The fine folks over at RelyOnHorror snagged an interview with members of Motive Studio as they head into the home stretch with the upcoming Dead Space remake. Speaking with Joel MacMillan, the Realization Director of Dead Space, and Jo Berry, the project’s Senior Game Writer, the interview covers how the team approached any revisions covering the game’s script and narrative, including the decision to have Isaac speak in the remake.

When it came to any potential updates to the 2008 game, Berry describes it as a “full revamp”, due to the choice to have a vocal protagonist. “The other was to incorporate more of the lore of the series into the remake. “There’s also a lot of great info in the post-game text logs, and we figured, since we know this info won’t show up in [the sequels], let’s work those into the story now,” explains Berry. “There were some overall character dynamics that needed to change and what we felt like were some missed opportunities from the original game, meaning things that they just weren’t able to implement into the story or scenes because the game development technology wasn’t quite able to support it back then.”

Rest assured, Motive focused on keeping the core structure of the game and the story “intact” with Dead Space. “Since we’re fans of the original, we were very mindful of not just changing things for the sake of changing things or just to make them different,” explained MacMillan. “We had a strict process for determining what would be changed on the basis of making sure it would actually make the experience better than what was done in the original.”

Regarding the decision to have Isaac speak more this time around, Berry says that the choice came as a natural progression of the character of Isaac. “Since he is an expert, him not being able to speak in the original took away from his agency when all the other characters are telling him what to do and how to do it. We wanted to lean more into the feeling of being a space engineer, and not just in gameplay, but in motivation for the player as well.”

As for any other changes, the team focused on making sure the characters in the remake “resonated and felt relatable to a modern audience”. According to MacMillan, the team wanted the dialogue to feel “genuine and contemporary” while avoiding clichés. “In the original game, some of the character dynamics were meant to give a sense of paranoia and mistrust, similar to something like John Carpenter’s The Thing, but they were handled in ways that escalated far too quickly and didn’t feel natural or real,” elaborated Berry. “With the remake, we wanted to make sure everything mattered, including the two characters Isaac was close with at the start of the game.”

Dead Space remake is set to arrive January 27, 2023 for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. And for Steam users, pre-ordering the remake will get you the original Dead Space 2 for free as a bonus.