Dead Space 2, Survival Horror, and the Fantasy of Mastery
Christian Haines, Managing Editor
There’s a moment near the end of Dead Space 2 when you have to complete a hacking mini-game before an immortal monster tears you apart. To complete the hack in time, you need to use stasis – a localized slowing down of time – on the creature. That’s after you’ve severed its limbs with one of your several weapons (I will always love the brutal ripper). If you’re quick enough at rotating your thumbsticks for the hack, you’ll open a door, allowing you to momentarily escape the monster’s grasp. But your encounter with this insistent terror isn’t over. As you run down corridors, fleeing the military station, the monster will recompose itself, its limbs pulling back together like some morbid algorithmically-driven marionette. It will return.
You’ll probably die a number of times playing Dead Space 2, but the game will gift you lush, by which I mean grotesque, death animations.
This action sequence captures so much of what distinguishes the Dead Space series. It reframes the genre of survival horror as an engineering problem. As my colleague Don Everhart explained in an essay on Silent Hill, survival horror doesn’t revolve around monsters but around the spaces that monsters inhabit. It’s an architectural and geographical genre, more than a creature feature. Dead Space 2 accentuates this tendency by turning each space – including the polygons making up your necromorph enemies – into an object with which you can tinker: hack the door, repower the solar panel array, trigger the security measure, slice off the necromorph’s legs to slow it down. The actions that make up the game are all about intervening into and weaving one’s way through space. The game’s design nods towards this with a dedicated button that illuminates a line drawn from your current position to the next significant point in space.
Almost every videogame genre involves the manipulation of space. Platformers require time-critical spatial navigation, which is to say they require you to leap at the right moment in the right direction (or die). Tactics games ask you to precisely position characters with specific skill sets and movement patterns in order to eliminate enemies. What sets survival horror apart isn’t just the mood of the space – creepy, eerie, haunting – it’s the elaborate construction of corridors and arenas in a manner that unsettles the player. The jump scare in which an enemy appears out of nowhere is only the most obvious version of this trait. There’s also the use of clanking, slurping, or chomping noises coming from a distant source or secret passages that reveal a dank crypt underneath a small town’s community center. The school section of Dead Space 2 is an obvious example: as shiver-inducing as the necromorphic babies are, it’s the contrast between the school’s cheerful décor and the lurking sense of doom that really puts you on edge.
There are several sequences in Dead Space 2 in which Isaac - your protagonist - tumbles through space, barely in control. Such sequences reveal that in survival horror, the goal isn’t mastery but vulnerability.
Whereas most action-adventure games goad you to improve your skills so that you become a master of space, dashing and shooting your way through obstacles, survival horror insists on a more humble approach. For survival horror, mastery is a superficial fantasy that covers over the player-character’s vulnerability to their environment. The Dead Space series, and Dead Space 2 in particular, positions players so that they’re caught between the drive to master their surroundings and the acknowledgement that survival is a best-case scenario.
Isaac Clarke, the series protagonist, is a ship engineer. He knows his way around tools and mechanical systems, which is a useful, if flimsy, explanation for Isaac’s skill at using the various weapons in the game – they’re not weapons, they’re tools! Really! At the same time, the linear nature of the games and the frequent use of tight corridors means that even when Isaac has leveled up his weapons and his armored suit, it’s still easy for the player to get overwhelmed. Necromorphs move quickly and they often emerge from easy to miss ductwork. The stasis ability lets you slow your enemies down, gaining some degree of control over situations, but its use is limited and it’s not uncommon to slow down one set of enemies only to be flanked by another. For all of his pluck, Isaac is never really in control of things. His movement through the Sprawl (the space station located in orbit around Jupiter’s moon Titan) and his movement through the narrative are more like a crash landing than a precision tactical maneuver. He’ll be lucky to get out alive.
Dead Space 2 is filled with fantasies of transcending mortality, but it includes them only to tear them apart.
What elevates the Dead Space series from clever take on survival horror mechanics to a thoughtful reflection on the genre is the way it organizes this play between mastery and vulnerability on the level of theme. Without diving too deeply into the story, it’s worth noting that the two major human forces in the game – religion (the Church of Unitology) and militarized science (EarthGov’s research wing) – aspire towards the same thing: mastery over nature, the conquest of planets. They want to harness the power of extraterrestrial technology (the Markers) for the sake of eliminating human vulnerability. In other words, they’re pursuing immortality. But, of course, science and religion aren’t successful in the series. Perhaps that’s because Isaac interferes, but it’s just as likely that those forces fail because of their own hubris. In any case, the Necromorphs tear apart their well-laid plans, a return of the repressed fact of biological vulnerability. They aren’t evil creatures so much as stubborn reminders that pain and death are defining features of life, rather than life’s opposites. The genre of survival horror is, at least in part, about the too often unacknowledged intimacy between living life and suffering it.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, German critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that the modern turn toward scientific rationality is an attempt to wrest humankind away from myth or superstition towards the conquest of nature. Rationality offers itself up as liberation from the physical universe’s cruel laws. It’s another version of the quest for immortality. Adorno and Horkheimer also argue, however, that the freedom promised by scientific rationality quickly becomes a ruse, as the instrumental rationality of science – its pursuit of knowledge for the sake of control – ends up dovetailing with systems of exploitation and subjection like capitalism and the imperial state. In other words, scientific pursuits become their own kind of superstition, the worship of human mastery in the church of unlimited progress.
In Dead Space 2, it turns out the postindustrial space future is just…industrialization with even more pollution, but, you know, on other planets and their moons.
Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Visceral Games shows how the mission for control over the natural world is inextricable from violence against the vulnerable. Both Unitology and EarthGov view the humans aboard the Sprawl as disposable commodities. Moreover, the backdrop of the game is a version of Titan that’s been turned into a hollow shell by resource extraction. The Dead Space series probably doesn’t hold some profound lesson about the social and political consequences of the exploitation of nature. At least, it doesn’t say anything about the interplay between freedom and control that hasn’t been said in a more complex manner by others. And yet, by turning vulnerability into a game mechanic, the series does what no book and few games have managed to do: it turns the pleasure of play into an occasion to feel your own vulnerability and to acknowledge how systems of power promise mastery, while delivering constraint.
