Motive’s modern remake ofDead Spaceis currently being praised by many players and gradually becoming the new gold standard to strive toward for remakes. It is clear thatDead Space’s graphical fidelityhas improved upon the original’s by leaps and bounds thanks to the Frostbite engine, overhauling everything from lighting to shadows and everything in between. Blood now glistens along the metal rivets in Isaac’s suits, limb degradation is more viscerally depicted as tissue cleaves more realistically, and each corridor is a potential nightmare for anyone who has nyctophobia.
The originalDead Spaceconveyed the same atmosphere with a lot less detail, but Motive’s remake allows that original vision to be realized in stunning fidelity. This alone could have been enough cause for a modernDead Spacereimagining, but visual fidelity is only one of the many substantial upgrades that the game receives from a technical standpoint. Entire areas are vastly improved, for example, and a lot of attention to detail went toward implementingquality-of-life features in theDead Spaceremake. That said, one of the game’s most impressive features is subtly hidden in the main menu.
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Gamers must be used to main menus having a dynamic or static background in a lot of cases. Main menus are chiefly used to convey a game’s particular tone, and obviously include tabs that players scroll through in order to select settings or access different parts of the game—essentially a launchpad where players can find ideal specifications for their console or PC and prepare to begin.
The originalDead Space’s main menu featured a digital incoherence with Marker symbols and blurry broadcast images. Players see this imagery often throughout the game, but particularly on orange-lit monitorswhen Isaac himself is experiencing a Marker-induced hallucination. In the remake, however, the main menu is a simple list of selectable options with a transparent background. This can be an alarming sight the first time that players see the menu after they spent time in the game because they will likely see a door’s activation prompt or a save station.
Unsure of what this is, it would not be surprising if players believed it to be a bug. Instead, when players press ‘Continue’ to resume playing from where they had left off, the game instantly loads in, and it is learned that the transparent background is actually the in-game camera already preloaded.
This means players can hop directly into their playthrough from the main menu, making the main menu essentially feel like a glorified pause screen as a result. This may seem like a rather small feat when considering how much technical expertise went into the rest of theDead Spaceremake, but it is an achievement in-and-of itself that deserves recognition too.
Motive’sremake is surely impressive, but many fans have not been able to truly indulge in its technical showcase due to a plethora ofDead Spaceissues and bugsthat have already been reported. Some fans have only had minor issues such as frame stuttering, for example, while others have been hard-locked due to enemies or batteries not spawning where they should.
This has apparently since been addressed with a patch in the pipeline to help fix these issues on consoles and PC, but it is unfortunate nonetheless that its launch cannot be fully appreciated. Even more interesting is perhaps howDead Space’s remake is being received incredibly wellotherwise, which could either mean that most players are not running into these issues, or that the pros outweigh the cons, especially with the new instant loading of the main menu.
Dead Spaceis available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
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