I was awake last night, the whole damn night, busy playing a damn good addictive game from ten PM to six in the morning.
An hour or two after midnight, my whole body was already sore from the prolonged sitting, but I couldn't stop exploring the futuristic corridors of the in-game world.
I kept feeling the urge to see what's waiting behind the next door.
At the beginning, most of the game takes place in very dark environments, which is great for the scare factor and tense gameplay, but it can be hard to find opportunities for an attractive screenshot.
Here you can see my avatar posing in a small, fairly well-lit corner of one of the many dark rooms, but ...
... but most of the time, he was nervously piercing the dark with a small flashlight integrated in his weapon.
The protagonist of the game is Isaac Clarke, that's the dude's name. He looks badass in that futuristic suit and helmet, but he's just an ordinary systems engineer, not a soldier, space pirate, or superhero.
I like the way they designed him for the game.
His gentle, composed, average-joe face is so wonderfully non-threatening...
... in stark contrast with the situation in which he was suddenly thrown.
In this screenshot, taken at the start of the game, I caught him putting on the helmet.
The film grain effect was on by default when I started the game. It took me some time to notice that screenshots look much better without that grain. In the gam, when things are moving, the grain is fine, but in the still image, it only muddies things unnecessarily.
The first enemies Isaac Clarke encountered were hard to catch in a screenshot. Everything was so dark, and they were pretty fast and chaotic.
Someone had to pay a high price for this and the previous picture. The hero had to die quite a few times by letting the monsters get too close to him.
According to Wikipedia, Isaac Clarke was named after Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.
Later in the game, playing as Mr. Clarke, I was able to float around in zero-gravity conditions. Those sections of the game provide quite a bit of fun and a welcome diversity to the gameplay. In the following screenshot ...
... Herr Isaac is posing near the save game slot, known as the Save Station, inside the game.
For the most part, like 90 - 95%, at least, the game is set on a spaceship infested with monstrosities created by the signal coming from a mysterious alien artifact, a signal that somehow reconfigures the dead tissue of corpses into ugly new undead things that serve as biological weapons that can further spread the infection. That's the premise, but there is more to the story.
In the screenshot right above this piece of text, you can see the waiting room in one of the monorail stations. Yep, it's a pretty big spaceship.
If you take a good look at all the details, you may notice a small doll.
Here you can see it better. Dolls are fairly usual in horror settings, so I thought that this one was just a random prop to make the atmosphere a bit creepier. And that's what the doll partially was, I think, but maybe not only, becouse ...
... becouse later in the game, I came across a pretty large laboratory with people floating in big tanks filled with some murky liquid.
Smaller tanks, embedded in the walls of the room, contained babies.
The grown-ups, a male and a female, in the big cylindrical tanks looked dead or comatose, but the babies were moving. Soon after taking the previous few screenshots ...
... I got suddenly attacked by this lovely baby-faced monstrosity.
Here you can see Isaac Clarce shooting at that thing from a safer distance.
From a toy baby to the baby necromorph, everything looked nicely connected through a series of clues. Oh, I almost forgot, the creatures created by the signal are called necromorphs in the game.
Dead Space is not only about combat. Technically is a third-person shooter, but more time is dedicated to the tense survival, ship systems rewiring, and exploration.
Through a series of logs, some written, some recorded, the player is following an interesting Science Fiction story and collecting small fragments of everyday life on the ship.
In this screenshot, our unlikely hero is passing by a scary, dark window. Who knows what could be watching him from the other side?
In some places, the damage to the ship's structure resembles an open wound on the organic tissue.
The tentacle-like thing that attacked our hero when this screenshot was taken came out of a hole simillar to the one shown in the previous picture.
At some point, Isaac Clarke came across a large screen that was displaying various space & science-related stuff. I took this screenshot when an image of our spaceship was on display.
Here you can see me, I mean, you can see Mr. Clarke, observing some medical stuff.
This "medical atlas" type of artwork can feel suitably creepy in a horror context, especially if lit effectively, and ...
... and when it comes to lighting things in a wide variaty of interesting, atmospheric ways, this dark game is definitely a masterpiece.
This screenshot shows a calm, mundane scene with two characters inside the monorail. A moment later ...
... a few seconds before all hell broke loose, a red blinking light transformed the site into something out of a Dario Argento or Mario Bava movie from the seventies.
You can see a bit of Space in this screenshot, for a change. Isaac Clarke was traversing a heavily damaged section of the ship.
