Today is not going well so far. Xian has barely booted it up and looked a few empty rooms before Isaac has a hallucination and Xian now refuses to move forward. Nothing helps. We paused to look at kittens on the internet for a bit, but there's still a lot of crying and whining when we resume. The game allows him to save far too often - why even have those save slots? We barely killed even one creature since the last save point!
We reach a window with a live person on the other side, and for a second, I thought that it was going to be another ugly cut scene and that the evening of Dead Space was going to get cut very, very short. But, it turned out to be our pals. Of course the door's jammed, so we can't actually join up. That'd be sensible, staying in a group with all these monsters around. And the last thing we want to do in a game like this is be sensible! So it's through the processing plant for Isaac to get to the other side. Nevermind that it's not meant to be crossed by an actual person. Again, see note on sensibility.
Xian is creeping along a metal walkway when the plant comes online and he freaks out badly. Nothing's attacking, I try to reassure him, but I think both he and I know that a game like Dead Space would only be making this much noise if they wanted to obscure the sound of a monster about to attack. And sure enough, two more inches of creeping along results in dark creepers bursting out and running straight at Isaac. They pretty much give Xian a heart attack - they're pretty fast. He doesn't lose much health, but he says he lost a few years of his life, and can't afford to see that scene again, so he goes back to the last save slot from two moments ago and saves yet again.
Time to get through the processing plant. All the grindy bits you'd expect from an acme cartoon are off, thanks to Ellie, but guess who shows up and turns them all back on? That... one guy... who's out to get you... for some reason that I forget. Whatever his motivations, the plant is on and ready to grind Isaac up to a pulp, and only his stasis and very slow mini-jets are going to get him through. Xian is much better at these timing-or-death things than me, and is vastly less stressed by them. He marches through steadily.
Ok, criticism time, are you ready, Dead Space? I've lavished praise on you for your setpieces and immersiveness, but your weakness seems to be those menus that you've been so good about avoiding. There's not many, but the few that one is forced to deal with are actually pretty obtuse. I like the pictures of items, but the way they are laid out makes it somewhat difficult to determine what you have in inventory vs. what is for sale vs. what you have in storage, and how many slots of each there are, etc. etc. Just a side note.
During this time, Xian has made it all the way through the processing plant without even dying once, killing another one of those gigantic blobs that flings homing bombs along the way. Go figure that you'd have to fight two of those in two consecutive chapters.
We met up with Ellie and Stross and reached chapter 9 (of 15, I looked it up) and things are now progressing more smoothly that Xian has somewhat accepted his fate. He has to repeat one sequence a few times, with a window blowing out very close to where he was standing, and there was another gigantic room full of hunters, but he made it with minimal death. But he called it quits after he had to exit a tram he was travelling in with Ellie and Stross to do some manual repairs. Always a bad idea in Dead Space.
