Typically in horror games a character's profession has little impact on the gameplay. Harry Mason can square up with the best of them and elite police officer Jill Valentine can barely keep up in a city where key municipal buildings are locked behind placing gemstones in slots. While Isaac Clarke's worst day on the job may not go as planned he does end up doing a lot of engineering. This is the ultimate strength of Dead Space, the way in which it grounds its world within a certain degree of internal logic. Everything Isaac uses has a clear dual use that would make sense in the context of sci fi engineering and mining. Isaac himself is a bit of an enigma in all of these. Hes the working class handyman whose the only one with enough wits to use anything other then the awful pulse rifle against the necros. Perhaps his silence represents a bit of blue collar smugness or perhaps hes just shell shocked.

Its these sort of elements which end up raising Dead Space up as a greater game then the sum of its gameplay. If judged purely on gameplay merits Dead Space ends up as simply an okay post RE4 action horror game which leans a little too much on the easy side and suffers from some very lopsided weapon balance, but when taken as a whole Dead Space displays a remarkable cohesion which transcended the dregs of 7th gen gaming at the time and even the survival horror classics in places.