Halo Infinite Reportedly Scrapped New Story Content Amid Studio Shakeup - IGN

Halo is reportedly staying at 343 Industries, but the franchise's direction is unclear amidst layoffs and a pivot away from Halo's Slipspace engine.

In a report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, the studio's leadership overhaul, mass layoffs, and other big changes are causing 343 to essentially hit the reset button on the franchise. The report also claims that at least 95 people were laid off from 343 as a part of this month's mass layoffs at Microsoft, and that 343 was not working on new missions for Halo Infinite's story over the last year.

After the layoffs, rumors started circulating claiming that Microsoft could pass Halo development to another studio entirely. According to today's report, Halo is staying put, despite concerns over the studio's ability to develop new Halo games after the big hit to the staff.

The report lines up with 343's statement that "Halo and Master Chief are here to stay", and Phil Spencer saying that 343 remains "critically important" to the success of Halo. According to the report, Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, has assured 343's staff that they're still in charge, even as the studio works with outside partners.

Big changes are in store for Halo

However, it would seem that big changes are still in store for the franchise. Namely, Halo is said to be pivoting to Unreal Engine, leaving the controversial Slipspace engine behind. Development challenges posed by Slipspace are reportedly holding back two Infinite multiplayer modes that are nearly finished: Extraction and Assault.

The reports of the engine swap come after years of rumors surrounding 343, Slipspace, and Unreal Engine. The pivot will reportedly begin with the Halo project codenamed Tatanka, which has been rumored for quite some time. This game is in co-development at 343 and Certain Affinity, and began as a Halo battle royale, but the game may now evolve in different directions. Future Halo games will also explore using Unreal Engine.

Halo Games in Chronological Order

343 isn't preparing any additional story content for Halo Infinite's campaign, the report claims. Rather, developers have spent the last year working on Unreal Engine prototypes while pitching ideas for new Halo games. Many of the developers working on these projects were laid off this month, as 343 isn't actively working on any new story content.

After strong initial reception for Infinite's fresh campaign and free-to-play multiplayer, things took a turn for the worse. Fans pushed back against Infinite's controversial multiplayer progression system, as lengthy delays to long-awaited features soured public opinion of the game. For now, Halo players are waiting for the launch of Season 3: Echoes Within this March.

For more on Xbox and Halo, check out IGN's recent interview with Xbox's Phil Spencer.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over six years of experience in the gaming industry with bylines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

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Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event: what to expect - The Verge

Three new phones plus as many as five new laptops could await us on February 1st.

A leaked image claiming to show the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra.

Image: NieuweMobiel.NL

On February 1st, Samsung will hold its first in-person smartphone launch since the Galaxy S20 way back in February 2020. The company is widely expected to announce its new flagship smartphone lineup at the event, namely the Galaxy S23 series. But, as is tradition, Samsung will almost certainly include a couple of additional product announcements for good measure. Here’s a roundup of everything we’re expecting at the event, which is due to kick off at 1PM ET / 10AM PT / 6PM GMT on Wednesday. 

Let’s start with some context because past events often provide clues about what’s coming. Samsung held a very similar launch event last year in February 2022 when it announced the Galaxy S22 lineup consisting of the S22, S22 Plus, and S22 Ultra. Alongside it, the company also launched new tablets, the Galaxy Tab S8, Tab S8 Plus, and Tab S8 Ultra. 

This year, rumors suggest Samsung could shake things up a little bit. It’ll apparently still have a new lineup of smartphones to announce, but rather than tablets, it’s expected to have new laptops. The keen-eyed have spotted that Samsung’s reservation page for the upcoming launch specifically name-checks a new “Galaxy Book” alongside the new smartphone, and rumors suggest this will be a lineup of Galaxy Book 3 devices. 

Here’s everything we think we know about what’s coming:

The Galaxy S23 series

This one’s easy, and not just because Samsung has announced a new flagship smartphone lineup like clockwork at the beginning of each year for a decade. No, it’s also easy because Samsung’s upcoming smartphones have more or less leaked in their entirety already, meaning we have a pretty good idea of their looks and specs even if we don’t yet know exactly how this will translate into real-world performance.

Like last year, the lineup looks to be three-strong. There’s the standard Galaxy S23, the slightly bigger S23 Plus, and finally, the high-end Galaxy S23 Ultra. Rumors suggest the first two will share similar designs and specs, while the third will be more visually distinct with at least one significant unique feature.

A leaked image claiming to show the S23 and S23 Plus.

