Dead Space

I recently played the new science fiction horror survival game Dead Space. It was extremely stylish and had some very original ideas in it, although not in regards to the story which was pretty much a copy of System Shock 2 only less interesting. (It even had the same pair of plot twists.)

One thing it did do right on the story front is give a plasma cutter to a poor, non-military engineer and get him to save the day. I've always been a big fan of the underdog protagonist, of heroes who are utterly out of their league. In my first novel length work (I refuse to call it an actual novel) I gave a gun to an electronic engineer and got him to do the world-saving. I don't think he actually managed to hit anything with a bullet either. No, he won through sheer desperation, some clever thinking and his knowledge of electrical systems.

Dead Space tries the same but ultimately fails for an odd and unexpected reason. The entire game is third person, with the camera hovering just behind and to the side of our poor engineer. This means that, unlike a first person game where you see out of the protagonist's eyes, nothing is left to the imagination. We can see everything that the main character does.

And what he does is... nothing. He doesn't panic, he's never unsure, he feels no pity, revulsion or fear. We can clearly see he's taking absolutly everything in his calm, even stride. This is no armoured space marine here. This is, if you'll forgive the term, Joe the Engineer, an incongruous and unconvincing character to be calmly slicing alien undead monstrosities into bloody pieces with a cutting tool and then stamping on their remains until they're mush. Atmosphere is all the game really has going for it but the main character's imperturbable aplomb drops the believability through the floor.