YMMV / Dead Space (Remake)

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The Red Marker. Nicole's final message indicates that she successfully communicated with it, asking it to stop what it was doing. Given this, it paints the Marker's actions in a far different light, since everything it does, from causing the ship to go into a decaying orbit and deactivating the ADS system, to blocking communications, poisoning the air, and scuttling the approaching military ship, could be viewed as it trying to prevent humans from taking it to someplace where there would be enough humans to begin a Convergence event, prevent humans from having an opportunity to study it, and prevent signal-infected humans from going out to create more Markers. In fact, the Nexus-Hivemind going absolutely berserk when Kendra tries to take the Marker away, and trying to stop Isaac from leaving Aegis VII can all be viewed as attempts to keep the Marker's impact contained prior to its final destruction. Given what happens to Isaac after the events of the game, the Red Marker would have had very good reason to kill him in order to prevent Convergence.
  • How much more of an Anti-Villain is Kendra? While she's undoubtedly nicer than her original counterpart, she still does questionable things such as putting suspicion on Hammond when she should know that he has no idea about the Marker's presence. Likewise when she leaves Isaac behind she says that he'll find another way out, but considering the Ishimura is minutes away from catastrophic failure, does she sincerely believe that or is she just trying to lie to both Isaac and herself to assuage her own guilt?
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Hive Mind, while much more intimidating then the original, is still only moderately difficult. The added attacks where it spews bombs at you and making certain parts of the arena hazardous with acid make things a little hairy, but are easy to dodge. The tentacle attacks are a little bit harder to avoid but the game gives ample room to maneuver around. The real challenge of the boss are its addons; it'll periodically summon a horde of slashers, which make its above attacks actually a challenge to avoid.
• Character Rerailment: The remake does its best to combine the original characterization of the Red Marker and the retcons to it found in 2 and 3. Basically, it's an object that is opposed to itself: an human-made alien artifact that creates Necromorphs but has been reprogrammed by human scientists to suppress the Hive Mind.
• Complete Monster: Dr. Challus Mercer lacks the Marker-induced insanity he had in the original, but commits far greater crimes. A devout Unitologist who seeks to escape death through gaining the Red Marker's favor, Mercer starts by having a mentally-vulnerable Brant Harris transferred to his care, where he takes advantage of his mental illness to manipulate him into agreeing to being turned into the Hunter, who he has help him kill survivors onboard the Ishimura. After things truly go to hell, Mercer's sabotage of the ship leads to several decks that may have held the line being overwhelmed and the crew onboard slaughtered. When a group of survivors from the Hydroponics Deck enters the Medical Deck, Mercer captures them, gruesomely experiments on them, and leaves them to be turned into Necromorphs. When confronted by Jacob Temple on the Crew Deck, Mercer puts him into stasis and shoots him in the head, intentionally dragging out his death for far longer. A crazed religious fanatic, Mercer claims he is acting on behalf of humanity's future, when in fact he only cares about his own eternal reward.
• Demonic Spiders
  • Leapers can take significantly more punishment before going down than in the original game, and they move around a lot more, as well. It's even worse in zero-gravity environments, where they will pounce at you and, if they make contact, will send Isaac tumbling backward and disorienting the player.
  • Twitchers have been heavily beefed up, similar to the Leapers, but they also have been given a truly devious trick up their sleeves; they are now completely immune to traditional Stasis blasts. While there is a spot on their chest that can be shot to trigger a massive blast of Stasis that slows everything down around it, the Twitcher itself included, that Stasis field won't last for too long. If you haven't acquired the Prototype Stasis module by the time Twitchers enter the picture, you're in for a bad time.
  • Phantom Necromorphs, exclusive to New Game Plus. Even a fully-upgraded Plasma Cutter will require almost ten shots to take down a basic Phantom Slasher, and they show up as early as chapter 1.
• Friendly Fandoms: With The Callisto Protocol, which makes a ton of sense. Both are third-person Survival Horror video games with a Diegetic Interface set on large space stations where something has gone horrifically wrong, with a heavy emphasis on blood and gore. It also helps that Glen Schofield, the creator of the original Dead Space, is the lead developer of Callisto, and it's very clearly a Creator-Driven Successor to Dead Space.
• Game-Breaker: The Line Gun's laser mines. When fully upgraded, these laser beams deal absurd damage and tear through necromorphs in seconds. A later upgrade even spawns three mines instead of one when you place them down, dramatically increasing their firepower. What turns them from "strong" to "broken" however is that they can be attached to physics objects and moved around with kinesis. You can staple some mines to the side of a box and turn it into a makeshift beam weapon, tearing through entire rooms in a single sweep. This method is incredibly ammo-efficient as well. Combine the beams with stasis and not even Brutes can pose much of a threat.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Lurkers are absolutely insufferable in the remake, having been given a much more aggressive behavior set that allows them to fire at the player relentlessly unless dealt with, not helped by how common they are and they rarely come alone. A lot of the areas in which they appear are difficult to see due to lower lighting, allowing them to blend in to the environment easily due to their darker color. Among a horde of Necromorphs, they tend to hide behind their much larger brethren as they whittle away at Isaac's health while he can't shoot back, while repeatedly staggering him and leaving him open to other attacks. They are especially big nuisances in Zero-G environments, where the player has to deal with both them and whatever puzzle at hand, and the intentional awkwardness of flight controls doesn't help. The icing on the cake is that they now also Lead the Target, which makes evading their shots a whole lot harder than it used to be.
