Over the past few nights I’ve been playing Dead Space, the new sci-fi horror shooter from EA. It’s an extremely well-made and entertaining game, and I’m enjoying it a lot. I want to make that clear up front, because I spend the rest of this post complaining about it. And I’m even going to go so far as to unfairly single it out as an example of everything that’s wrong with the current state of storytelling in games.
At least from what I’ve seen so far — I’ve finished three of twelve levels — Dead Space is the perfect title for this game, because it’s the only combination of words that could possibly be more generic than SciFi Horror Videogame. It says nothing about the game and leaves no lasting impression, and it has the added benefit of being indistinguishable from a billion other videogame and movie titles, from Freespace to Dead Rising.
In Dead Space, you play as an engineer for some futuristic mega-corporation, separated from your group and making your way through a derelict sci-fi shooter haunted by the memory of past videogames, as you’re attacked by wave after wave of cliches. Bodies of victims are littered about the ship, their last warnings scrawled on the walls in blood, right next to alien, demonic-looking runes. You walk from one darkened room to the next, surrounded by flickering lights, audio and video logs, locked doors that need to be unlocked, health and ammo pick-ups, bodies hanging from hooks, lockers to search, ironically cheerful corporate advertisements, glass-walled rooms that show a survivor being attacked in a gruesome fashion, medical centers containing the zombified remains of the sinister scientists who knowingly took advantage of the situation, and monsters leaping out of air ducts at ostensibly unpredictable moments.
The cliches pile up so high so quickly that I was surprised just how entrenched and downright complex sci-fi horror cliches have gotten. I don’t play that many shooters (mostly because I’m terrible at them) or see that many horror movies, and yet everything I’ve seen in this game is recognizable several times over. At its core, it’s like an attempt to cross System Shock 2 with DOOM 3 (which was itself an attempt to cross System Shock 2 with DOOM). Toss in some Resident Evil and Half-Life 2, along with some smaller elements of Deus Ex, Halo, and Gears of War, and put your main character in a big suit vaguely reminiscent of the Big Daddies in BioShock. Now, Dead Space has been in production for at least two years, probably much longer, so I’m not suggesting at all that they “ripped off” those recent games. That’d be like complaining that the Sci Fi Channel Original Movie Tsetse Fly Rampage rips off the movies Mantis Attack, Night of the Snails, and Koalapocalypse*; it’s not necessarily that they’re stealing from each other, but that they’re all coming from the same source.
The game has outstanding production values: fantastic visuals, perfect sound design, extremely clear and well-thought-out level design, good controls, great balance, and terrific effects work (riding a tram through a cavernous engine compartment surrounded in fog as you hear howls and moans echoing all around you is a particularly cool moment). But it’s all in the service of a setting and story so distractingly uninspired and unoriginal, I have to wonder if the lack of innovation was intentional. I’m reminded of a quote from the EverQuest guys at a CGDC, explaining that the reason they chose such obvious fantasy cliches for that game was because they didn’t want to “confuse” or “overwhelm” players. But even in the rare cases where the game shows true originality and not just polish or attention to detail, the way they’re used just pulls the game back into generic shooter territory.
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Over the past couple of days, there’s been a good bit of attention towards the change in tone of the presidential campaign, more specifically, the McCain campaign.