the Necromorphs generally assume they're some kind of alien species. Even Hammond, who has baseline information about the Marker, doesn't know what they are on the first encounter, cluing the player in that Kendra knows more than she lets on.
    • Besides her constant complaining regarding the mission, Chapter 4 opens with Kendra arguing that Hammond knows something about the Marker and is hiding it from her and Isaac, with Hammond acting defensively about the subject. He only has basic knowledge about it and assumes the Marker was of alien origin because that was the classified information divulged to the CEC at the time. Kendra knows this, accusing Hammond to cast suspicion on him and deflect it from herself.
    • This goes forgotten for most of the plot, but Kendra's a computer technician for the Kellion crew. With access to the Ishimura's central computer core, she can look into every record available and easily manipulate the RIG communication lines to keep Hammond in the dark while maintaining a clear line with Isaac for instructions.
    • Hammond makes an effort to console Isaac and assure him they'll find Nicole. Kendra never even bothers.
    • She's ecstatic when the USM Valor contacts the Ishimura which, in the heat of the moment, is disguised as her very logically being relieved that rescue is finally coming, and just as logically devastated when the ship is crashed by a Necromorph infiltration. But Hammond later notes the ship's armed to the teeth and was somehow already in the same system as they are, as if they were waiting nearby. It is later revealed that the Valor was sent to destroy the Ishimura; and Kendra offhandedly mentions that the crew were also supposed to be her backup, as well as her extraction.
    • Hammond's communication line with Isaac is constantly interrupted by something or someone aboard the ship, with Dr. Mercer being the only obvious suspect. Except Kendra has clear contact with Isaac, and the signal jam affecting Hammond only stops when the Valor crashes into the Ishimura, near the sector where Kendra is. Notice that as soon as she regains control, Hammond is blocked out yet again.
• Fun with Acronyms: The first letter of every chapter title. Together, they spell out "NICOLE IS DEAD."
  • All (armor) suits in the franchise are called RIGs, which stands for Resource Integration Gear.
• Futureshadowing: Staring a New Game Plus, Isaac can look through the crew dossier for the USG Kellion as organized by Zach Hammond and his superiors. Isaac has a more than thorough entry, detailing everything about him from where he went to school to who his parents were, but Kendra just gets a stub with the guy who sent the message telling Hammond that she was recommended to him last minute and that he has almost nothing on her personally.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • There's a couple, but a big one is in Chapter 5, where the Fetch Quest-link can be broken (Isaac can't activate the panel to turn the Chemical Mixture W/DNA into Poison), possibly by saving/reloading during the quest, preventing the player from continuing further. Reloading the game may fix this, but usually the only way is to completely start over with a new game.
  • An issue that crops up with newer PCs is VSync, which most players just shut off because it causes mouse lag. What it can also do is completely screw up the confrontation with the Hunter in the cryo-chamber, making it so Mercer never shows up and thus doesn't complete his scripted action, thereby never triggering the Hunter and locking the player in an empty room.
  • Also, don't save after moving the Marker into the second to last shutter. (IE, don't put it in the shutter, then go and save at the nearby save point.) Even after you open the other Shutter, the Marker will refuse to move onto the tracks.
  • PC users have an issue that makes the game Unwinnable within minutes of starting the game. What's supposed to happen is that a door is opened, and you witness a Red Shirt being killed by an enemy. What tends to happen is that the someone is killed by nothing, and the open door acts like a closed door.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Short summary: Item of immense religious significance found on a planet, item removed from planet, really, really, really bad stuff goes down afterwards.
• The Great Repair: Keeping the Ishimura afloat after what the Necromorphs have done is no small task.
• Grid Inventory: Because running the risk of an ambush every time you open your item menu isn't bad enough already.
• Grotesque Gallery: Every Necromorph, including the ones pinned to the wall by a mound of flesh that constantly gives birth to hideous little babies every few seconds and screams constantly.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: The Valor is a military ship armed for war and advised it may be dealing with a deadly biological menace. So of course they take a random escape pod on board and take no precautions at all when opening it; what's the worst that could happen?
• Hammerspace: As futuristic as his weapons and items are, Isaac really shouldn't be able to carry so many weapons and medi-packs.
• Harder Than Hard: Impossible difficulty, which has to be unlocked. It is hardly impossible, but squander upgrades, money, or ammo and you will die miserable death after miserable death in the later chapters. However, you won't get any new overpowered items or hidden cutscenes if you finish this difficulty.
• Hand Cannon: Upgrade your Plasma Cutter enough and it can kill standard enemies in 2-4 well placed shots. The best part is that it doesn't have to be hampered by the slow rate of fire and low capacity of typical hand cannons depending on how you choose to upgrade it.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: With one exception, the enemies in this game pose more threat to you than the bosses do, partly because the standard enemies are really into ambushes while the bosses telegraph their attacks and have very obvious weak points.
• Head Desk: Isaac comes across a guy randomly doing this in a part of the USG Ishimura. The guy is just standing in the hallway beating his head against a wall, with more blood coming out with every hit. Eventually, he hits his head against it hard enough that it kills him. And when his corpse is on the ground, you can see that there was nothing left inside him - all of his intestines had apparently been ripped out.
