Dead Space 1 just not scary?

[The Aimless One]

Scared the crap out of me......
I am finding the second one less scary but that could just be me getting used to it.

It's still a bblast to play though, so I say: "Yay" as to wether you should buy it.

 

[Morbira]

Like many have said already, the predictability of the horror is what killed it for me. I almost felt a burgeoning sense of clairvoyance while playing DS. Walk down hallway, vent will shake, music will freak out, but nothing will be there. Turn the corner, OH SHIT THERE WAS SOMETHING THERE AND- now it's dead...

Another thing that was probably supposed to be more meaningful but took a turn towards comedy was the whole Nicole thing.

Spoiler

Maybe I've played through too many survival horror games, but did anyone else just take for granted that she was already dead? I literally played the game start to finish without once realizing she was supposedly alive. Granted, the game doesn't give you much detail on her survival other than a brief blip from one of your pilots before you land on the station. This made that whole scene where she comes back and you have to protect her more funny than hectic. To me, it was like, "*****, you're just a hallucination. Why should I care if you get eaten?"

There are two massive points I give in favor of DS though. The first being the aforementioned Regenerator (I'm also a huge fan of the Nemesis concept from RE). The second, which hasn't been touched on much, is the death sequences. Seriously, I felt some of those, and Issac's muffled grunts and screams from behind his mask help make them all the more visceral to watch. Coming from someone completely desensitized to gore, it's impressive if a game can make me sit back and say "damn..." like that.

Other than that, it's a pretty game with good atmosphere that overstays its welcome and becomes far too routine. There's a reason I renamed the file "REPAIRMAN: Chronicles of the Bullshit Space Station" on my computer.

 

[Darks63]

The scares become predictable really which killed the horror for me.

Scare 1; A presumably dead nerco lying there ill just walk by and boom it jumps up and back attacks.

Solution; Blow any "dead" necro I saw apart.

Scare 2; You walk by some dead bodies of people and think damn somebody wasted these guys and leave the area, later on you walk through the area again and they have become black necros who are fast as hell and take much more damage with little stingray buddies.

Solution; Just amend the first solution to include the dismemebring of all human bodies apart with my friend Mr. size 20 boots.

Scare 3; You are walking through a corridor and you see and big hole in the wall and wonder what could have done that and you see more than one of these but you pass them without incident, until a gaint tenticle shosts out of one and you have a small amount of time to shoot you way free.

Overall this scare kinda worked except for the fact that its scripted and that kinda destroys the scare factor a little.

Scare 4; you pick up any key item and suddenly a wave of enemies attack from a previously cleared room.

As a Doom vet this technique is overdone as hell and doesnt scare me at all.

Scare 5; you see/hear something in the vent in front of you and got to investigate the vent where the noise occured only to have the vent behind you explode and a screaming necro flailing/charging you from behind.

Solution; Just always expect back attacks from these guys as well as pincer attacks and you will be fine.

Scare 6; You are in the vacuum and the only thing you can hear is your own breathing and suddly a necro grabs/attacks you from behind.

This was the only really good scare in the game because the vacuum cut out one of the main design flaws of the Necros and thats the fact that they are waaaayyyy to noisy, to point where they are annoying not scary.

 

[alimination602]

I would say my biggest horror turn off, which was a key flaw in Dead Space, was knowing when something was going to attack you and then how easy it was to dispatch an enemy. Resident Evil Zombies are cheap one shot one kill enemies which slowly shamble towards you which works because there are hundreds of them in any given battle and you have to work to clear them out before they swarm you. In Dead Space the most enemies you ever encounter at once is about four- and they're usually all lined up in a row anyway, thereby allowing you to hold down the trigger button until they're all a pile of severed limbs.

The scariest films/games for me are those which have proper atmosphere. The kind of games where you can walk around for the first 20 minutes weaponless either with things being creepy but safe or with demonic horrors attacking you and your only choice is to run for the hills. That is a good opening.