This screenshot is displaying more medical stuff, while the following one ...
... is here to show you the same thing from a different angle.
Here you can see some heavy futuristic machinery.
This is the same machinery, but our hero is in a slightly different pose.
In this shot, Mr. Clarke is posing next to one of the many uplifting posters scaterred all around the ship.
I played most of the Fallout games. I played them and replayed them for years. One of the things that I always loved in Fallout is the contrast between optimistic old-world adverts and the grim reality. Dead Space doesn't showcase a post-apocalyptic setting (although it can be argued that this is a post-apocalypse in the making, only no one in the game is aware of that), but you can find that kind of contrast in small doses.
This is yet another zero-gravity scene because zero-gravity moments in this game are very cool and photogenic.
I mentioned earlier in the post that the moments of comat are short and frenetic, so the monsters are hard to catch in a good, well-composed screenshot. In the case of the beauty shown in the above picture ...
... a glitch helped me get a couple of clear, sharp images. There was a small patch of a relatively big zero-gravity area, in which some kind of invisible wall didn't allow the creature to hurt me. The first and only glitch I encountered so far in the game ended up being a very useful one. The thing kept attacking me, and I kept taking screenshots instead of shooting with lethal weapons.
After screenshooting it for a while, I took a futuristic plasma weapon and blew the creature's head off.
Here you can see the dead thing floating behind me.
When I replayed the same segment of the game one more time ...
... the necromorph destroyed me. In this screenshot, the decapitated Isaac Clarke is poetically floating surrounded by its own blood that looks quite decorative in the absence of gravity.
In this screenshot, the living, uninjured Isaac Clarke is observing some space suits. I included this boring, mundane scene becouse I love watching the mundane, boring details inside this game.
Here you can see some boring toolboxes and tools, and in the following picture ...
... you can admire some even more boring blue cleaning gloves.
This is yet another zero-gravity scene, because zero-gravity scenes are objectively more interesting.
Here you can see our hero reading one of the many logs he found along the way. You can read along if you wish.
This screenshot shows a bit of fresh, red blood in a sickly greenish ambiance.
Here you can see a scene from a red-lit corridor. Nothing is interesting going on here, but I like the color, so I included the picture.
In this screenshot, bloody intestines are scattered across the floor. That's something worth showing when one talks about a horror game.
Here you can see Isaac Clarke communicating with one of his colleagues via some kind of Holographic screen or something like that. In the following screenshot ...
... he's talking with some girl. The girl is also a colleague, a female colleague.
At some point, our hero came across a futuristic gadget that helped him lift, move, or throw stuff around through some energy and stuff. That thing was a cool addition to the gameplay that made the fights more inventive and even helped solve some environmental puzzles. In this screenshot, you can see Isaac easily lifting some heavy boxes. Sometimes science really looks like magic.
Here you can see him examining some medical stuff again.
The creepy litlle medical mannequin shown in this picture is pretty cool and memorable.
Here you can see one of the corpses Isaac found in the ship's clinic.
Before turning into monsters, some infected experience hallucinations and other mental disturbances that make them do disturbing stuff. Here you can see a nurse or a doctor vivisecting someone. A bit later, when the patient died, she calmly cut her throat. The following screenshot ...
... was taken in the same area.
In this picture, our hero is posing near the demolished entrance to the security station. Blood and gore are abundantly spread on the floor behind him.
This picture is here only becouse the chair reminded me of an isopod or a trilobite. I like the design inspired by segmented animals.
Here you can see a dramatically lit screenshot I took when Isaac Clarke reached an area overgrown with some massive organic stuff.
The same thing is lit differently in this picture.
Some transmuted humans were embedded in that thing that was spread like some kind of fungus across the walls and around poles and railings. They looked dead at first sight, but ...
... but nope, they were kinda alive and ready to scratch and bite.
The disturbing imagery in this game is fairly inventive.
The overall atmosphere is absolutely great.
This is my favorite screenshot I took last night - Isaac Clarke near the poster that's advertising the type of suit he's wearing in the original game from 2008.
Here you can see him checking his objectives written in the game's journal.
I don't know how long the game is. I have no idea how much gameplay I still have in front of me, but ...
... but this post ends here, that's for sure ...
... THE END.
This is my entry for the Gaming Photography Weekly Contest - Theme: Gaming Photographs. Here's the link to the contest announcement post by 