• He Knows Too Much: Isaac Clarke by the end. And in fulfillment of this trope, Kendra leaves Isaac for dead twice because he knows that the Marker was a military experiment.
• Healing Factor: The Hunter Necromorph can regrow limbs, making it an ammo sink until you find a way to keep it from following you.
• Hero of Another Story: You'll frequently hear about the exploits of Acting Chief Engineer Jacob Temple via audio logs found throughout the ship, detailing his journey to find and save his girlfriend while traveling through all the areas that Isaac ends up going through. Unlike Isaac, Jacob actually manages to meet up with his girlfriend alive. Unfortunately, Dr. Mercer ambushes and kills them both.
• Hide Your Children: Averted - the Lurkers are actually mutated from clone embryos meant to be used for replacement limbs (which, in the expanded material, is apparently a regular enough safety hazard that they have an entire deck devoted to this).
• Holographic Terminal: There's no HUD at all, just a bunch of nifty holographic GUIs that manifest as actual objects in the game world. No pausing to check the inventory for you!
• Heroic Suicide: In an audio log found on the mining deck left by supervisor Dallas, he decides to kill himself via self-inflicted dismemberment to ensure that he doesn't become a threat to others when he turns. Shortly after finding the log Isaac runs into a Slasher that has all of their limbs gone besides their head and a single blade-arm, heavily implied to be an infected Dallas. However, it falls just short of being an exercise in futility given that his efforts to neutralise himself ahead of time has rendered his undead form a sluggish, pitiful creature that is so ineffectual that killing him is more of an act of mercy than one of self defense.
• Hope Spot: Near the end of the game, Isaac actually succeeds in putting the Marker back on its pedestal and suppressing the Necromorphs and the Hive Mind. That lasts for just a few seconds before Kendra removes it again and things get even worse.
  • Several smaller ones occur before, such as successfully sending a distress call to the Valor and meeting up with Nicole. All are dashed by the end.
  • At various points in the game a giant tentacle will burst through the hull, grab Isaac and drag him toward the tentacle's hiding spot (and Isaac's death). Isaac can save himself by repeatedly shooting the tentacle's weak spot. If he fails, the tentacle will successfully drag him to the hiding spot, then let Isaac go and withdraw into the hole in the hull. Isaac will appear shaken but unharmed...at which point the tentacle will re-appear, grab Isaac again and decisively drag him away, killing him.
• Iconic Starter Equipment: Isaac Clarke, the series protagonist, is shown wielding the Plasma Cutter in most promotional art.
• Idiot Ball: Apparently, the entire crew of the Valor spontaneously forgot about their infinite-charge personal Stasis modules when faced with a single bog-standard Necromorph. Not only that they were heavily armed and armored well trained Space Marines, outnumbered it and could have easily destroyed the thing, or could have simply left it trapped inside its escape pod instead of stupidly opening it up.
• Improvised Weapon: Only one of the eight weapons is an actual gun - the rest are mining/surveying equipment. Word of God states that the power tools were illegally modified to act more like weaponry when the ship came under attack. Every weapon (except the Pulse Gun) is designed to cut or bisect enemies: the crew knew about dismembering being effective, and adapted their tools (the only things they had) to deal with the situation.
• Informed Attribute: At least two, unintentionally due to Isaac being a Heroic Mime.
  • Isaac's main motivation for going to the Ishimura is to ensure the safety of his girlfriend Nicole. Yet, apart from his observations in the objectives tab and a few moments before the final boss, he never has an apparent reaction to when he finally reunites with her. The supposed emotional connection falls flat because it wasn't established to begin with. The remake does away with this by making him voiced and taking time to delve into the nature of his and Nicole's relationship.
  • Isaac's status as an engineer also is very questionable, since he barely does anything that would actually require engineering skills. He doesn't build anything or take things apart (all the weapons he finds are already modified to be lethal), or fiddle with mechanisms to make them work. He just moves stuff around with Kinesis and shoots stuff like any other shooter character. The sequels and remake make efforts to avert this.
• Informed Equipment: Isaac's weaponry and equipment are kept in Hammerspace. Despite that, the inventory is an in-universe object, the things it represents are just sucked into Isaac's feet and deposited in a pocket dimension for when he needs them.
• Ink-Suit Actor: The characters with names and faces are voiced by the same people in whose likeness they are made.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: The flimsy metal barricade in the Medical Bay, which for some reason requires an entire level centered on building a makeshift explosive device to shift, despite the player character's entire armament at that point supposedly consisting of industrial cutting tools.
  • Oddly inverted in areas featuring zero gravity. Isaac should be able to accidentally walk off the unprotected edge.
  • You also can't step off the edge of the floor only a few inches from the top of a ramp.
  • You can't hop off the tram platform and go down the tracks, either.
  • While Necromorphs can shatter glass (in scripted moments), you can't. Despite being able to stomp and hit hard enough to remove limbs, and the aforementioned cutting tools.
• Ironic Nursery Rhyme: You won't hear Twinkle Twinkle Little Star the same way you used to...
• Jump Scare: The Video Game! A particularly unexpected one happens at the very end after the boss battle.
• Justified Save Point: The save points are, in-universe, a way to synchronize a person's RIG with the main computer so it knows 1) where they are, 2) their physical status, and 3) what they have on them.