Image: WinFuture

We’re referring, of course, to the S23 Ultra’s main camera, which has consistently been rumored to be using a high-resolution 200-megapixel main sensor. That’s almost double the 108-megapixel sensor found in last year’s Galaxy S22 Ultra. As my colleague Allison Johnson wrote last August, higher resolution sensors like these matter because they mean phones can bin more pixels together to gather more light and produce brighter, more detailed shots. The exact sensor is expected to be Samsung’s ISOCELL HP2, which Samsung announced just weeks ago. 

Alongside this 200-megapixel sensor, a leaked spec sheet suggests the Galaxy S23 Ultra will have three additional cameras, a 12-megapixel ultrawide, a 10-megapixel telephoto with a 3x optical zoom, and another 10-megapixel telephoto with a 10x optical zoom. It amounts to a significantly better camera system than both the Galaxy S23 and Galaxy S23 Plus, whose own leaked spec sheets suggest will both have triple-camera systems consisting of 50-megapixel main sensors, 12-megapixel ultrawides, and 10-megapixel telephotos.

Leaked images suggest it won’t just be the camera systems that distinguish the S23 and S23 Plus from the S23 Ultra but their designs as well. The Galaxy S23 Ultra will seemingly have square corners and an accompanying S Pen stylus, reiterating its status as the spiritual successor to Samsung’s discontinued Galaxy Note phones. Meanwhile the Galaxy S23 and S23 Plus have much softer rounded edges, even if they’ve ditched the camera bump that distinguished the S22 and S22 Plus from the S22 Ultra last year. 

A leaked image showing the S23 Ultra’s squared-off design next to the S23 and S23 Plus.

Image: WinFuture

Next up, screens. As its name suggests, the Galaxy S23 is the smallest of the three phones, with a 6.1-inch 1080p 120Hz OLED display. The S23 Plus is slightly bigger at 6.6 inches, though its screen specs are otherwise largely the same. Finally, the S23 Ultra has a larger screen still at 6.8 inches, and importantly, it bumps the resolution to 1440p. It’s still OLED and still 120Hz.

Those same leaked spec sheets we mentioned earlier suggest all three phones are going to be powered by Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor in Europe, and historical precedent suggests we’ll see the same processor used in North America as well. What’s interesting is that there’s no sign of Samsung’s own Exynos processors in the Galaxy S23 lineup, which the company has historically used to power its phones in select regions around the world like Europe and India. Qualcomm suggested as much in an earnings call last year when chief financial officer Akash Palkhiwala said Qualcomm’s processor share would increase from “75 percent in G S22” to “global share in G S23.”

The rest of the lineup’s specs appear to be broadly consistent with previous Samsung flagships and the industry at large. We’re looking at between 8 and 12GB of RAM and 256GB to 1TB of storage in the Ultra, while the two other models will reportedly only ship with 8GB of RAM and between 128 and 512GB of storage. Battery capacities range from 3,900mAh to 5,000mAh across the three phones, with 45W fast charging on the Plus and Ultra and 25W on the base S23. 

In terms of pricing, internal Verizon documents posted to Reddit suggest we’re looking at a $799.99 starting price for the Galaxy S23, $999.99 for the Galaxy S23 Plus, and $1,199.99 for the Galaxy S23 Ultra, which is in line with last year’s models. European buyers might not be so lucky, however. In countries like Spain and Germany, leaked pricing suggests the starting prices may have increased by around €100 for certain models.

Galaxy Book 3

If Samsung’s reservation page is anything to go by, this year’s Galaxy S smartphone launch will be accompanied by a new line of Galaxy Book laptops. Rumors suggest we could see as many as five laptops announced, which MySmartPrice reports will be called the Galaxy Book 3, Book 3 360, Book 3 Pro, Book 3 Pro 360, and Book 3 Ultra. Last year, Samsung announced its laptops a little later in February at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. 

As you’d expect from its name, the Book 3 Ultra will reportedly be the highest-end model. According to leaker Ishan Agarwal, it’ll have a 16-inch 1800p OLED display, an Intel i9-13900H CPU, an Nvidia RTX 4070 discrete GPU, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and will be compatible with Samsung’s S Pen stylus. Its touchscreen could also be thinner and lighter than usual thanks to having its touch sensors integrated directly into the panel. 

A leaked image claiming to show the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra.

