“You kind of walk into every situation feeling like, ‘God, I don’t have everything I need to win whatever fight I think might be coming,’” Bagwell says. By forcing the player to constantly scrounge for resources, the team also ensured that the player couldn’t hide from a level’s darkest corners. When it came time to develop Dead Space 2, Bagwell and the rest of the team even went so far as to develop a system that measured how many resources the player had when they reached the game’s various checkpoints. “We let you move and shoot and all these things… to counter that, we made very dark, claustrophobic environments.”

“We said, ‘You need to feel like you’re desperate for health and for bullets all of the time,” Bagwell says. Accomplishing that meant depriving them of fundamental resources and general confidence. While the Dead Space team was against crippling the player with awkward controls, Bagwell says that it was important to ensure the player didn’t feel like James Bond. You can do that through audio and lighting and level design and enemy design.” “What they realised is that you don’t have to have these clunky control schemes in order to scare the player. “Some of were like, ‘You can’t make a scary game if you let the player move and shoot,’” Bagwell says.

Indeed, the Dead Space team initially referred to their project as “ Resident Evil 4 in space.” It was a bankable pitch, but the team struggled when it came to balancing the gun-toting action of a game like Resident Evil 4 with their goal of designing the scariest game ever made. “I remember Glen Schofield saying that he wanted to build the scariest game of all time.”Īt that time, building the scariest game of all-time meant besting the current genre king, Resident Evil 4. “Scaring the shit out of the player was definitely the goal ,” Wright Bagwell recalls. Designer of Dead Space, Director of Dead Space 2 at Visceral Games

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