• Kill It with Fire: You can buy the flamethrower during gameplay, but its usefulness against most Necromorphs is debatable.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Kendra steals the Marker from its pedestal. The only thing keeping all the horrible space creatures neutralized. She's smashed into paste by the massive Hive Mind less than five minutes later.
• Late to the Tragedy: By the time the Kellion makes it to the Ishimura to repair the subspace array, most of the crew is dead. At most, there are 20 survivors, and of these, all but 6 are too far gone (physically anyway... mentally, there's 5) to be saved by the time you see them while 3 of them escape just as you arrive. The entire ship is overrun by the infection, and Necromorphs have free reign over it.
  • And the Valor after that. Not a good day in the Aegis system.
• Laughing Mad: One of the survivors that you come across can be found in the crew quarters, where you get the final nav card to repair the executive shuttle. She's in a room with a large amount of other dead crew members, laughing before blowing her head off.
• Limited Loadout: Isaac can only equip 4 weapons at a time. The rest must be either kept within the safe (accessible from any of the Ishimura's store consoles) or sold to those stores to free up space. The game further encourages an even smaller loadout for two reasons. First off, the guns are upgraded separately. As such, if you carry the full allotment of four guns, you'll have four poorly upgraded guns. Likewise, ammo drops are based off of the equipped weapons, so if you have a weapon along for niche uses, it'll still take up 1/4th of the ammo pickups you find. For this reason, it's generally best to pick two weapons to use for the whole playthrough, plus the Contact Beam due to its ammo selling for a whopping $1,000 apiece, making the gun pull double duty as an emergency BFG and a cash generator.
• Living Structure Monster: Nest type enemy fused to a variety of walls/bulkheads throughout the game. They spawn nasty babies with missile shooting tails. They cannot be rerouted around and the babies will kill you if they manage to shoot you enough times.
• Luck-Based Mission: Level 5 of the Shooting Gallery can be this. The targets pop up just fast enough that shooting a red target can accidentally blow away a blue one behind it in the same shot, thus ruining the score.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Throwing a severed head will cause it to explode.
• MacGuffin: The Marker - practically anything weird that happens can be credited to the Marker messing with you... The power of the Marker to repel Necromorphs is somewhat debatable though, as the Necromorphs seem as willing to attack you when you are standing next to it. Maybe it needs to be on its pedestal to work properly.
• MacGuffin Delivery Service: Once Isaac loads the Marker onto the shuttle, Kendra reveals her status as The Mole, kills Doctor Kyne, and leaves Isaac to die on the Ishimura. Isaac's not going to let her get away with that.
• Made of Plasticine: Isaac can dismember uninfected human bodies by stomping on them in the right spot. He's also torn apart in some kills (like the gravity centrifuge) where he should die from trauma but still have his body intact.
• Mad Scientist: One slightly less mad one who wants your help and another much crazier one who wants to kill you.
• Magikarp Power: Almost all the weapons, especially the smaller ones. Your plasma cutter and pulse rifle, once fully upgraded, will tear through basically everything. The Line Gun is no slouch, either.
• The Many Deaths of You: Smashed to pieces, slashed to pieces, being impaled then slashed to pieces, being body-jacked by a parasitic head, being eaten, and much more.
  • You can see for yourself right here; if you prefer to sleep tonight, here's a Benny Hill version.
• Meaningful Name: Temple and Cross care for each other, and both are murdered by Mercer, the hyperreligious whack-job.
• Meat Moss: Growing all over the ship. Made about ten times more disgusting by it being self-replicating rotting flesh implicitly constructed from ordinary dust (which is made of dead skin).
• Militaries Are Useless: A single necromorph is enough to take out the entire crew of the USM Valor.
• Money Spider: For some reason, many of the Necromorphs are carrying either ammunition, health, or their paychecks. This gets a little weird when you find it includes Lurkers.
  • Stasis modules can be melded into flesh, and so can items. That still doesn't explain why lurkers have items, though.
• Mook Chivalry: Averted, as Isaac must learn to fight off several (very) different types of enemies at the same time. Isaac is invincible to attacks from other enemies when he's trying to pull one off of his face, though.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Whoever gave a doctorate to Dr. Mercer is crazier than he is. And Kyne's school isn't much better, considering what he's done.
• Monster Closet: The necromorphs pop out of vents, floor tiles, the ceiling; outside of a few rare circumstances you never run across them in the open. After a while you can pick out exactly what parts of the wall the Necromorphs will pop out of.
• Mundane Utility: Inverted. The weapons that Isaac uses are actually mining or repair tools. The plasma cutter, line gun and ripper are used for cutting through rock and other barriers, the force gun is essentially a jackhammer, etc. etc. All of them have in-game justifications for the Ishimura's task of planet-cracking. The only true weapon that you get is the pulse rifle, and it's a lot less effective than your other weapons unless you know how to use it properly.
  • Isaac's suit. At its strongest, it's slightly less effective than full-on combat armor, because it was made for engineers (like Isaac) trained to go in and solve problems under extreme conditions. As an engineer trained to handle emergencies on a spaceship, Isaac had to be prepared for anything that could go wrong on a spaceship, and a lot can go wrong in a spaceship.
