The original Dead Space was a survival horror masterclass – a highly atmospheric and tense action game that exploited seventh-gen console hardware to deliver something really special. Some fifteen years and two console generations later, Dead Space has been fully remade with modern tools, sporting excellent new artwork, sophisticated rendering features, and revamped level layouts and content.
As John has covered in detail, Dead Space is on the whole a successful remake effort. However, the game arrived with serious issues, including completely unlocked frame-rates on the console’s quality modes (and Series S) in the preview code, resulting in extremely uneven performance, then serious image quality problems with the day one patch applied, with current-gen consoles sporting a raw, aliased presentation. For better and worse, updates have come in hot and fast on this one, requiring not one but two restarts of our coverage – hence the late arrival of this comparison piece.
Now reports online suggest that the game’s visual woes have indeed been addressed. So what’s the current state of the game on current-gen? And do these image-salvaging measures hurt performance?
So to recap: at launch, Dead Space had some very awkward image quality characteristics for a current-gen game. The PS5 version in particular exhibited some very strange artefacts in virtually every shot. Geometric edges often looked jagged and serrated, a sort of stippled artefact pattern that looked almost like a chainsaw blade. In stills this was unpleasant enough, but in motion it meant that the PS5 version suffered from a lot of edge aliasing. Textures resolved oddly as well, appearing blocky and suffering from breakup on fine details. Again, these were temporally unstable, leading to a lot of flickering when the game was in motion.