YouTuber Synthetic Man trashes the Dead Space remake, says it “barely surpassed” his minimum expectations amid the game’s “woke” changes.
For the most part, the Dead Space remake has been warmly received. Open Critic collated an 89 Top Critic Average [2] out of 100, while Metacritic’s average Metascore across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X is 88 out of 100 [3]. The user score also averages out to 8.6 out of 10.
However, there are points that some gamers have focused on — namely, allegations of woke content, or otherwise unnecessary changes presumably made to avoid offense. This is a far cry from EA’s “Your Mom hates Dead Space 2 [4]” marketing campaign from 2011, which showed the reactions of middle-aged women watching to the game’s shocking horror.
For example, the USG Ishimura has various Concordance Extraction Corporation (CEC) posters within, motivating employees. While the original posters featured mostly Caucasian and Asian individuals, the remake changes several figures in the posters to be Black.
Further, the female uniforms are also modified with a less prominent chest, and women are depicted as more flat-chested to boot. Both these points can be seen in the “Powering Humanity Into The Future” posters, as showcased by @AmericanKrogan [5].
@AmericanKrogan also showed another example, where a poster for biological prosthetic was changed from featuring a White man [6] to a Black woman [7]. The new poster makes the prosthetic more blatant, as her new hand is White.
Another poster that featured Caucasian, Asian, and South Asian people [8] was also changed. Arguably, it fits the “corporate” poster better, seemingly featuring the major demographics of White, Black, Latino, and Asian people [9].
Cartoonist George Alexopoulos (@GPrime85) was one of many who noted the Dead Space remake featured a gender-neutral bathroom sign [10], complete with the words “All Gender Restroom” underneath for good measure. “To be fair, Dead Space is a game about chopping off body parts,” Alexopoulos mocked.
Representation continued, as one of the games major characters was seemingly changed to a lesbian, no less than a few minutes starting the game. Kendra Daniels notes Issac Clarke had been listening to a video message from his girlfriend, Nicole Brennan. He explains he hadn’t seen her in six months, and was worried about saying the wrong thing.
“I don’t blame you,” Kendra replies. “I’d listen to my girlfriend over Hammond reciting security protocols.” This may be mere sympathy, or a ham-fisted attempt to show a diverse character before the main plot would prevent such a subject to come up organically.
Another element some took issue with was the Dead Space remake having content warnings. “F—k you if you buy the new [Dead Space] remake especially when the original is still available,” fumed @dumpsterjpeg [11]. “This is the lamest generation in history.”
The user shared two screenshots of the content warnings. The first warns the player “the upcoming scene contains depictions of graphic death.”
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The other screenshot shows the content warning for an audio log, potentially spoiling any twists therein. The warning states, “The upcoming audiolog contains depictions of psychological manipulation and medical malpractice.”
It should be noted the gameplay and plot of Dead Space features monsters made of twisted and mutated corpses which brutalize their victims, and an equally sadistic cult. As such, some may expect to experience the content that the remake is warning players about.
On the game’s webpage about the content warnings [13], EA explains, “Dead Space contains graphic violence, including explicit depictions of dismemberment, impalement, blood, gore, vomit, and death […] We want to ensure that as many players as possible can play and enjoy our game.”
The content warnings are disabled by default, along with the option to outright hide “disturbing scenes” behind a screen effect (while audio can still be heard).
Another element that some had been offended by was what many believed was a small addition which rejected capitalism. Polgyon co-founder Russ Frushtick was one of the few pleased with it [14], praising, “[Dead Space] remake not pulling *any* punches.” He shows a small piece of graffiti on a wall that reads, “F—k this shit, it’s a sh—ty capitalist organization.”
The anti-capitalist message isn’t entirely unfounded in the game’s setting. Along with “motivational” posters seemingly desperate to encourage employees to see their work as useful for humanity, the CEC had engaged in illegal mining operations, attempted to influence Earth’s government through lobbying, and put their own goals above the safety of their employees.
Spoiler Warning: The following paragraph contains spoilers for Dead Space and the Dead Space remake.
Albeit, the latter point wasn’t for profit. Along with some of their highest ranked members being affiliated or in support of the Church of Unitology, their members were funneled onto the USG Ishimura for its clandestine mission to find the Red Marker.