• New Game Plus: Beating the game once unlocks the hardest difficulty mode, a shit-ton of credits, ten power nodes, and the Military Suit, the best non-DLC armor you can get.
• No Hero Discount: Vending machines aren't known for their kindness, after all. Nope, no one hacks the system to give you freebies. Nope, you can't break into the machine and help yourself.
  • Could be justified by the RIG replacer built into every store kiosk; would you want to potentially mechanically damage or fuck up the coding of a machine that clamps your entire body (including your head) into a space-age iron maiden and uses either precise mechanical arms, precise lasers, or both to pull off your clothing and replace it with a new outfit? Better to just sell off the junk you've been accumulating across the derelict ship to afford the store's prices rather than potentially give yourself a gruesome and entirely avoidable death trying to get a five-finger discount, especially considering the general safety standards aboard the Ishimura presenting enough of a hazard to life and limb as it is.
• Non-Combatant Immunity: Although you meet enemies before being armed, they can't actually kill you.
• No OSHA Compliance: Even before the Zombie Apocalypse, the Ishimura isn't exactly the safest place in the universe. For example, it has nozzles designed to spray acid across a hallway at a set of storage rooms at regular intervals.
• Not Quite Dead: Occasionally, Necromorphs that you have only damaged will play dead and ambush you when you try to walk past. The Hunter Necromorph refuses to die, growing back its limbs when you cut them off and even coming back after you cryogenically freeze him. Eventually, you have to incinerate him with a shuttle's engine fire to finish him off for good.
  • Any human corpse you see can come back to life if there's an Infector Necromorph in the area. The best idea is to stomp every corpse and take at least two limbs off. The rule of thumb is that if you weren't the one who killed it, it's not dead.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The Necromorphs. Ironically, the game makers basically summed them up as "Space Zombies."
• Older Than They Look: Isaac and Nicole are both supposed to be middle-aged, but look considerably younger than that. Isaac at least looks plausibly like a 40-something man with really good genes who takes care of their health, while Nicole both looks like she's in her early 20's and also has some Animesque stylization of her features (which can be achieved with cosplay makeup, but not at your day job). Dead Space 2 and the Dead Space remake both have Nicole looking more age appropriate (though the remake also de-ages Isaac even more for some reason).
• Once More, with Clarity: The video log from Nicole as seen at the beginning of the game seems like a plea for help. When the clip is shown at the end of the game in full, it reveals her true fate.
• One Bullet Clips: Taken a step further with each type of ammo being limited to a set clip size in your inventory (100 rounds per slot for Pulse Rounds, for example), which often doesn't match the clip size of the gun you're using it with. The Plasma Cutter can never hold as many rounds as one of its clips does, while Pulse Rifle clips only cover the bare minimum capacity of the rifle. A fully-upgraded rifle carries slightly less than two clips.
• One Last Job: Being the Captain of the Ishimura, a ship about to be decommissioned, Mathius chose to become a part of the Church of Unitology's plan to secretly retrieve the Red Marker. He dies of needle to the brain.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Necromorphs. They're basically space-zombies but apparently their 'brains' are in their legs (or arms or tentacles). Going for the body or the head - which will be your first instinct - is an exercise in dying very quickly.
• Oxygen Meter: Used when you enter a vacuum or toxic environments. The game is pretty forgiving in this respect: you get a minute of air minimum, and there's infinite oxygen refill stations in areas where you'll certainly exceed that minimum. Consequently, this renders the fairly numerous air canister pickups useful only for sale.
• Parental Abandonment: After unlocking the game's background logs, you are able to review the Background Request Hammond submitted for Isaac and Kendra. It is suggested in Isaac's file that he is estranged from his vested-Unitologist mother Octavia and has been unable to locate or contact his father Poul despite his efforts due to an executive order record classification.
• Path of Greatest Resistance: The Guide Lines subvert this somewhat, but there are a few times where your best navigation maneuver is to seek the path that tries to kill you.
• People Jars:
  • The Medical Bay has cloned babies that are grown to replace the crew's limbs in case of major injuries. Naturally, they are kept in creepy looking green tanks. And the moment you see them, you know they're infected too. Then you start running into the Lurkers. Considering the number of Necro-babies you'll run into around the ship are easily as high as the number of jars, most likely all of the cloned babies were infected.
  • Doctor Mercer's office contains various heads in jars and a room in the Medical Bay contains the Hunter and another victim in large jars.
• Perpetual-Motion Monster: Necromorphs don't need to eat, sleep or breathe and are essentially immortal. The Hunter even more so; not only does it share those attributes, it can regrow limbs endlessly.
• Personal Space Invader: Every Necromorph tries to grab Isaac and gnaw his face off, but the Lurkers are especially prone to this, and the several giant tentacles Isaac must face grab him and drag him down the hallway.
• Playing with Syringes: It becomes clear as you progress through the game that several questionable activities seemed to have been endorsed by The Government.
• Plot Hole: In Chapter 7 you have to protect Nicole from a horde of necromorphs. The player can shoot her, and if she takes too many hits from the necromorphs or the player's shots her too much she dies, but this doesn't work with the reveal that she's been dead all along. Fans theorize that either Isaac was protecting someone else and the Marker made him think it was Nicole, or that the whole thing was just an hallucination, which includes the necromorphs attacking Nicole and the door being locked, but neither possibility is implied by the game itself. The remake fixed this by revealing the "Nicole" was actually Elizabeth Cross, and the Marker made Isaac think he was talking with Nicole.
