There's nothing particularly original delivered by Dead Space's synthesis of Event Horizon, Alien, Half-Life, System Shock, Resident Evil, and the many recurrent elements that make up the genre of deep space horror — but when a piece of genre work is executed this well, there doesn't need to be.

What Dead Space does deliver is a dense, eerie, exhilarating, and often frightening piece of sci-fi horror that, even as it riffs off the genre's mainstays, manages to avoid falling within their shadows. This is genre work at its finest: a set of familiar pieces polished to a mirror shine and placed in perfect configuration. As a longtime fan of this particular subgenre of horror, it's one of the best games I've played in a long time.