watching my grandma’s ashes pass under the slats of the pier, the wind blowing towards me. later i wonder if any of it got on me and my allergies are a reaction to this, or it’s just hayfever. particles of her would have. like in life, dead cells and dust and sweat and spit shared in various minor ways. no different except it’s the elements of the final growth.
the last metabolism that she inhabited.
i get home from the funeral and try to play the last chapter of Dead Space Remake (2023). i fall asleep and wake up the console having timed itself out.
when i do play it the next day i feel curiously mute, as i have for most of its personal story for Isaac Clarke, the engineer in search of Nicole Brennan, his wife, a scientist and medic on a doomed planet mining ship, not interested really in the known outcome, that this will not turn out too good. maybe it’s the aaa writing that gives no sense of a relationship between the two, it’s flat and reviving an era of flat, MILITARY relationship writing in taking 2008 and giving it at least an update to be less comic book dead wife. The characters get fleshed out in what they did to get here, but their relationships, the things people do to and with people, don’t appear in any significant respect in the game.
the chasteness of a story like Dead Space in its remake is really weird. somehow everything is grotesque, gruesome, awful and yet flat, no fucking, no screaming, no dread, no wetness. or maybe, it’s all there but muted, volume turned down so no-one might hear the still living characters feeling anything too intense.
its comic book movie. the affect is in fighting things that are already made, thwacking their flesh against the wall or cutting it with saw blades, separating their limbs or having yours separated by them.
outside of that you’re a marble in a maze, bouncing back and forth solving problems with an increasingly unlikely escape and dwindling team on your hands. you read text logs and listen to audio logs, finding out what happened if you care. the feeling i have when i see another wall of text in a tiny font is… ugh.
but maybe that dissociation is accurate.
the entire ship is dead. you have one hope of seeing your lover again. how are you doing? don’t ask me how i’m doing. don’t ask me to feel. i’m at work here.
Isaac for instance knows Nicole is gone, she sent him a video of her death, and the version of her that appears is a manipulation by a great psychic power. the following of it is more a depressed hypnosis or dissociation, at least in part.
on the pier on Saturday i had to wait for everyone else to leave so i could cry. i wanted to but no-one else was. in my family i am uniquely separate in some ways. in how i am and my relationships. so i wait for everyone else to walk off a while and then i can cry and say goodbye.
i think, there is a lot of charity in what i’m saying there though. for instance, the book Solaris, so influential in being about manifestations of the dead on a space station, is one of the best pieces of emotional, chilling, upsetting literature ever written.
i think that, the stories of death on space stations are most boring when they are about being very serious BRAVE SOLDIERS and then collecting a text log about someone’s very serious conversation or very tediously described scientific discovery. it’s dull and it’s boring. to get sooo into making the lore and present it like a selection of cheese and crackers you can pick at during the atrocity. it’s silly. at least Resident Evil as a series gets how silly that mode is, with almost every text log across 25 or more years of games being some kind of mischievous tragedy broken up into short pages.
there’s a lot to be said about how something like Resident Evil 7 presents an identical type of story about a man seeking his missing scientist wife and getting trapped in an experiment gone wrong and it being infinitely more interesting and fun.
the text and audio logs in deadspace2023 are so long, to elaborate on what is not really a very complex plot. everyone’s an alien now because of some fucker’s fucked up religious cult experiments and the big artefact of evil and you gotta kill the different types of monster and escape.
like, that’s a fun premise, i think maybe that’s almost it… it’s meant to be like… fun. if you take the horniness, the jokes, the baseness, the direction, the shock, the editing, the intentionality of making some kind of biological horror manifest… if you lose the terror of the body and take the ‘genre’ out of the genre writing… then your interface structure, the delivery of narrative/information via the many modes in one game, might as well not be there, because you’re serving porridge. each element a beam that adds little support to the structure because of the angle it’s propped at.
thankfully the game of the game, its moving, fighting, looking, puzzling out and progressing through a dead space ship with fucked up creatures is decent… even more so when I encounter bugs, glitches that tear through the simulation, launching me out into a dead space beyond intent…
…that’s all Something. the rest of it… idk, i felt similar at the funeral, an inability to interact with what felt artificial in the ritual, only able to get through to the point of it at certain points where people were being real or i was able to be so… in hugs and crying and the words of my grandma read aloud…
title of this is a reference to jokes on stream by classic streamer Scorpy, referring to reaction voice-over in friday 13th: the game.
GlitchOut 