• Posthumous Character: Most of the Ishimura's crew are dead by the time the Kellion arrives, including most of the audio log characters. Such as Nicole. Doctor Mercer reveals himself to still be alive though and spends more than one chapter trying to murder Isaac. Doctor Kyne also turns out to have made it this far.
• Powered Armor: Subverted somewhat. Isaac's suit is basically a fabric spacesuit when the game begins, and the various suit 'levels' add bar-like plates to the exterior of it, making it roughly akin to futuristic splint mail as the game progresses. Played straight with the Military Suit, which resembles a cross between Stormtrooper armor and MJOLNIR armor.
• Press X to Die: In the zero gravity segments, there are a few surfaces that Isaac can’t jump to, but oftentimes, there is nothing stopping him from aiming upwards and flying off the Ishimura’s orbit.
• Press X to Not Die: If a creature grabs hold of you, just mash the right button and you'll pry them off, and oftentimes unleash a can of whupass whilst doing so (such as kicking the lurkers clear across the room). A few instances, such as the Hive Mind's grab and the tentacles dragging you to your doom, require you to aim, rather than just mash.
• Psychic Link: The Hive Mind apparently has one of these with the other Necromorphs, though in practice it doesn't really affect the proceedings and the Necromorphs seem to largely do their own thing.
  • It might be more intelligent than it looks. The moment Isaac begins moving the Red Marker, Necromorphs everywhere increase in numbers and try to stop him every step of the way.
  • And the Marker is really pulling a Mind Screw on Kyne and Isaac.
    • Also, right at the start of the second mission, Isaac runs into a dying, blinded woman cradling and talking to "McCoy" (at that point, McCoy was a rotting, dismembered torso). She tells Isaac that McCoy said he'd show up, and hands him a kinesis module. This is likely the Marker tricking her into giving Isaac a needed tool so he could do his part in returning it to the planet.
• Punch-Packing Pistol: The Plasma Cutter is extremely effective, and if upgraded remains so for the entire game.
• Raising the Steaks: Some fish get attacked by the Necromorphs.
• Randomly Drops: Sort of subverted. Item drops are randomized, but ammunition dropped tends to only be from weapons Isaac is carrying. All ammunition drops that don't fit this are fixed and will be available from the same location in every single playthrough of the game.
  • There also seems to be something of a pattern in how often medkits are dropped (especially when Isaac's health is very low) and where stasis-recharge packs are more likely to recharge (in the areas where this ability is required more often).
• "Rear Window" Witness: The game just loves to taunt Isaac by forcing him to watch murders he can't do anything about from windows he somehow can't break.
• Recycled In Space: The game is Resident Evil 4 IN SPACE. Whether or not this is awesome is entirely up to the player. (Apart from gameplay, it's effectively an updated version of System Shock 2, but that was already in space.)
  • Not to mention that, as Yahtzee noted, the story is more or less Event Horizon meets Aliens.
  • Another Let's Player made an informed comparison to Run Like Hell: Hunt or Be Hunted.
  • The remake almost certainly got greenlit after the success of...you guessed...Capcom's Resident Evil remakes.
• Red Herring: You lose contact with Hammond several times throughout the game with weird shit popping up during the interim, and Kendra thinks he knows more than he's letting on. He doesn't, she's The Mole and keeps cutting off his communications. She's most likely accusing him of being a spy to avert any suspicion towards herself. "The lady doth protest too much" indeed.
• Redshirt Army: Oh Dead Space army, you fail so hard. Maybe you should send the troops into mining engineering classes.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Zig-Zagged. Shooting a Necromorph's head will kill it... if you've blown off at least one of its other limbs (or two, depending on what you're shooting). Shooting one in the head from the get-go, however, will only make it go berserk. However, after the head is removed, if you throw it or shoot it, it pops like a melon filled with firecrackers.
• Rescue Equipment Attack: The Ripper, a sawblade gun, is intended to sever live electrical cables in the event of an emergency. It works a treat on Necromorphs, as well.
• Retirony: The Ishimura was to be decommissioned the following year of the events of the game, but for the unlucky crew, especially Captain "One Eye" Mathius, they all went insane and killed each other or themselves before being turned into Necromoprhs.
• The Reveal: Isaac finally takes off his helmet in the ending cut-scene.
  • It can also be seen at the very beginning if you know what you are doing.
  • Finding out NICOLE IS DEAD, as spelled out by the first letter of each chapter name.
  • That Kendra betrays you and leaves you for dead or that Isaac has been experiencing hallucinations of his dead girlfriend induced by the Marker and arguably propagated by the Hive Mind.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Isaac loves his stamping on crates. And so do the fans. Those crates just happen to bear a passing resemblance to the original Xbox console. Interpret that as you will.
• Rewatch Bonus: Upon arriving at the Ishimura, Kendra begins casting doubt at Hammond's decisions, and it only continues from there, with her accusing him of knowing more than he's letting on at every possible opportunity. On your first playthrough, this could be chopped up to her being a civilian freaking out or becoming irrationally paranoid. Going through the game a second time will make you realise that since she's The Mole, she is likely just trying to make Hammond look guilty in order to gain Isaac's trust, with her constant arguing at Hammond's every word becoming much more obvious.
