Dead Space 3 Awakened Review

Original, creepy, memorable, silly.

→ March 15, 2013 This review contains Dead Space 3 story spoilers. Consider yourself warned: MEGA SPOILERS AHEAD.
Dead Space 3 Awakened grafts a grisly tale of Marker-induced dementia onto the end of the original Dead Space 3 experience, and in three brief chapters did more to unsettle me than the entire game managed. Disturbing, creepy, and entertaining, it’s great fun – though Awakened’s satisfying but brief story gets a bit silly and serves as a vivid reminder of the ho-humness that preceded it.

If you finished the main game and watched the credits roll to the end, you know that Isaac Clarke is alive. Awakened picks up the story as Isaac and co-op sidekick John Carver attempt to figure out how they actually survived. That’s appropriate, because I seriously wanted to know the same thing. After all, in the finale, they were caught in a free-fall through the heart of a cataclysmic atmospheric storm kickstarted by a moon-sized Necromorph collapsing into the planet. The survival rate for that is estimated at around zero.
Granted, we are talking about a game where alien sculptures wub-wub and transform people into spider-like necro-beasts with super-vulnerable limbs, so you do sort of need to just play along.
Awakened is spread across three separate beats, following Isaac and Carver as they attempt to escape from Tau Volantis and get back to Earth in one piece. This involves a long series of backtracking through the buildings, hallways, and the many, many elevators of Tau Volantis, and eventually up to the elevators of the Terra Nova, the giant Sovereign Colonies starship hanging in the orbiting flotilla where the majority of the space sections of Dead Space 3 played out.
Once aboard the Terra Nova, things take a turn for the bizarre and... slightly silly. In the time since Unitologist leader Jacob Danik was killed on Tau Volantis, a fringe group of Unitologists (the craziest amongst the crazies) led by a zealot named Randall Carr have cobbled together an extremist uprising focused on a much more disturbing way of expressing their faith: they cut off each other’s hands and carve themselves up in a sort of hardcore Necromorph cosplay.
This is easily the most provocative bit of dark imagination in all of Dead Space 3, and it represents both smart art and gameplay design. The conceit that cultists put the Necromorphs on a pedestal and disfigure themselves to "transcend" is a nifty one. The grunt soldiers chant in devotion, they hobble around, at times on all fours, their heads cinched up in sacks, their tortured bodies carved up to ribbons, with twisted sharp blades where their hands once were. Necro Scissorhands, each of them, they pose a formidable challenge in packs on higher difficulties. As a drone of voices begin to invade in Isaac’s mind and Carr starts to appear and disappear, each time plodding closer and closer, a wonderful tension begins to emerge. It’s a fast, no-nonsense burst of flashes, combat, and haunting mood.

Much as I love this more twisted side of Dead Space 3, it is a little far-fetched that these extra-crazy zealots have gone off the reservation so quickly. They managed to totally redecorate the Terra Nova in record time. Where exactly did all those candles come from? And how did they set everything up with no hands? Oh yeah, I'm playing along.
That's the lowpoint of the story, but the best bits are Isaac’s relapse into full-blown dementia, which didn’t happen in any meaningful way in the original Dead Space 3 campaign. Turns out Carr’s bad religion needs a new leader, and it slowly becomes clear that Isaac is the man to build a new church, as Carr would say, “not one of brick and mortar, but of flesh and blood.” Lovely stuff. Isaac’s tangle with his sanity and enemies real and imagined is exactly what Dead Space 3 needed, so it’s a totally refreshing string of events. This is especially true for the few hallucination-state visits to the nightmare plane similar to Carver’s crazy freak-out moments in the Dead Space 3 campaign. Each trip is mostly identical, but stays there are brief.

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Riddle me this, Visceral: why wasn’t anything like this in the main story?

All of the enshrined dressings and the dementia, including imagining Carr with otherworldly powers, takes things in a decidedly twisted and satisfying direction. The voice work is particularly disturbing, there are plenty of jump scares, and as a whole, Awakened works well to set a menacing mood that's true to the spirit of Dead Space.
So riddle me this, Visceral: why wasn't anything like this in the main story? Danik was such a wet blanket of a villain compared to Carr’s stabby tendencies, and his handless creeps are so much more effective at evoking a reaction than Danik’s carbon-copy soldier cult members. Also, this epilogue was hardly necessary. Set aside its sheer entertainment value, Awakened is an open and shut, single-serving add-on that's fun but totally arbitrary. The fact that Awakened itself ends on another much larger cliffhanger than Dead Space 3's original ending only amplifies this.
When it comes to gameplay, the combat, collection, and core mechanics all return in Awakened, with literally no changes. I was truly surprised that there are no new RIGs and no new weapon variations, which is a strange disappointment. Not even a new Scavenger Bot? For collectors of Dead Space-y stuff, DLC like this is an opportunity to add to your arsenal with something unique or weird. A Necromorph-themed RIG? Yes, please. A new melee weapon to go hand-to-hand with the creepy Voldo characters? No-brainer. Alas, no such luck. This stings doubly so when you consider the plethora of Dead Space 3 goodies on sale ala carte in the Dead Space 3 store for real cash. Silly, EA. While there are no new RIGs, a set of plus-3 chips and overclocked Mark II parts to collect that you could previously only get by playing through the campaign again in more difficult modes is now within easier reach, so that’s something.

There are a few new enemies in addition to those mad cultists who hate their hands, the most noteworthy of which being a variation on the charging Stalkers. The original creatures - and the way they chirped and poked their head around corners – got an upgrade that made them seem stronger, faster, and grosser. The main encounter with these beauties is a manic mess of rapid fire, reloading, dodging and mashing health refills, creating an adrenaline-spiking buzz of a moment. Much of everything else is nearly identical to Dead Space 3, outside of the candles and cult graffiti. All the puzzle solving works the same, save for a thoughtful new Reactor Core puzzle that requires some time management, evasion and Stasis juggling. It’s novel, but it’s brief.