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Dead Space’s USG Ishimura is believable because it sucksYou don’t have to be depressed to work here, but it helps
You don’t have to be depressed to work here, but it helps
Even before the monsters arrived, the USG Ishimura was a nightmare.
Dead Space PC Review - An Excellent Remake Of A Horror ClassicThis is the Dead Space you remember but with a brilliant new sheen, luxuriously improved in small but considered ways. Comfortably familiar, but excellent nonetheless.Watch on YouTube
Dead Space PC Review - An Excellent Remake Of A Horror Classic
Revisiting the game this week in preparation for the upcoming remake, I was pleased to see my memories hadn’t fooled me. The Ishimura is still a magnificent feat of environment design, despite the posters for the mysterious “Peng” carrying different connotations than they did fifteen years ago.
When Peng entered the national dialect, I genuinely thought it was a Dead Space reference because I am broken on a fundamental level.
The Ishimura is a planet cracker. Its sole purpose is to punch into the surface of a planet to wrench out its shiny guts. Those on board then use a variety of tools - the same tools Isaac uses to sever flesh and bone - to separate the valuables from the rock. The inside of the ship, unsurprisingly, looks like a vessel that has cracked a lot of planets. It is suffocatingly bleak. Endless corridors of grim metal. Heavy doors to protect against the dangers of such a profession. A medical bay as large as the processing plant, presumably because limb severing was a problem way before everyone grew blades out of their hands and decided it would be fashionable to pop their small intestine on the wrong side of their tummies.
You’d think, considering the rest of the Ihsimura resembles the inside of a washing machine (and, thanks to the large amount of machinery it contains, sounds like one too) that the crew quarters would offer its residents some kind of light respite in the form of carpets, or maybe a single plant. But no. Apart from the presence of endless rows of cramped bunk beds, they are indistinguishable from the rest of this godforsaken ship. The Concordance Extraction Corporation cares little for your comfort, and why should they? The Ishimura is a place of work, and just because you’re stuck there for months (years?) at a time matters little to those stuffing their pockets full of delicious planet rocks.
Better than the house I rented in my second year of uni, to be fair. Significantly less mould on the walls, for starters.
“But what of the officers!” you cry. “Where does the Captain, his first mate, and his cook sleep?”. Well, that’s a good question. The reason we grow to know the Ishimura so intimately is that Dead Space ferries the player to every corner of its sprawling layout, and Isaac does indeed spend time exploring the officer’s quarters. They are brilliantly - laughably - average. Here we find the carpets the crew must crave. Each officer has their own private room. A double bed. Velvet sheets. A cabinet complete with hard liquor and photos of home. But here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter. The walls are the same claustrophobic metal as seen everywhere else on the ship. Your rank among your colleagues means little to the groaning bones of the Ishimura. Dress it up in crimson as much as you like. If you are aboard, you are worthless. Madness and decay are both an inevitability and a welcome conclusion.
I hope, if anything, that the remake enhances this sense of suffocation. I want to see more evidence of the misery that existed regardless of mutated monsters. Of capitalism’s firm grip on the throat of comfort. The USG Ishimura is believable because it sucks. That’s precisely why I love it to this day.
