Dead Space

Dead Space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Space_%28video_game%29) is a video game that came out about a year ago. It’s classified as a survival-horror game. The game is about an engineer trying to fix a spaceship that has been taken over by aliens. I’m writing about it because I think the design principles behind the game are wonderful. In most modern horror-based works of fiction, the majority of fear comes from anticipation and jump-scares. Although there are a great many jump scares throughout the game, Dead Space tries to make horror through atmosphere. It packs you into tight corridors so you don’t feel like you can escape. It makes you feel like there are enemies around every corner and behind every door. It shows you just enough of what normal would have been like on this ship so you can contextualize just how horrid the place now is. The game was very successful when it released, and they are making a sequel to build on the atmospheric elements. If this series continues to have the success that it does now, I’m hoping that it will eventually lead to a reworking of the horror genre of media so that it experiments with things other than simple jump scares, and that the genre as a whole will put out higher quality media because of it