in the original blind spot, very intentionally for you to live in Isaac’s big, heavy, strong boot. From the moment you take control of his tormented body and debilitated mind, Visceral’s designers wanted you to truly embody him. Live through his fears and see this ruined world the same way he did. It’s not enough for you to be subject to what he sees – a plague of necromorphs is eating at the heart of USG Ishimura. No, Visceral wants to go deeper. Through the eyes, into the brain.
// VIDEO // – Dead Space (2023) isn’t just a visual treat; it’s a full-body experience.
It worked. In the original game, there was a system that mimicked Isaac’s breathing and heart rate. If there’s a scripted panic going on, or if you take a lot of damage, or run from some unknowable fear deep in the belly, his heart rate will increase and his breathing will become rapid.
In the game’s original 2008 release, the system was rudimentary–but it worked. There are only a few heart rate and breathing states that can be more or less divided into three distinct categories: Resting, Stressed, and Extreme. Still, even though it’s a fairly binary setup (sound effects sometimes even play each other in a sort of sonic melee), you’ll find yourself matching breath pumped into the headphones or played from the speakers. If Isaac is dying and his heart rate is unhealthy compared to his resting heart rate, gasping for air, you may find yourself feeling physically aroused, too. This is what we are as humans – you can’t help but empathize.
Dead Space Remastered, which came out some 15 years later, had the opportunity to build on this remarkable idea. The original game laid the groundwork for a horror experience that played with your body as much as your mind, and now EA Motive has a chance to really dive into it – building on the solid foundation established by Visceral’s Glen Schofield and more Architecture and Michael Condrey back to 360/PS3.
“It finds the sweet spot and makes you notice it,” says Roman Campos-Oriola, Remake’s creative director, when we asked him how you make a tool like this only when necessary. When it works — so it’s not something you become adapted to, immune to. “So it depends on the mood of the particular part. We want the part to be tense. You should feel bad for Issac. But! It’s not scripted. It’s a whole new system. That’s the value we want.”
Dead Space Remake uses what the developers call the ALIVE system to channel the horror experience. The acronym neatly breaks down to “Adrenaline, Limbic Response, Intelligent Dialogue, Vital Signs, and Force,” and is what design bible Motive refers to as it tries to recreate the authentic horror experience for you and Isaac.
“The reaction is Isaac’s reaction, we’re not trying to mimic the player’s reaction,” Campos-Oriola said when asked if the studio was trying to predict the player’s reaction when building the game. “But we tried to use a lot of systems (such as the ALIVE system) to try and make the ship more dynamic. This also applies to Isaac – we tried to make him react in a more dynamic way.
“He responds to more elements, like breathing and effort and stuff like that. The way he responds to them; we try to make it more immersive and expansive.”
Instead of the original game’s binary way of dealing with exertion and reaction, the remake takes a more refined approach: there are more sound effects for different levels of fatigue or injury, more types of breaths he can breathe, and ‘hurt breath’ wins’ Play ‘Breathe Hard’, etc. The result is — the studio hopes so! – One character reacts more like a person in Isaac’s situation than a video game mannequin that can quickly walk through a state loop.
“It’s tricky because you run a lot in the game, so you definitely don’t want to trigger it every time you sprint down a hallway. But it’s something you don’t want to hear so often that you notice it’s there, so it It affects the atmosphere of the game. There’s a bit of back and forth adjusting those values.”
Campos-Oriola explained that sometimes testers would run 10 meters to escape an unexpected encounter with the likes of a Necromorph, and then “Isaac would ‘HUFF HUFF HUFF’ [laughs] A little too much! ’” Campos-Oriola joked. “And sometimes you’ll be running around the boat in a big fight and he’s barely breathing and we’ll be like, ‘Well, maybe that’s not enough. ”
This iteration resulted in a system that was more realistic and human than what we saw in the original game. The game’s soundtrack is specifically designed to induce feelings of anxiety and dread, and this is exacerbated by the audio programming surrounding Isaac. The end result is a game that will scare and excite you not only in action and visuals, but also in sound and psychology.
“A good example [of all this working together], for me, was Chapter 2 Quarantine,” explains Campos-Oriola. “It’s a pretty big room with a lot of enemies. When you’re fighting in that room, running around flying kites, finding things in your environment to throw at them, etc., we want you and Isaac to start breathing heavily – that’s the kind of immersion we want. We do have benchmarks throughout the game to help us set those values. “
Campos-Oriola and the rest of the Motive team put the playtesters to good use to make sure all those tiny moving parts fit into your head in unison as you explore USG Ishimura. Taking the core of an idea in this way and bringing it up to modern standards is a unique advantage of a remake of this kind of prestige (see what The Last of Us, Part 1 did in terms of accessibility), as well as a major contribution to Their cast iron defenses are in the realm of the modern game. For Motives and Dead Space, the ALIVE system isn’t just a cool piece of technology; it’s the beating heart of the game’s identity.