The biggest example of this is the difference between the openings of the US made Resident Evil film and the UK produced 28 Days Later (I know they're not games but just hear me out).

In 28 Days Later they have a 3 minute intro in a secret lab showing monkeys being experimented on and tortured. The creatures are then released and infect one of the people who then starts murdering her friends. It fades out to a guy waking up in an abandoned London who then walks around for 10 minutes before finally encountering a zombie and understandably legging it. The guy is then only saved when some survivors arrive and blow up a Petrol Station with Molotov's! That's what made it good- pacing and making the enemies seem properly dangerous and give the player/protagonist a reason to fear them.

In Resident Evil by comparison we have a 5 minute intro in the secret underground base in which the AI kills everyone which doesn't make sense since surely if it's a lab designed specifically to house dangerous biological agents they would have a better containment strategy than gassing everyone and leaving the doors wide open! Milla Jovovich then wakes up naked in a shower, throws on a mini-skirt and 2 minutes later a Special Forces team break through the windows and open the door to a secret underground base she shouldn't even know existed due to her plot convenient amnesia! She then spends the rest of the film being escorted around by people with Semi-automatic weapons and despite her apparent unwillingness to do anything but stand around and remember plot points about 10 minutes after they would have been useful the first time she finally picks up a gun she drops half a dozen mutant dogs with one shot each to the centre of the head and kick drops the last one with a Karate move which I'm pretty sure defies several laws of physics and proper fighting form.

We can scare ourselves far better than anyone else can. If you want to make true horror games don't fill it with blood and chainsaws and demonic horrors. All you need to do is simply put the player in a dark room with some messed up scenery and let their warped, child like imaginations misinterpret the mailman delivering this morning's post as a serial killer peering through their mailbox!

 

[Dogstile]

snip

So you're used to horror games, so therefore it wasn't scary?

I mean, jeez people, it was meant to be startling. All you horror veterans saying it wasn't scary don't realise that it /wasn't designed for you/. Doesn't the fact that the game made you feel like you had to constantly check each corpse and make sure everything was stamped on kinda hint that it might have made you slightly more worried than you remember?

 

[DVS Storm]

Dead Space 1 did give me a few jumps yes but other than that it's not scary. I still like the it a lot. It's great game and I'm going to buy Dead Space 2 at some point.

 

[akibawall95]

I did not think it was that scary, it was just a bit creepy. I hope that Dead Space 2 is more scary. Will someone tell me if it is?

 

[BrionJames]

I agree to an extent. There were plenty of "SPOOKED YA!" moments, but ultimately I never felt genuinely afraid while playing it. There was plenty of tension, just not fear. Oh also FEAR 2 was a pretty shitty game.

 

[deckai]

The only difference between F.E.A.R and Dead Space I see, is the setting, one is more about the paranormal/ghost the other is more about the alien/Body Horror.

Both rely heavy on jumpscares. But in the end I found Dead Space more scary, since it still counts as survival-horror and not as a Fps. I kinda feared for my "life" not like in F.E.A.R, where most of the jumpscares were harmless.

And I don't agree with people who say jumpscares aren't really scary... if your gaming-style is changed by them, even slightly, for example by moving slower, wasting more ammo or have a eye on the darker conrners, than boys and girls, you a scared. That may be not be the kind of fear you were looking for, but in the end you still were scared.

There are countless kinds of fears and people react to them in different ways.

Oh and I just finished Dead Space 2, If you didn't like the first one you probably won't like the sequel (Although there a bit more of ghost/paranormal scares this time).

 

[WOPR]

I've been playing through the first Dead Space (I never finished my play through cause it got boring) so that i can buy the sequel, and im about 3/4 of the way through and not one thing has scared me except for a jump scare. I'm quite surprised, i was hopping there would be some genuine scares, but so far nothing, i mean F.E.A.R 2 was a lot scarier than Dead Space, did any one else find this so. Also if you have play the sequel would you give me a yay or nay on whether to buy it?