Image: The Tech Outlook

The rest of the lineup is reportedly split between 360 laptops, with displays that can flip all the way around to be used tablet-style, and standard clamshell laptops. MySmartPrice reports that the Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 will also be available with a 16-inch 1800p OLED display, with a choice of an Intel i5-1340P or i7-1360 CPU, integrated Intel graphics, 16GB of RAM, up to 1TB of storage, and stylus support. The non-360 Galaxy Book 3 Pro will reportedly be available with a 14-inch screen in addition to the 16-inch version. 

Images of the Galaxy Book 3 Pro, 3 Pro 360, and 3 Ultra were leaked last year by The Tech Outlet, showing the laptops’ USB-C ports, headphone jacks, and charging ports. 

There’s not much concrete information about what we can expect from the non-Pro Galaxy Book 3 laptops. MySmartPrice reports both will come with just a single screen size — 15 inches — but their exact specs are less clear. Judging by the rest of the lineup, however, we’d expect both to feature 13th Gen Intel processors. 

But probably no tablets, earbuds, or smartwatches

It seems unlikely that we’ll see Samsung announce a new lineup of Android tablets, true wireless earbuds, or smartwatches alongside this year’s Galaxy S23 smartphones. The best evidence we have, frankly, is that if an announcement was coming, it’d probably have leaked by now.

Samsung did announce a new lineup of Tab S8 tablets alongside the Galaxy S22 last year. But according to a report from South Korean outlet The Elec, the company pushed back the release of its upcoming tablets (presumably the Tab S9) from their original December 2022 release date due to a drop in demand for consumer tech. According to The Elec, however, we should still expect a new generation of tablets to release this year, which means they might still launch alongside Samsung’s anticipated Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Z Flip 5 foldables at the company’s traditional summer launch. Just don’t hold your breath for an appearance in February. 

It’s a similar story with Samsung’s true wireless earbuds. The company currently has between two or three lines of earbuds, depending on whether you think it’ll ever release a follow-up to the (in my opinion excellent) Galaxy Buds Live. The company last updated its Galaxy Buds Pro lineup in August last year with the Pro 2 and released the non-Pro Galaxy Buds 2 in August 2021. That suggests the latter is due for an upgrade this year but maybe not for a few months yet. 

Finally, there are smartwatches, which last saw an update with last August’s Galaxy Watch 5 series. Samsung’s smartwatches have been on a 12-month release cadence for the past couple of years, meaning the most likely time we’ll see a Galaxy Watch 6 announced is in August 2023. 

Samsung’s Unpacked event will be livestreamed over on its YouTube channel on Wednesday, February 1st, starting at 1PM ET / 10AM PT / 6PM GMT.

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OnePlus Could Be the Next Android Brand with Folding Smartphones - Gizmodo

Imagine if this OnePlus 10 Pro could fold.

Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo

OnePlus could be the next major Android brand with a foldable smartphone. A circulating leak from the Chinese patent offices indicates the company may already be laying the groundwork to offer an alternative for U.S. users.

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A trademark listing discovered through the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) shows a company —Shenzhen Oneplus Technology— filing two patent applications for a “OnePlus V Flip” and a “OnePlus V Fold,” respectively. Yes, you would be correct in thinking they sound exactly like the corresponding Samsung versions of each device. They probably fold the same, too.

I accessed the patent through a link provided by 9to5Google, which has a screenshot of the listing on its site. Twitter user Mukul Sharma initially spotted the names of the smartphones. The pre-Elon verified account notes that internal testing of at least one of the mentioned foldables has begun at the OnePlus headquarters.

Rumors of the OnePlus foldables aren’t new. They’ve been circulating more heavily since last summer, especially after OnePlus’s co-founder, Pete Lau, tweeted a look at a hinging mechanism. It was unclear at the time whether it was for a OnePlus device or a smartphone for its parent company, Oppo.

Oppo has a foldable smartphone circulating overseas. The Find N2 launched in December, and it’s reviewing pretty well in other markets. It’s a bit shorter than Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4, which it takes after, and has a slightly different aspect ratio. CNET says it’s somewhat squarish compared to the Z Fold 4's relative rectangularity. It would be no surprise to see Oppo attempt a similar form factor under the OnePlus moniker since it’s already an established brand in North America.

OnePlus also has the added benefit of being known as an affordable flagship brand. It’s managed to keep the OnePlus 10 Pro and 10T under the $900 mark, eventually dropping the 10 Pro down to under $600 for similar specifications stuffed into Samsung’s Galaxy s22 devices.

