Traversal to disparate parts of the Ishimura was previously routed through the ship’s internal tram system, which the player would route their way to at the end of each of the game’s dozen levels. The most significant change the game makes is the restructuring of the USG Ishimura from a series of discrete levels to an entirely explorable and seamless ship design. The circuit breaker puzzles are sparse and slight, and don’t impact the experience enough to write home about. To my eyes, there’s nothing in the ‘Intensity Director’ that separates it from any other horror game’s enemy spawn system. While welcome additions, the effects of both features are largely overblown – chalk it up to marketing hype. Elsewhere, extra puzzles have been added in the form of circuit breakers, often forcing you to decide if you want to progress through your next room and subsequent enemy encounters with either the lights or oxygen off. This dynamism is emblematised in the ‘Intensity Director’, a system that controls the pacing and spawning of enemies to keep the tension high and encounters fresh. Pay any attention to the game’s marketing and you’ll notice there’s been a concerted push to make the game feel more dynamic. Dead Space likely plays as you’d remember it in 2008, and still boasts the strength of its single-location setting.Ī few key elements of the game, however, have been retouched, and appear in the form of relatively minor ‘quality of life’ changes. Under these special effects, the core game is still there, and its core gameplay loop is relatively untouched. Image: EA / Motive StudioĪs a current-gen game, the Dead Space remake, powered by EA’s Frostbite Engine, looks and plays exactly how you’d imagine: high-quality textures and with impeccable 3D audio pieced perfectly with dense atmospherics and environments draped in mood-perfect lighting. Its updates to its original version, however, are far less radical, a sign of both the original’s relative youthfulness in comparison to the original RE2 – it’s a remake of a PlayStation 3 game rather than a PlayStation 1 game – and the raw strength of its foundation, the 15-year-old hard work of the original Visceral Games team. Inevitably, and perhaps by design, the Dead Space remake has drawn comparisons to the RE2 remake. In January, the Dead Space remake, developed by Motive and published by EA, was released to much the same response as RE2 remake back in January 2019 – that is to say, something close to ‘universal acclaim,’ in the parlance of Metacritic. These releases created an interesting template for remakes to follow.ĭemon’s Souls (2020) was a ‘cleaned up’ version of the original, replacing it with a new visual style and more recently, Metroid Prime Remastered took a similar approach. A week later, Square Enix released Final Fantasy VII Remake, their self-conscious, full-scale redux of the original Final Fantasy VII, which actively engages with the concept of what a video game remake even is (something that Kirk Hamilton has facetiously classified as a ‘Super Turbo Remake Plus’.) Image: Capcomĭid Capcom kick off a ‘golden age’ of video game remakes? In April 2020, they followed up with their Resident Evil 3 remake, which continued this specific remake tradition (albeit to a far more muted reception). Idiosyncrasies woven into the original version – often seen in today’s light as hindrances or visible signs of age, desperately in need of remedy – are sculpted (or, perhaps, carved away) in the shape of a pristine third-person action game, a genre much more palatable to a contemporary general audience. These updated remakes take the core ideas of an original game, and fix them squarely within the contemporary Triple-A tradition. It began a new wave of (and appetite for) remakes, of games that reconstruct – or work in dialogue with – their original versions, in a different manner to the usual slate of high-definition ‘remasters’. The developers of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake have gestured to RE2 as a source of inspiration, for example. Capcom proved one model extremely successful in their impressively modernised remake of Resident Evil 2 in 2019, which has become both a catalyst and reference point for the horror remakes that follow it. In 2023, video game remakes are in vogue.
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