‘Dead Space’: The Frightening, the Dauntless and the Meh

My weekly post on PopMatters is up. This week in horror month I wrote on Dead Space.

It went up a day late, because I posted it in the back end a little later than usual and it was missed until late afternoon. And it was late because I was actually still playing Dead Space early on Tuesday morning. Friends on the weekend and the Monday Presidential Debate  cut into my play time.

Pretty much everything I have to say on the game is in that post. There really isn’t anything extra. I went in with an, “okay show me what you got game,” attitude. And it did. It was scary as hell for the first hour or two. But then I started to get used to it. Then came Chapter 4 and I was on edge all over again. Then it went back to the usual shtick. I do say in the piece that I’m not sure if that was on purpose or not. That’s because Chapter 4 is going through an already visited area and I collected the ammo the first time around.

If Dead Space wanted to stay scary it needed to either be shorter or do more of that change up stuff to its formula. Ultimately some of it was good to the horror, some of it was bad and we can all agree the monsters were ugly.

Read it over on PopMatters.