Folding phones will likely remain pricey until they become more common. Samsung’s current batch of foldables are too expensive, even with the cheapest foldable coming in at $1,000. It would be an excellent addition to the current folding smartphone portfolio to have something with a more accessible price point compared to Samsung’s Flip and Fold. That said, don’t expect too much of a discount. The Find N2 starts at $1,512 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage space, which is almost $300 less than the Z Fold 4.

There’s no word on whether any of this is official yet. OnePlus’s foldable smartphones are still just a rumor. But it sure is nice to think of a time when folding smartphones won’t cost as much as a mid-range laptop. Some older options like the rebooted Motorola Razr are already hitting steep sales, but even that still debuted at $1,500.

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Watch a Real-Life 'Terminator' Robot Turn Into Liquid to Escape a Cage - CNET

Scientists have created a tiny robotic system that can transition from solid to liquid and back again, bringing a bit of classic sci-fi lore to life while they're at it. 

It's been 30 years since killer liquid metal robots entered our nightmares courtesy of 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day. That movie's shape-shifting T-1000 robot could seemingly overcome any obstacle while turning parts of itself into weapons at will. 

The specter of Skynet and the robot apocalypse have haunted us ever since, and now an international team of researchers has finally given us a real-world version of a T-1000, although with more altruistic aims. 

The team says it was inspired not by Hollywood, but by the humble sea cucumber, which can transition between soft and rigid body states. 

"Giving robots the ability to switch between liquid and solid states endows them with more functionality," says Chengfeng Pan, an engineer at The Chinese University of Hong Kong who led the study.

As if to gesture at Terminator-inspired night terrors, Pan and colleagues demonstrate this increased functionality by placing one of their miniature robots in a simulated jail cell and showing how it might escape. 

It can be a little tough to see what's going on in the video above, but basically the robot melts itself down to a liquid, flows between the bars and into a waiting mold where it cools, reforms itself and then pops back up. Granted, this escapee is a little less terrifying than a T-1000 since it needs a mold at the ready to reconstitute itself, but it's still enough to agitate any Luddite. 

The demonstration is part of a study published Wednesday in the journal Matter. 

Senior author Carmel Majidi from Carnegie Mellon University said magnets make all of this futuristic phase transitioning possible.

"The magnetic particles here have two roles... One is that they make the material responsive to an alternating magnetic field, so you can, through induction, heat up the material and cause the phase change. But the magnetic particles also give the robots mobility and the ability to move in response to the magnetic field."

The particles are embedded in gallium, which is a metal with a very low melting point of just 86 degrees Fahrenheit (about 30 Celsius), creating a substance that flows more like water than other phase-changing materials, which are more viscous. 

In tests, the mini robots were able to jump over obstacles, scale walls, split in half and re-merge all while being magnetically controlled. 

"Now, we're pushing this material system in more practical ways to solve some very specific medical and engineering problems," said Pan.

In other demonstrations, the robots were used to solder circuits, to deliver medication and clear a foreign object from a model stomach. 

The researchers envision the system being able to conduct repairs in hard-to-reach spaces and serving as a "universal screw," which melts into a screw socket and solidifies with no actual screwing required. 

The team is particularly excited about the potential medical uses. 

"Future work should further explore how these robots could be used within a biomedical context," said Majidi. "What we're showing are just one-off demonstrations, proofs of concept, but much more study will be required to delve into how this could actually be used for drug delivery or for removing foreign objects."

Hopefully the list of foreign objects that need removal won't ever include weaponized miniature melting robots, as they might prove difficult to track down and extract. 

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Apple's One Trick to Make You Want VR - CNET

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The Dead Space remake is a grisly cut of classic horror - The Verge

The new shooter offers low-key but highly effective updates to a great game.

Isaac Clarke goes back to the USG Ishimura.

Image: EA

In October 2017, publisher Electronic Arts unceremoniously shut down its studio Visceral Games, best known for shooter series Dead Space. Visceral was part of a dwindling breed at EA, devoted to linear high-budget games instead of a profitable “live service” model. One former employee noted that even the popular Dead Space 2 had been considered a financial failure, and the odds of a new one appearing in the near future seemed small. Yet tomorrow, EA will do just that, releasing a remake of the original 2008 Dead Space developed by its Canadian team Motive Studio. The Dead Space remake isn’t the path I’d have chosen for a resurrection of one of my favorite series. It also happens to be great.