• Room Full of Crazy: In addition to the usual mounds of corpses, some rooms have writing scribbled all over the walls. Not all of it is in English, and it's possible that decoding the writings in the Unitologist alphabet would prove scarier than anything else in the game. And did we mention that the writing is usually in blood?
• Rule of Cool:
  • Some of the game's developers have specifically stated that they did not want Isaac to look like a Space Marine. Be that as it may, what's the best suit in the entire game, in terms of both protection and aesthetics? The Military Suit. Not that it did the Valor any good...
  • The primary reason why you would find a remotely operated circular saw blade weapon. It even sounds like a real circular saw. If there's a more satisfying way to dismember necromorphs, we haven't found it yet.
• Rule of Symbolism: As you upgrade Isaac's suit, the increasing length of the health bar is represented by more notches popping up in the spinal-mounted RIG on his suit. In other words, his progression from Action Survivor to Action Hero is represented by him literally growing a spine.
• Scare Chord: The game features a dynamic music system implemented so that no music, or very little, plays when there's nothing around, but when Isaac sees, hears, or feels something that seriously raises his stress levels, some scary violin chords kick in.
  • Listening to the soundtrack on its own has moments of this, since those chords are built into almost every track.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • Doctor Mercer introduces himself and his insanity by releasing the Hunter from the tank right behind you.
  • Oh, and for the Aegis VII miners? Moving the Marker off its pedestal was a bad idea.
• Second Hour Superpower: The Kinesis Module. This is probably one of the most useful tools at your disposal, along with your plasma cutter. While many of the objects you can throw at enemies are relatively weak, there are a number of objects (including enemy body parts) that do massive damage, and aren't too uncommon in the environment. It's possible to play through almost every fight using only the Kinesis Module, effectively allowing you to have a weapon with unlimited ammo.
• Shout-Out: Isaac Clarke's name.
  • At one point, you have to salvage a "Singularity Core" from the USM Valor. Said core looks an awful lot like a flux capacitor...
    • The first loading screen, which is a graph describing the Kellion's Shockpoint jump, also states that the "Flux Capacitor" is a component of the FTL engine system. Other components include The Improbability Drive and Warp Field Generator.
  • On the Medical Deck, a woman addresses a corpse as McCoy.
  • Mercer also possesses a medical manual in his office for 'Galaxy Class' starships. There's also a "Storage Room 47".
  • Having to mix up poison and use it on the hydroponics deck? Guess the system has been shocked.
  • A visual shout-out to Alien; when encountering danger for the first time, you run down a dark hallway full of flashing yellow lights, almost identical to Ripley's retreat from the Nostromo.
  • The promotional comic The Big Game is one to the Chick Tracts.
  • In the medical section of the Ishimura, at one point you can hear over the loudspeaker, "Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard."
  • Word of God says that the Divider enemy and its howl were inspired by The Thing (1982).
• Shown Their Work: The Dead Space wiki talks about the hydrazine fuel of the flamethrower and its use for melting ice on comets for mining. Such a fuel is used in space travel already, in part because it's a monopropellant and requires no oxidizer; ice is plentiful on comets. In general, it's all very well thought through, except that in the game, the flamethrower doesn't work in a vacuum. Hmm.
  • Ever wonder why flies would populate something that's floating around in space? The Ishimura is designed to be self-sufficient. It has hydroponic gardens, probably recycling centers and whatnot. As such, flies would be completely necessary for breaking down organic waste and many of the gardening processes.
  • The GamePro article, "The Science of Dead Space".
• Sidetrack Bonus: There are many rooms and even entire areas that you do not need to pass through to proceed, but many may contain supplies. Or monsters. And many times, both. This is recycled throughout the series.
• Sniper Pistol: The Plasma Cutter is basically a fancy handgun, but it's extremely long ranged and stable.
• So Near, Yet So Far: There's a unique example that isn't plot sensitive, but is still a game-spanning objective. The game is littered with enigmatic advertisements for something called Peng and an award in the Achievement System exists for finding it. It happens to be a tiny golden statue of a woman sitting in a trench in the very first area of the game but Isaac won't be able to get ahold of it until returning there near the end of the game, using the Kinesis Module he didn't have earlier. It has no purpose but is sellable for a large sum, and picking it up does net you the aforementioned achievement.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Averted, more or less. The first weapon you get, the Plasma Cutter, is good enough to be your weapon of choice to the end of the game. There's an achievement for only using the cutter for a playthrough, and it's actually fairly easy to get, the only downside being an inability to shoot multiple enemies at once.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: One of the trailers for the games is set to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" while flashes of gore and horror flicker across the screen. It also plays faintly in one of the later levels of the game.
• Space Is Noisy: Averted. The game will amplify the sounds coming from inside Isaac's helmet, muffle the sounds coming from direct contact with his weapons or the ground, and mute most sounds while in a vacuum (you can still hear close enemies though, because the sound is being realistically transmitted through the floor). It's actually quite immersive and adds to the gameplay since he can't hear Necromorphs creeping up on him.
  • Space Is Cold is also averted, for that matter, though it's less obvious.
