Time Extend
A smart horror spinoff whose uncertainty guaranteed a good time
On Dead Space: Extraction, the horror spinoff whose uncertainty guaranteed a good time
Horror in Dead Space: Extraction comes from the imminence of danger and the absence of control. It trades on our fear of being propelled into the unknown as much as on the threat of its monsters. And while it doesn’t shy away from gore and jump scares, its main weapon is toying with your perception and sense of agency. Extraction is one of numerous lightgunstyle shooters that created a mini-revival for the genre on Nintendo Wii, along with the likes of House Of The Dead: Overkill, Ghost Squad, and Resident Evil: The Umbrella
Chronicles. But it doesn’t quite fit the profile, occupying a sort of niche within the niche. It fiddles with the familiar structures the other games reinforce, and subverts your expectations to create its sci-fi horror show.
As a spinoff, Extraction borrows ideas and assets from the first Dead Space. But its main achievements are its own, as it redraws a template synonymous with immediate arcade play to form an atmospheric, narrative-led journey. This metamorphosis creates tensions, which are used to manipulate you. On one hand, there’s the tension between interactivity and storytelling, or whether you feel like a participant or a passenger in the game’s events. On the other, there’s a tension more specific to the genre, in the contrast between the predetermined routes of character movement and the inputs you’re allowed. At the core of this dynamic is
Extraction’s use of an in-game firstperson view, which confines your experience of the unfolding plot to each chapter’s unbroken realtime take. If the ideal for narrative design is to direct the player’s position and sight without removing their sense of control, as a firstperson rail shooter Extraction has this potential hardwired in. Its players expect to follow preset paths, and so the developers could insert events and conversations without breaking perspectival immersion or compromising their limited power.
The horror potential of this scripted viewpoint is instantly clear, with its blend of unstoppable forward motion and unpredictable camera pans. Player characters move with caution, checking side passages and ceiling vents as they go, while thudding alien footsteps and screeching incidental music threaten danger from all sides. Especially unnerving is the way characters glance behind themselves occasionally; it adds to the idea that something might be there and leaves you open to a scare when your view reverts to the path ahead. You constantly feel at the mercy of a frightened individual’s decision-making powers.
The experience is comparable to a found-footage horror film such as Blair Witch or Cloverfield – that intimate and inescapable position among the protagonists, with its shaky, claustrophobic field of vision. Except here you’re placed inside a character’s view, removing the contrivances of having to include the camera within the fiction. That gives Extraction room to experiment, not least by switching protagonists at key points, which further adds to your uncertainty over the fates of the core group. No character is guaranteed to survive just because they’re attached to you.
The opening chapter functions both as a tutorial in the regular sense and as a lesson that you should take nothing for granted. It puts you in the shoes of Sam Caldwell, one of the engineers on mining colony Aegis VII tasked with transporting a recently excavated alien ‘marker’ to a research facility. Immediately, things go wrong. Other engineers are driven insane by the marker, and Caldwell starts to hallucinate whispers and alien symbols. You’re forced to defend him from the psychotic crew, and by the end of the chapter you’ve killed them all. It’s then that security forces arrive and shoot him, and as he dies you hear them lamenting his breakdown and solo murderous rampage.
This reversal reconfigures your experience, leaving you wondering what you’re doing and whether you can trust your own senses. It’s the gaming equivalent of literature’s unreliable narrator, except here the perspective is your own. From that moment, an air of doubt lingers throughout the game, and intensifies at specific points when those hallucinatory audiovisual effects are reintroduced. Again, this feeds back into the tension between agency and lack of control: are the characters you’re
responsible for even following their own motivations, or being pulled along to their doom by an alien consciousness?
Having set this precedent, Extraction focuses on exploiting your sense of vulnerability. For every battle in an open space, there’s a slow crawl through infested air vents, a trudge through waist-high water, or a trek along a narrow walkway with a huge, tentacled creature lurking above. Whatever weapons you’re carrying, you still feel exposed and boxed in. There are areas that dial down the pressure, and even the sporadic boss encounters are more imposing than genuinely scary, but these also ensure you can’t relax into a comfortable rhythm.