Spoilers end here.
The point is somewhat moot however, as the graffiti is present in the original Dead Space. As noted on r/KotakuInAction [15], the message was scrawled on a wall along with other Marker symbols.
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Discussing the Dead Space remake (14:31), YouTuber Synthetic Man explained how he changed his mind about doing a review, as the game was “simultaneously not good enough, nor bad enough, for me to have anything interesting to say.” Despite this, he continues with his thoughts, summarizing his thoughts from his earlier Community Post [17], and his time with the game when streaming.
While he admits a lot of gameplay elements were improved, along with changes to room layouts, story scenes, and objectives, he felt EA “really f—ked up a lot of the horror elements here, part of that was Necromorph designs look less human, which really takes away that ‘uncanny valley’ factor.” Animation and sound effect quality were also issues.
“And then of course there’s the wokeness thing I talked about at length, and of course people were ‘sperging out about it — even though it’s obvious to anyone paying any amount of f—king attention,” Synthetic Man fumes, summarizing how the crew has been “diversified.”
“One Hellion crew has been diversified — notably one now being a Black woman,” he pointed out, explaining that “ultimately it doesn’t really matter, considering she dies in the first 30 minutes, but for some reason devs thought that was a good change.”
Synthetic Man also mentions that Nicole Brennan “looks 50 now,” asserting that her character is now “Probably twice the age she was intended to be in the original,” further noting that he’s aware the developers modeled her after Tanya Clarke, who voiced the character in Dead Space 2 and is reprising her role in the recently released remake.
“Much like how Isaac Clarke now looks like [voice actor] Gunner Wright, who vaguely looks like Adam Sandler — but that’s just laziness,” Synthetic Man fumed, explaining that he feels the “trend” of basic the character’s model off their actor or actress was “the cheap route with this motion-capture technology.”
While falsely assuming the posters should feature Asian and Caucasian people as the USG Ishimura has a Japanese name (which nation CEC began in is not specified, but other ships are named Castle, Perceus, Charon, Phobus, O’Bannon, and Kellion), he notes they had been “Black washed” — as only Black people had been used to diversify the posters.
“Its funny, they even race-swapped Dr. Kyne to, I’m assuming, Middle Eastern? I don’t know; he’s Brown. And I’m assuming they did this because Dr. Mercer — the guy who makes the Hunter — is Middle Eastern so, I guess it would be bad optics if the evil doctor was Brown and the good doctor was White,” he went on to propose.
Synthetic Man then preempts and rejects those who would claim he was nitpicking or looking to inject politics into the game. “Well if it doesn’t matter then, why did they change it?” he asked rhetorically.
“They changed it to — quote unquote — ‘add representation,’ and that does matter. Unless you’re gonna come out and say you don’t think representation matters. But no, you know it does, which is why you’re pushing for this. Which absolutely f—king disgusts me and pisses me off.”
He adds, “This is a remake. You’re sh—ting on someone else’s vision. You people didn’t make this. This is not [Visceral Games] making this remake, it’s [Motive Studio].”
Synthetic Man also took issue with Elizabeth Cross now surviving — despite all logic — and the big twist of Dead Space being “completely butchered” and “incredibly cringe.”
Synthetic Man concluded those still critical of his opinion, despite the game being fun, was exactly why he didn’t review the game. “At the end of the day, Dead Space is still fun, it’s just the problem is it’s fun because the original game was fun. They didn’t make it all that much more fun.”
“So the problem to me is they only barely surpassed the minimum standards of what I would expect for a remake. Now unfortunately, given the nature of modern remakes, that makes it one of the best game remakes,” Synthetic Man ridicules.
He explains that the Dead Space remake isn’t “as good as it should have been” due to “various minor issues,” and relents, “Most people will probably enjoy it and just ignore the woke sh—t because everyone’s f—king brainwashed anyway so, what’s the point in trying to wake ’em up?”
Synthetic Man mockingly doubles down, proposing, “Let’s just accelerate ’till society collapses. I think that’s a good idea at this point. They should have had like 10 trans women and trans men in that game. I mean, why not, right?”