• Space Is Slow Motion: Perhaps unintentional, but nearly everything done in zero gravity environments is slower than in the artificial gravity counterparts.
  • At least the slower walking is justified as magnetic boots would require you to always keep one foot on the ground at any time, making walking quickly and running very difficult.
• Spiritual Successor: To System Shock, in every way except for gameplay, which is more closely modeled after Resident Evil 4.
• Spotting the Thread: Quite a few: first of all, it is a relatively simple jump in imagination to complete the message that the chapter titles are spelling out.
  • Second: You know that Doctor Kyne is hallucinating and is seeing his dead wife, and after hearing Mercer talk about it in a log, you can figure out that the Marker can only create visions of the dead, and so Nicole is dead as well.
  • Third: While aboard the USM Valor in mission 9, you get a video transmission from Nicole. For a split second, her face distorts into a skull.
  • Fourth: When you are in close proximity to Nicole in the Flight Control Room, getting close to the monitors causes them to display Marker text overlaying a CEC logo. It's the first clue that something is wrong with Isaac.
• Spring-Loaded Corpse: Necromorphs adore playing dead, and since the ship is overflowing with corpses, this can make for many a Jump Scare. Resulting in your throat getting torn out.
  • Made even worse by the fact that many creatures love to play dead in the middle of a fight, and will happily stalk you while your back is turned. Nothing quite as pleasant as turning around and seeing the creature you supposedly just killed escape into a nearby vent.
  • This turns into a bit of unintentional hilarity when players have wised up to this trick. The best of them simply know to (a) watch for the item drop when you kill a necromorph (since items tend to be shiny and holographically highlighted), (b) automatically blow any "predeceased" necromorph you see laying around away by shooting its legs out with a plasma gun or line gun (this works since only one "predeceased" necromorph on the whole ship actually is dead and not playing dead, though it can still be overlooked if a play-dead necromorph is hiding in a pile of human corpses), and (c) preemptively dismember all the corpses in areas they know an Infector will be about. The rest of us simply dismember everything and some of us rationalize it as Isaac Clarke being Properly Paranoid. Or we like the psychological morale boost to hear Isaac's cave-man roar and the wet squelch sound of corpses popping under the Mighty Boot.
• Stock Scream: Isaac releases a few of these at times, particularly during the battle with the Hive Mind if you fail to free yourself from the tentacles.
• Subspace Ansible: Implied via Nicole's message getting out at all.
  • Note that the distress signal Isaac sends out being answered immediately is part of the story (the military ship was nearby all along).
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Kendra sees fit to steal the Marker after Isaac returns it, even though it is the only thing holding the Necromorph hoard at bay and she is barely armed (a single pistol, while Isaac is practically an armory). Needless to say, her death comes swiftly.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: The two Red Shirts Isaac brought with him in the scene where Isaac has to override security in the Flight Lounge.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Played straight, but often inverted in a manner similar to After Boss Recovery.
  • If you come across a save spot all by itself - no bench or store - it's a good reason to sweat in this game.
• Sympathy for the Hero: Mercer will repeatedly tell you that he admires your determination and perseverance, including saying that you almost make him think the human race had a future after all.
• Take Your Time: No matter how urgent the task, nothing will actually happen until you reach the place it's supposed to occur at. Even when the ship is getting pummeled by asteroids or the oxygen levels are rapidly falling, or that big chunk of planet crust is dropping through the sky down onto where you are fighting the end boss. The Necromorphs are good enough to leave you alone while you spend all the time you want practicing at the shooting range or playing Z-Ball.
• Talking Is a Free Action: An Infector is polite enough to just stand there and let Mercer go through his entire speech before trying to infect him.
  • But going to the store is not, oddly enough. If you go into a room and run to the store console you may find yourself with a rather unpleasant surprise behind you.
• Technology Marches On: In-Universe. RIGs have a vastly expanded Waypoint function in 2 and 3, able to point out shops, save stations, and upgrade benches. Stasis also regenerates by itself, presumably by incorporating movement-powered generators. They also have integrated maneuvering thrusters, though this particular feature was added to the 2023 remake.
• Tech Points: Power Nodes are usually found as a reward for completing objectives (not directly, but conveniently in the same room as that key you've been looking for, etc.) They are used for upgrading weapons, your space suit, and occasionally opening optional doors with lots of pickups behind them.
• Telekinesis: via Applied Phlebotinum. It basically gives you Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun, up to and including the use of nearby objects as improvised projectiles. It also provides a very useful workaround for the scarcity of ammo: once you've shot the arms off one Necromorph, you can use those arms to stake the next two you come across! Also, Necromorphs playing possum aren't affected by telekinesis, but dead ones are. It takes the trial and error out of the equation.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: Often played straight, though it is handwaved by the creatures hiding in vents. The mad doctor Mercer supposedly has hacked the controls for a lot of the areas, but there's a few times where he exits into areas from which there is no escape, and how he avoids being dismembered by the monsters he worships is a complete mystery.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Pretty much every death scene for poor Isaac. A good example would be the Hunter death scene: the creature stabs both its blades through Isaac, then lifts him up above it. It then stabs him two more times, cuts off both his legs, cuts off his left arm, looks into his eyes as he bleeds out, then decapitates him and cuts his torso in half. Yeesh.
