Dead Space – Necromorphs
It’s crazy to think that only six short years ago none of us had heard of Necromorphs.
Enemies are, as we’ve now firmly established, a crucial element in determining how effective a horror game can be. Silent Hill established this pretty early on, but because it was a survival horror game, most of the time your best option when encountering one was to spend a few seconds marveling at its weirdness before turning to run the other way.
When the horror genre started to welcome more action-oriented horror games like Condemned and Alan Wake, that rule was amended to include the way we dispatch these foul creatures as being just as important as how visually interesting they are. Condemned relied on brutal melee combat while the combat Alan Wake revolved around the use of light.
Then Dead Space came along and introduced us to strategic dismemberment. Rather than pump them full of lead or whatever the future equivalent of that idiom would be, we had to remove limbs. I must have beaten Dead Space more than twenty times. By the time the sequel arrived I was a goddamn surgeon.
Whatever your feelings are about the direction EA took the series, there’s no denying its effect on our favorite genre. It came very close to reaching the bar set by the early Silent Hill games, and it accomplished that while setting the bar incredibly high for combat in horror games.
It’d make the top spot if it weren’t for the next game…