  • Swarmers are significantly more annoying than in the original, due to them being harder to dodge and taking longer to shake off once they latch on to Isaac. They also show up more frequently. If you don't see them coming and/or don't have a weapon that is effective at killing them quickly, they can be a right pain.
• Heartwarming Moments
  • The crew of the Kellion is much, much more friendly than they were in the original game, making for a greater sense of camaraderie between them throughout, even as distrust is sewn such as Kendra and Hammond's falling out being more gradual over the course of the game rather than instant.
    • After the intro sequence, if you have Isaac stay in the Kellion, the game will trigger a brief dialogue between him and Johnston, with Isaac making sure she's okay and Johnston assuring him that she'll be fine for now.
    • When the hallucination of Nicole asks 'do you miss them?' during the ending part of the game, when the entire crew is either dead or has betrayed him, while she goes on to bring up his parents, Isaac's first thought is of the Kellion crew, and he immediately answers in the affirmative.
  • Nicole and Isaac's relationship, despite the massive tear jerker that is their final proper conversation, is a very sweet one. In fact, even after their heated argument that put their relationship in jeopardy, Nicole still holds on to an audio recording of her call to Isaac and gives it to Kyne since it would be safer with him. She still loves him, even after what he said.
• Improved Second Attempt:
  • Several changes to the Ishimura's design were made to fix criticisms of the ship's layout.
    • In the Medical Deck's Imaging and Diagnostics Wing, a medical bed must be moved with Kinesis to create a makeshift bridge to cross a gap on the upper floor. In the original game, this was the only way to cross and made no sense from a practical standpoint, as medical staff would have to move a piece of equipment in use each time Zero-G Therapy needed to be accessed. The remake fixes this by adding a set of walkways on the upper floor that completely bypass the aforementioned gap. However the walkway has been partially destroyed, necessitating using Kinesis to move the bed.
    • The Ishimura now has maintenance accessways and a means to access decks on foot in the event of a power or tram failure; in the original game the only means to move from deck to deck was with the tram system, which meant decks were essentially isolated sections and not areas of an interconnected ship.
    • The original had lockers throughout the Ishimura that were locked the first time you went through a section of the ship, only to be mysteriously unlocked when you went through the area in a later chapter to prevent you from looting the entire place the first time through. The clearance system used to unlock them ties this loot to progression in a more realistic way.
  • The much loathed ADS turret sections from the original have been entirely retooled to only require a few shots per cannon to calibrate them, now lock on to asteroids, and no longer overheat, turning one of the worst sections of the original into a set piece that is memorable for the right reasons.
• Moral Event Horizon: Dr. Challus Mercer crosses it by taking advantage of a mentally vulnerable Brant Harris in order to groom him into taking part in becoming The Hunter, all the while sending him to kill people and sabotage the ship, all while not having his sanity touched by The Marker.
• Narm: An interesting case, as it is completely dependent on luck. Throughout the game, Isaac is scripted to react to certain scenes with a disgusted groan. There are several different versions of this groan, and one is randomly selected to play during the scene. Normally, this works totally fine, as his groans manage to sound both disgusted and horrified. Some of these groans, however, are less horrified, more disgusted, leading to the hilarity of Isaac reacting to the horrifying sight of a woman carving a man up like a pumpkin before slitting her own throat with a disgusted "Eugh..." that sounds less like he's witnessed someone commit murder-suicide, and more like he just stepped in something.
• Narm Charm: Isaac's Bring It line to the Hive Mind. Between Gunner Wright's delivery and the actual line, it is simultaneously embarrassingly over the top, yet completely awesome. It's also a good indicator of how Isaac has reached the end of his rope, and after all the trials he's been through he's standing defiant in front of the gargantuous Eldritch Abomination bearing down on him.
• Nausea Fuel: The improved graphics causes all the blood and gore to be much more detailed. And the new Peeling system can result in even greater carnage being wrought upon a Necromorph, where you can blast away layers of skin until there's just bone underneath.
• Older Than They Think: There has been a noticeable backlash on social media by some people over Nicole’s perceived Age Lift in the remake compared to her more youthful look in the original, but some forget she had already been aged up a bit in Dead Space 2.
• Paranoia Fuel: One of the new features added in the remake is Isaac's dynamic heartbeat. Anything that causes his heart rate to spike such as being surprised or taking damage will cause a heartbeat to start sounding. What helps sell this is that Isaac's heart rate won't come down until he calms down, and by extension, you the player calming down.