Dead Space (2023) is most obviously a better-looking version of Dead Space (2008). Debuting on next-generation consoles and PC, it’s the kind of game where everything glistens, from the slimy explosive tentacles wreathing its futuristic spaceship to the ornate brassy ridges on protagonist Isaac Clarke’s suit. But beneath that surface, Motive has polished the foundations of Dead Space with changes drawn from its 2011 sequel as well as some simple yet effective new ideas. Rather than an elaborate reimagining in the vein of the Resident Evil 2 remake, a metanarrative experiment like the Final Fantasy VII Remake, or a user-friendly transformation of a tough-to-play classic like the yet-unreleased System Shock remake, it’s just an immensely solid update to an already excellent game — and one that couldn’t have come at a better time.

The Dead Space franchise is a third-person shooter series defined by a clever twist: you’re in a disaster zone overrun by grotesque zombie-like monstrosities dubbed “necromorphs,” but instead of a bullet to the head, the creatures go down when you sever their blade- or bomb-like limbs. While horror games have explored just about every permutation of the hideously twisted human form, Dead Space forces you to confront it with combat that feels like gruesome surgery — aided by weapons based on power tools like plasma cutters and radial arm saws as well as telekinetic powers and a time-slowing ability called stasis.

The Dead Space remake — like the original — sets this action on a mining spaceship called the USG Ishimura, which has gone unexpectedly silent after cracking open a planet in the depths of space. Engineer Isaac Clarke boards the Ishimura hoping to repair it and track down his girlfriend, a doctor named Nicole Brennan. Instead, he and his team find themselves thwarted at every turn, not only by the necromorph outbreak but also by a mysterious sabotage operation and their own increasingly unstable mental states. Isaac learns the outbreak stems from an apparently madness-inducing alien artifact brought on board the Ishimura. And a powerful religious cult called the Church of Unitology, which is, of course, absolutely nothing like the Church of Scientology, may be helping it spread.

Dead Space was initially conceived as a sequel to the exploration-heavy immersive sim System Shock 2, and although that plan was abandoned early in development, the influence feels evident in the original and carries over to the remake. The Ishimura is a fairly small and self-contained location, full of looping shortcuts and a tram backbone that lets you move easily between levels. (It’s unsurprisingly reminiscent of Arkane’s 2017 Prey, another indirect System Shock successor.) Both iterations of the game involve fixing problems by backtracking through flickering corridors and cavernous common areas, blasting the monsters that burst out of vents or play dead in plain sight. It’s a structure that Dead Space’s two direct sequels would downplay, moving toward comparatively linear level design.

Frustrating sections like an asteroid-shooting run have been heavily overhauled.

But while the original Dead Space established the basic combat system, some of the series’ best elements came later. Dead Space 2 turned telekinesis into a full-fledged secondary combat option — letting you do things like freeze an enemy with stasis, chop its arm off with a plasma cutter, and pin it to a wall with its own severed limb. It’s so intuitive that the original game feels incomplete without it, and the same goes for some other features, like free-floating zero-gravity sections that let you jet through the vacuum of space rather than just hopping between walls with magnetic boots.

The Dead Space remake is the best that playing a Dead Space game has ever felt. (I ran through it on a PC with a controller and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card, the game’s recommended spec.) On top of combining the first and second game’s best elements, Motive has overhauled a few undeniably bad encounters, particularly a couple of interminable cannon-blasting set pieces that now feel far snappier and less repetitive. It maintains the methodical but not artificially slow pace of the original, creating suspense with shameless sudden blackouts and enemy jump scares but mostly avoiding the heavily scripted sensory assaults and quicktime sequences that Dead Space 2 became known for. Isaac will certainly take his share of physical and mental punishment, but Dead Space is emphatically a horror game — something to play with and master, not simply be subjected to.

And the remake introduces a few welcome tweaks of its own. The game largely keeps Dead Space’s original array of weapons, but it buffs some of the less popular ones with fresh alternate fire modes — the flamethrower, for instance, can now produce a protective wall of fire. As you attack enemies, you’ll see chunks of their flesh visibly erode, letting you know how close you are to severing a limb. One weapon takes things further with a fire mode that strips off entire layers of skin and muscle, leaving brittle animate skeletons that you can knock out with another weapon. It’s gory and over the top, and I can’t get enough of it.

Dead Space still happily embraces the shooter genre’s artificial yet satisfying shorthands. Enemies have familiar glowing weak spots to aim for, and you’ll stomp gigantic supply crates to release the futuristic equivalent of a single $100 bill, carefully collecting money for supplemental ammo and dopamine-drip upgrades like new suits. On top of being glossy and dramatically lit compared to their 2008 counterparts, the levels are now full of clearly marked stuff to smash and throw at enemies; I have never been so aware of furniture’s potential impalement value. Some doors and lockers are gated behind a new “clearance” system that lets you open them later, when you’ve collected credentials off the bodies of dead crew officers, giving you an organic way to learn about the people on the Ishimura.

