The Art of Gaming, Part #7 - Sound Design in Dead Space
6On the face of it, standing completely still in an empty maintenance shaft in a third person shooter about silly aliens invading an ugly spaceship full of grey corridors doesn't deserve to be an even remotely engaging experience, but the almost unparallelled sound design in the original Dead Space ensures that, somehow, it manages to be quite interesting despite the lack of any actual gameplay.
During the roughly two minutes and thirty seconds that this little video lasts, the player is presented with a richly textured, multi-layered soundscape which includes (among other things) a generous amount of unique little samples sprinkled throughout which are entirely unrelated to any actual event or scripted sequence. The hard work that went into crafting the vast sonic vistas of Dead Space - which are seemingly at odds with the suitably claustrophobic nature of the physical environments - is enough to make Visceral Games' otherwise well-rounded and satisfying survival horror/shooter hybrid into something of a landmark title in the currentgen catalogue.