• Remade and Improved: The general consensus of fans and critics alike is that the game manages to take what the original game did back in 2008, sand off any and all rough edges, and then add in enough new twists on gameplay, narrative, and presentation to create the definitive way of experiencing the original game in the series.
• Scrappy Weapon: Progression changes and redone weapon mechanics have turned the Pulse Rifle into one of these. The weapon now does pitiful damage while consuming a ton of bullets, and even after fully upgrading it, the Pulse Rifle still barely keeps pace with any of the other weapons. Part of the issue is that all of the other weapons are very damage-to-shot efficient, while the Pulse Rifle can tear through an entire clip before it fells something. As well, the gun no longer has a niche due to the Peeling system, as the other guns excel in exposing necromorph bone to cut through better than the Pulse Rifle can. This eliminates its purpose as a high-power precision weapon, which is now filled by the Contact Beam. Overall, it's probably best to bench the Pulse Rifle this time around in favor of other weapons. Thematically, this makes sense, as a key part of the series' gameplay is the use of repurposed industrial tools as your primary weapons, while the military fails to effectively respond to the Necromorphs because conventional rifles are ill-suited for fighting undead, non-human enemies that need to be dismembered in order to kill them.
• Shocking Moments: Mercer's introduction is far, far more menacing than in the original game, firmly establishing him as an even more menacing presence this time around.
• That One Achievement: "Wishbone": Rip a dangling limb off of an enemy with Kinesis. This is much harder than it sounds, as a lot of the time, your shots will cut clean through a limb and sever it entirely, making it rare for it to reach the stage of "disabled but still attached". It's very possible to go through tons of Necromorphs and never being able to do it unless you get lucky.
• That One Boss: The final boss, unlike in the original version, can be this now to some players due to a lack of checkpoints mid battle. The boss is now much longer, with multiple stages and more attack variety, and while most of the fight is challenging but fair, the last stage, in which Isaac must shoot the boss's final weak point while dangling in mid air, can still be very much a Luck-Based Mission, and if you die on this portion you have to do the entire boss all over again.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: One of the very few changes that have been widely disliked is changing the malfunctioning gravity floor plates into electrified floor plates. They fulfill a similar function, but it is much less memorable and amusing to see a necromorph (or Isaac himself) fried by electricity than it is to see one suddenly hurled upwards and smash into the ceiling, though this change does function as an Anti-Frustration Feature as the electrified plates give Isaac a window to escape their effects and survive, unlike the gravity plates which killed him instantly.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: A downplayed example for Isaac, whose face is directly modeled off of his voice actor, Gunner Wright. Some players have noted that he feels slightly off, mainly due to the lack of facial hair, causing his face to look a little unnaturally smooth.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: While the original game is still an excellent looking game to this day, the decade-plus of technical enhancements since the original game definitely show!
  • The sheer amount of tiny details on things as simple as a windowsill throughout the Ishimura is nothing short of astounding. Rust, blood, dust, tiny screws and bolts, and scuffs are all excellently rendered, telling the story of the old, decaying ship, even before the Necromorphs arrived.
  • Isaac himself. His suit is excellently detailed, right down to the seams in his fake leather suit, with an extremely realistic head scan of his actor, Gunner Wright's face. He looks simply fantastic, and his animations look even better than they did in the original game.
  • Necromorphs are a very, very grim example. They are incredibly well detailed, down to small spots where skin has melted from the extreme heat of transforming into a horrific monstrosity, and the details inside the Necromorph are nothing to sneeze at, either. They are, simply put, absolutely horrific, and the fact they're so visually perfect helps a ton with that.
  • The atmospheric effects are incredibly impressive. The lighting is immaculate in how realistic it looks, especially when combined with the fantastic new fog and particle effects which can be interacted with. Adding onto this is how all of this works when introduced to certain environmental conditions, like zero-gravity.
• Win Back the Crowd: The Dead Space franchise had been considered dead ever since the third game had all but successfully attempted to Torch the Franchise and Run. With the Remake's release, the series immediately catapulted back into the gaming industry's forefront a decade later thanks to not just properly remaking the original, but expanding upon and even improving elements that didn't quite hit the mark before, while also bringing back fan attention to the original trilogy into the limelight. More than ever, almost every reviewer and critic on the block had four words to say: "Dead Space is back."
  • A smaller example is that many fans were disappointed that the game's original iconic trailer was not remade for the remake. Roughly a month after release, Motive dropped a fully remade version of the trailer, complete with rapid cuts to Isaac being brutalized.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Early designs of Isaac's new suit had a set of "spines" along his health bar, which was a point of contention to fans. Later streams showed that the "spines" had been toned down to look much more natural and now stick out much less than before, blending into the outfit, though some fans still prefer the original design of the Level 3 suit. Thankfully, this is corrected with the option of an alternate costume of the Level 3 called the "DS-08 Legacy" that is a straight port of the original armor model from the 2008 game with only updated texture work and animation rigging.

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