The upgrades encourage exploration, too. Like before, you collect power nodes that you can weld to your weapons and suit at benches scattered through the levels. But this time, some of those welding points are unlocked by items that enable specific special functions, like setting enemies on fire with plasma shots. While the powers aren’t necessarily new, the items add an extra incentive to poke around the ship. And they’re far simpler than the confusing modular weapons in Dead Space 3, an okay-at-best game whose influence is nearly undetectable in the remake.

The riskiest moves Motive makes aren’t mechanical but narrative. Dead Space began as a relatively simple space-horror story that evoked Event Horizon, but its plot became more lore heavy and tortured with each game and supplemental tie-in book — Dead Space 3’s climax is as baroquely incoherent as a fever dream, culminating in the decision to (spoilers) make players physically fight a moon. And between the first two games, Isaac underwent a dramatic shift from a silent masked protagonist to a character voiced by actor Gunner Wright, who plays the man as a combination of weary, snarky, and horrifically traumatized.

Wright came on board for the Dead Space remake, giving Isaac a voice in conversations that have been extended, centering characters’ motivations and backstories more clearly. You’re no longer playing a silent figure constantly ordered around by snippy superiors doing the bare minimum to convey where you’re supposed to go but, instead, a competent technician who has a tense but collegial relationship with his team. A series of side missions, which are basically just encouragements to explore specific optional rooms, also give a little extra background on his relationship with Nicole and what she’s been doing on the ship.

Games writer Tom Bissell once laid out a passionate argument against Dead Space 2’s expanded plot and Wright’s voice acting, arguing that a horror game protagonist’s vulnerability “annuls any need for ‘character’ or ‘personality’” to make players care. “Isaac is not relaying an experience. He is, rather, the relay we carry and protect during our experience,” Bissell declared. “The Isaac of the first Dead Space was so moving precisely because you had no idea what was inside his head.”

But I always found Isaac’s inexpressiveness in Dead Space distracting because it was so ostentatiously stiff in a story about ordinary people having a brush with madness and tragedy. A first-person control system lets the protagonist simply disappear, but a third-person avatar makes it impossible to ignore all of the moments that someone would normally react and doesn’t. (A lot of these reactions were buried in the original game’s menu text, which is written from Isaac’s perspective.) Wright imbues the character with an endearing charm that makes him fun not only to protect but also to be around for 15 or 16 hours. It’s enough to make me forget that Motive has made Isaac a generic brunet in his rare unmasked scenes, rather than keeping his distinctive salt-and-pepper hair.

We no longer stan a gray king.

Isaac’s companions, including Nicole, have been rewritten to feel more engaging and human. We’re thankfully past the period where blockbuster shooters have to pretend to be nuanced high art, but the remake is simply better at pragmatic genre storytelling: the underappreciated craft of giving characters enough personality and relatable motivation that I want to listen to them talk. The remake is weakest toward the end, where it feels either rushed or hemmed in by the original script. But it still pulls a little twist that’s compellingly creepy, even if it doesn’t change the story’s ultimate trajectory.

The Dead Space remake feels clean and good in a way that few big-budget Western titles do right now. In 2008, Dead Space seemed like a variation on any number of story-based horror shooters. It was directly inspired by Resident Evil 4 (which itself is getting a remake this year) but also shared DNA with first-person games like BioShock and Half-Life 2, which beat it by a few years to telekinesis and weaponized industrial tools. But in 2023’s world of modest indie narrative games and sprawling open-world AAA slogs, it stands nearly alone. The closest equivalent, Dead Space creator Glen Schofield’s The Callisto Protocol, seemed almost embarrassed to be a game instead of an unforgiving interactive movie.

Sadly, I’m not sure what Motive’s success here means. I’ve seen the game compared to a director’s cut, but none of Dead Space’s original primary creators are involved, and the term suggests a level of deference toward designers that EA simply hasn’t shown. Dead Space remains a relic from an age of self-contained prestige shooters that almost certainly isn’t coming back; I’m not even sure Motive’s approach would work for remaking the series’ other games. But none of that diminishes the sheer ridiculous pleasure of ripping up a zombie with a sawblade and stomping it for loot.

Dead Space will release on January 27th for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC.

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