Dead Space, And Why It Terrifies Me

 Warning: strong language.

I broke my xylophone. ,_,

Ever heard of a game called Dead Space?

 Good.

It's fucking horrifying.

I don't mean to degrade the game itself at all - it's actually excellent in terms of graphics, gameplay and even plot. My friends love it. I love it. We gather at Kaylie's house for the sole reason of playing it. The only problem lies in the fact that it's more like they gather to watch me play. Because I'm so fucking terrified of it, and my constant pants-shitting horror seems to be a sick source of entertainment for them.

It's not the gore that gets me. I'm good with gore. In fact, I love gore. The Saw series is my favourite to date (and seeing as so many people I know can't sit through a single scene without squirming, that's saying something). No, it's not the gore. The blood. The killing and subsequent resurrection of a spaceship full of colonists.

Don't laugh, but it's the fact that the space zombies don't look like proper zombies.

That's not normal. That's not fucking normal.

I have an incredible fear of things that are just ever so slightly wrong. It's difficult to explain, and even more difficult to define. But as you can see, the space zombies - called necromorphs in the game - are just off-putting enough to give a normal person shivers. According to a website I remember reading but not the name of, during the "zombification" process, the deceaced body's arms move to their shoulder blades and sprout scythes from their palms, their skin melts off, their jaws rip from ear to ear, and a third arm (or a smaller pair of grasping hands) emerge from its stomach. The process itself scares me. And that's not the only kind of space zombie you can encounter - there are plenty of others with legs fused together into a tail that fucking leap at your face, and some that don't even resemble anything ever but still find it necessary to tear out your organs and smash your corpse into the ground.

Oh, come on. You're not even trying any more.

Am I the only one who finds this immeasurably creepy?

This is called a "pregger". Aptly named, because if you shoot it in the stomach about a million tiny leech-zombie-spawn swarm at you and try to eat your face.

See that dead one? The one you wasted all your ammo on?Yeah, it's probably just waiting for you to step over it.

This one is a fucking child.

Let's play a game for a minute. Take a walk in my shoes.

Imagine one of those sprinting towards you. Now imagine another three following it, and two more around the corner, and godknowshowmany sneaking up behind you (yes, sneaking. The bastards are intelligent.) Now imagine that you are the one holding the controller, and have to shoot the fuck out of it before it tears you open. Now imagine that those bullets don't to a damn thing to stop it.

Bullets don't stop them. You need to cut certain specific limbs so that they can't physically move to get you any more, because they never really die.

Holy fuck.

And now, to top it off, imagine taking the controller after a game of round-robin. You've seen everything there is to see in the game, and surely the worst scare would be the potential shock of an enemy twice your size falling on your head from a loose vent. You unpause the game, ready for anything, and walk into the next level.

Then room you're in goes red. An alarm starts screaming in your ears. Your first thoughts are, FUCK, THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN TO THE OTHERS. An automated voice chants that it is blocking off all the entrances and exits to contain a breach. Three-foot-thick steel doors close all around you, the windows shutter themselves, locking you into a room that you are convinced will be your tomb. But hey, nothing is in here with you, and it's just a bit of darkness. You can deal with that. You're telling yourself this quite firmly, while in truth you believe that your physical real-world self will be killed just as brutally as your in-game character if something goes wrong. But you're alone and it's secure, right?

... Right?

There is a scrambling metallic noise at the far end of the room. Something is at the window, looking in from the outside. It screeches and scrambles to the roof, and you see more follow - they're too fast for you to count. Undead, mutated feet are dragging and crashing across the roof. You are positively shitting yourself. Then --

Silence.

A moment spans for an eternity. Something will come. Something will kill you. Something will kill you. Your gun is trained on the window the creatures saw you through. Your focus is acute, your finger on the trigger, your terror amplifying with each second that passes.

Something metallic scrapes beside you.

Your fear explodes. The creature is right there, across the room, and it had been there for godknowshowlong, and it's getting closer terrifyingly fast, and you're shooting wildly --

It goes down. You fell another as it charges you from across the room in its fellow's stead. Then you search wildly for the third -- there were definitely more than this through the window. Thinking they could have come from each corner of the room, you turn to scan your surroundings.

An unearthly screech rings from behind you, and when you turn all you can see is the bubbling flesh of the recently dead. Its bloody maw forever torn in a veracious hunger, its grasping third arm clutching you to its stomach -- and you shoot.

It goes down.

Light returns to the world. The doors unlock. The windows unshutter.

You put the controller down slowly, try to ignore your hysterical friends, curl up in a ball and weep pathetically.

I hope you had fun playing the "imagination game". This, my friends, is what it is like to be me playing Dead Space. I only exaggerated a little bit. Honestly, the back-to-real-life end happened exactly as I said it. I cried in the fetal position for a few minutes before I was willing to down some Coke and pizza and let myself get some sleep.