As for the monsters, the designs from the original game translate across perfectly. The distinctive necromorphs are often roughly humanoid, but their twisted forms and alien-infused biology make them unpredictable adversaries. They charge down walls, drop from above or reanimate from corpses in front of you, and you have to dismember them to take them down. Having to lop off limbs to slow their advance adds a layer of tactical prioritising beyond the usual procession of headshots. And again it’s uncertainty, this time about how these vile bodies function, that keeps you blasting away when little more than a torso remains.
Even so, these are the times when you’re in control; specifically, a form of crowd control that requires decisive management and precision execution. Yet
Extraction is no simple shooting gallery, and you’ve a wealth of options to tackle the advancing threat. The methodical precision of the plasma cutter gets you so far, as it dissects the common necromorph varieties. But as the enemies multiply and evolve into increasingly bizarre forms, you’re not merely prioritising but multitasking. The need to rapidly switch between guns increases, and a balanced loadout soon becomes essential.
In the tutorial you’re introduced to engineering tasks such as riveting panels in place, sawing through barriers and shifting objects with a kinesis beam. Before long, these actions and others are integrated into the fight for survival. In battle you juggle shooting, melee attacks and quick reloads, while also deploying stasis to slow enemies down and kinesis to pluck projectiles out the air or grab ammo and health drops. Then you’re using the rivet gun to reinforce a barricade, shaking a ‘glow worm’ for light or welding a circuit together to activate a door, all while trying to pin back the alien advance.
There’s a brilliant contextual flow to this moveset, but its relative complexity and the different motions it demands are also geared to induce panic. In a perverse twist, the one thing as horrifying as not being in control is having to control too much, and each option reduces the certainty and proficiency of your actions. As if to emphasise the point, in many of the game’s deadliest sections the
HAVING TO LOP OFF LIMBS ADDS A LAYER OF TACTICAL PRIORITISING BEYOND THE USUAL PROCESSION OF HEAD SHOTS
player character’s companions offer no help, or appear to go missing altogether. The price of taking charge of your own fate is being made responsible for everything.
This notion is brought to a gruesome conclusion in a moment near the game’s end. Your character is pinned to the floor by a giant alien mutation, a spike impaling his hand to the ship’s hull. You wonder what to do, and then the camera fixes on the arm. You can’t look around for options and only one tool is available – the rock saw. The arm has to go. As in the first chapter, you’re forced into doing something unthinkable, but this time aware of the reality. There’s horror in the certainty of what you must do, and having your control turned against you. Given its ambitions, and some B-movie production values, it’s inevitable that the structural tensions in Extraction sometimes snap. As an action game, the drama can only be built up for so long, and thus events are sped through in a way that deadens their impact. Minor characters, especially, are despatched with near indifference as the core group pushes forward. And in that opening level there’s sometimes an almost comical disconnect between the crew’s fate and the demand for clinical shooting. The apparently crazed engineers rush towards you. Sam pleads with them to stop, threatens to fire if they come any closer, then swiftly pops their heads off with the rivet gun.
Elsewhere, in an attempt to balance interaction and plot development, you’re given things to do during dialogue scenes. In practice, this means that while the group figures out a plan, you’re left to vaccuum up anything not nailed down with the kinesis beam. Collecting becomes a sub-game, which sees you constantly scanning the background for more ammunition, upgrades and data logs (which, in their readable form, commit the sacrilege of pausing the action’s otherwise unbroken flow). It’s an excessively game-y mechanic that rubs against the overall vision.
Regardless, the overriding experience remains the sense of a game playing with you as you play with it, using the camera to channel your focus, and working the unexpected around a reliable ruleset. The craft of Dead Space: Extraction remains a confident blend of uncertainty and control.