Isaac Clarke is sent to the USG Ishimura to make repairs. Quickly though (and this is the thrust of the game, if you didn’t know), Isaac’s objective changes. He must now kill zomboids “make things whole”. To put all of the toothpaste back into all of the tubes. Fortuitously, Isaac Clarke, with the tools on his back and all manner of “maintenance devices” found along the way, has all he needs to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

I think my favorite moment in the entirety of Dead Space is when Isaac protects his Very Alive Girlfriend while she unlocks some door to transport something somewhere. She stands there, typing away, sometimes sparing a glance and a cautious lean as Isaac mows down 1 or 2 dozen monsters. She finishes up, spares some parting words, then casually and comically walks through the festering pile blocking the door. If they wanted this scene to make sense, they could have added a door and had her exit stage right. They could have shown us her means to defend herself as a way to make her behaviors less awkward and to give us an idea of how she made it to us in one piece. They could have spared her mentioning that she can’t make it across, despite first meeting us somewhere pretty crossable like 2 minutes ago. They didn’t of course, because she is a poorly constructed delusion being puppeteered by a naive man who just wants to believe things can be the same as they were. It is a strange and surreal moment conjured out of what I would almost describe as a parody of the specific video game mode of “survive in this room for 60 seconds” and I think it's a pretty reflective moment for the kind of game Dead Space is as a whole.

Ok, Isaac thinks to himself, it is weird how much cutting and burning and exploding I’m doing in my quest to “make us whole again”, but, you know, a lot of what I’m doing is pretty typical of a surgery if you think about it. Bonesaws, blades and needles; the ship has wounds that need cauterizing. It is a body and I am its surgeon. I am still fixing things, I am still healing us. Right?

Eventually, a man (google tells me his name is Terrence Kyne, who, in a heavy handed yet fun act of parallelism, also often speaks with his Totally Not Dead Wife) reaches out to Isaac. He has an idea: we are in this mess because of The Marker. Everything was fine until we put The Marker on this ship and then something called The Hive Mind got mad. If we put The Marker back where it came from, then the Hive Mind will be contained, and everything will be ok, everything can be whole again.

If you have been paying attention to this review, or you were paying attention to the game when you played it, you already know this goes awry. Before The Marker even makes it to its special spot, Daniels kills Terrence and reveals that it was all a big conspiracy (no way!). She tries to take The Marker back but is also killed. Isaac heroically kills The Hive Mind and makes his way back onto his ship with his world… not entirely in one piece.

Well, the jig is up. When things die, they rot. Isaac’s Actually Dead Girlfriend, no longer sustainable as a symbol for repair/cohesion, provides our lovable man-child with his final jumpscare now morphed into an entirely new symbol. Isaac Clarke, like most of us, is a baby when it comes to death. Isaac Clarke, Still unable to wrap his brain around the entropic void that is dead space, but now able to acknowledge it as an inevitable part of existence, imagines it as a zombified loved one. There is nothing more to say, it isn’t any more complicated than this. Good luck growing up Isaac. Sometimes I wish we didn’t have to.