There’s a new gameplay video for Dead Space at 1up’s GameVideos, and for the most part, it’s another great showcase of the game’s diegetic interface. The avatar’s health is displayed in a series of lights along the spine of his armor, crosshairs are laser-projected from the weapon itself, and there’s even an “upgrade bench” with a pop-up holographic menu where the player can upgrade weapons.
There are some good scares as well, and the trailer ends with a fantastic sequence of a player getting dragged down a hallway by a giant tentacle, before shooting it off it and making a narrow escape. It’s a great bit of gameplay, but just as it finishes, right before the trailer ends, the severed tentacle fades away.
The horror! For all of EA’s claims that they want to boost the game’s immersion to help it become scarier, seeing the corpses of enemies fade away is one of the most glaring ways a game can say, “REMEMBER, THIS ISN’T REALLY HAPPENING!” It ruins an otherwise brilliant sequence, and I’m hoping it’s just triggered to happen while the game is in development and will be changed for the final product. Since the corpses of other monsters killed in the trailer don’t fade, I don’t think that’s entirely unlikely.