I have never been scared by a game... ever

(well that's not entirely true, when I was 4 or 5 I saw the bloodied up face in doom and that gave me nightmares, but that was it; plus I was 4 or 5)

EDIT: Only buy the squeal if you like the game
I found it fun, but not scary at all- it was pretty basic and all I saw was "LOOK! RESIDENT EVIL 4 IN SPACE!"

 

[End]

Not even slightly in my opinion, Silent Hill is much more my type of horror series, much scarier.

 

[JoshGod]

not one thing has scared me except for a jump scare.

Was it when the necromorph tried to get in the elevator, That made me jump, then again nothing else did not even the ending, infact i saw it coming. As for fear, i played one, two is sitting in my library.

 

[MaxP779]

Dead space is a far scarier game than fear, its also a much better game as well.

 

[Molander]

FEAR 2 was a god damn joke... LOOK OVER HERE! *Alma passes behind your back and you don't notice shit xD

Dead Space was scary the first chapters but then it went for action and the rest is history

 

[Kontar]

I've been playing through the first Dead Space (I never finished my play through cause it got boring) so that i can buy the sequel, and im about 3/4 of the way through and not one thing has scared me except for a jump scare. I'm quite surprised, i was hopping there would be some genuine scares, but so far nothing, i mean F.E.A.R 2 was a lot scarier than Dead Space, did any one else find this so. Also if you have play the sequel would you give me a yay or nay on whether to buy it?

I didn't find the first one very scary either, the beginning was creepy because you weren't entirely sure what was going on. Once you learned more of what happened, how to kill the monsters, that the plasma cutter makes the game easy mode once fully upgraded (and I played on the hardest difficulty first time through), it wasn't scary. I thought it was still a fun action type third person shooter with zombie/alien things.

The second one is quite a bit better than the first, once again it's not all that scary, if you thought the first wasn't scary you won't be scared by the second. It was still a good game in my opinion, decent story, good action etc. I recommend playing the second even if you slightly liked the first.

 

[jh322]

It's a combination of things, really. This is why DOOM3 came with a little message from the developers saying something like "if you want to enjoy this the way we had in mind, turn the lights off, the sound up, and lock your door". I did this, stupidly, with DOOM3 and it took me about 30 mins to genuinely fall off my chair in fright. Playing the same game a few weeks later with friends in a well lit room at around midday was comically not scary. It's about the world you're in when you look at the world they create. Now, survival horror games for me are all about waiting untill your housemates are asleep, nobody's around, you should really be sleeping but you're too excited, you turn on the console, wrap the sofa in a plastic bag to protect it from unintentional excretions, and get it on.

 

[teebeeohh]

the atmosphere was scary but I disliked the Necromorphs just lying on the ground jumping when you get close, this destroyed the scariness, after they got me once i just shot every corpse to check. Thats another thing: make ammo rarer, if you alway know that you still have 30+ ammo for weapons that can onehit most enemies it makes me feel less like i am running but more like i'm hunting


oh the shock effect always get me though, even when i know that they are coming

 

[DragonBorn96]

Strangely playing on Impossible it felt more tense becasue i knew they'd havea better chance of killing but I like games where its atmosphere is still shown and i think Issac not talking whule walking through the dark corridors and the music stings making me go ZOMGWHATSGOINGON! and then something going blurgle flurgle and biting my head off was oh so amusing as well as pant-wetting.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

Dead Space 1 was quite scary when I played it when it was released.The jump scares wasn't really expected so my heart jumped out of my chest a few times.

Regarding for Dead Space 2..one of the most frightening times is when I was walking for more than 15min to reach an objective,checking every corner and not knowing when the necromorphs are gonna jump me.

The survival horror is scarier when you are expecting something to happen and it doesn't,gives you the suspense that something will pop out and insta kill you at any point and time.

That sells it for me..