Three months or so in, 2023 has been the year of the remake, as some of this year’s best-reviewed games have been new versions of Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, and Dead Space. Now, developer Fraser Brumley is looking to go the opposite way. Dead Space Demake is available for free on itch.io and clues us in on what it might have felt like if Visceral Games released Dead Space in the PlayStation 1 era.
It’s not even close to the full game — you should be able to get through it in around a half-hour — Brumley’s Dead Space Demake is a novel little Unreal Engine indie project that adapts some of Dead Space‘s iconic gameplay moments and locations into a much more retro-feeling formula. The PS1-era aesthetic works shockingly well with Dead Space‘s formula. The rough, pixelated edges of the space station corridors and the Necromorphs that attack Issac within them are just as creepy as the remake’s highly detailed versions of these same things.
Even if you’ve played the original and EA Motive’s remake, the Dead Space Demake should still be a novel experience as you now have another way to experience some of the best parts of one of the greatest horror games of the past two decades. It speaks to the appeal of something Digital Trends has written about in the past, which is that remakes that reinvent and reimagine something well-known are just as interesting as the remakes that give an already great game a simple coat of fresh paint.
Dead Space Demake is available for free on itch.io, although you should also pick up the Dead Space remake for PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X/S if you want to compare the two.