  • If one feels like watching this particularly violent death, they can see here
  • If you fail to kill the Hive Mind when dangling, your death is almost thirty seconds of it chomping at Isaac, removing individual limbs with a mouth with More Teeth than the Osmond Family while he screams in agony. It makes Kendra's death looks pretty tame in comparison.
• The Radio Dies First: Kendra hangs a lampshade on it while approaching the USG Ishimura, and it continues to happen to individuals communicating with Isaac throughout the game as needed.
  Kendra Daniels: Never heard of a total communications blackout on one of these things.
• Title Drop:
  • The name of the twelfth and final chapter of the game is "Dead Space".
  • Additionally, the backstory log "The Red Marker" indicates the Marker creates a "dead space" around it that makes the necrotic recombination effect dormant. This doesn't occur during gameplay, as it is implied that this "dead space" is just a measly few meters.
• Took a Shortcut: You really do have to wonder how some of the characters manage to get around the ship without being killed, considering they're running around a ship infested with undead killing machines and Isaac appears to be the only person who bought a helmet for his spacesuit. Hammond and Kendra are somewhat justified, given that the former seems to have military training and the latter spends most of her time sealed in a secure control room and also turns out to be a Spec Ops agent. But you really have to wonder how the unarmed, rather doughy-looking Dr. Kyne, as well as the unarmed and completely batshit insane Dr. Mercer, managed to survive for so long when everyone else got killed.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: The Valor's armory is full of weaponry Isaac can't take, and he has to buy all his own gear save the Plasma Cutter; no other weapons appear in the game as pickups, even though they're supposed to be industrial tools used in the standard operations of the ship he's on. You can't even take the rifle off a guy who was just killed two feet in front of you. That said, he finds a metric assload of ammunition free for the taking.
• Unstable Equilibrium: If you don't waste ammo, avoid taking hits, and sell everything you pick up short of ammo and a few medkits, you can upgrade your equipment early on and have a much easier time with the rest of the game. By contrast, if you're trigger happy and let yourself take hits, you'll spend more money on ammo and medkits and less on upgrades, which will only get worse as the game starts throwing elite Necromorphs at you.
• Variable Mix: The music rises and falls depending on how you move through the level, but it also remains silent unless the player sees a monster, whether or not the monster is actually in the room with you. If one hits you from behind or jumps into view, you get a very appropriate musical sting that adds to the surprise.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Admittedly, the only creatures you interact with are undead aliens, but Isaac can maim and mangle them just as badly as they can brutalize him. Cutting limbs off, punting babies like footballs, ripping heads off in choke holds, tearing tentacles out... and this is actually encouraged by the game; it's more ammo-efficient to dismember your opponents. This even applies to human corpses. Any intact corpse is Infector bait, so the savvy player will maim them all with gratuitous boot-stomping.
• Video Phone: Isaac has an ultra hi-tech video phone with a projected holographic screen as part of the RIG suit's Comm Link.
• Viewer-Friendly Interface: Nearly every panel you can interact with is in huge font with simple words and large symbols. Also, you basically never have to search for functions; the exact thing you are looking for will pop up if you approach the respective terminal.
• The Virus: The Necromorphs, the race of baddies who make up the Zombie Apocalypse. Unique in that they can't actually infect living people - they have to be dead first. Precisely how the virus itself is transmitted is never particularly clear, since the only vector seen, the Infector, can only create one specific type.
  • Although the Hunter was created by injecting the infection directly through the forehead of a living victim.
  • The motion comic goes into more detail on this, showing a corpse infected by contact with a bacterial colony transforming into an Infector and proceeding to reanimate other nearby dead.
  • Not to mention the book, in which a scientist injects himself with suspicious alien tissue, becoming an Infector soon after.
• Was Once a Man: Pretty much all of the things Isaac graphically dismantles used to be members of the Ishimura's crew, excluding the Hive Mind, and possibly the Leviathan and Slug.
  • It's implied (admittedly more All There in the Manual) that the Hive Mind is physically composed from the reshaped corpses of, A: the majority of the colonists, B: the original poor bastards who became Necromorph chow when they first reverse-engineered the damn DNA codes, or C: both of the aforementioned.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Red Marker manipulates people by creating illusions of someone that the victim cares about, such as Nicole, but in the end, all it wants is to be placed back on its pedestal so that it can stop the Necromorph outbreak, and every illusion keeps urging the victim to help accomplish that.
• Where It All Began: Before the last chapter, you find yourself back on the hangar deck, where you arrived.
• Your Head Asplode: The Scientist in Chapter 2.
  • Also, the cackling mad woman who commits suicide as you enter the room in the Unitology 'coven'. Too bad you can't pick up her pistol, since this is just moments prior to the Hunter's second appearance (though all things considered, a pistol would probably be useless).
  • A Necromorph also does this to Isaac if you don't fight it off in time.
• Zombie Gait: Averted for the most part. Most Necromorphs can keep running pace with Isaac, the exceptions being the ones whose bulk or frailty wouldn't logically allow them to match his speed. Special mention has to go to the Twitchers, former soldiers whose stasis units have been repurposed to make them inhumanely quick, allowing them to cross a room in seconds.

---

Though I know not what you are,

Twinkle, twinkle, little star...