Coming soon to your nearest Toys “R” Us
Have you wanted to play Dead Space, but both the 2023 remake and the 2008 original are just not quite old enough for you? You’re in luck, because now you can play Dead Space reimagined as if it was running on the PS1 via a short Dead Space Demake demo developed by Fraser Brumley.
The tech demo is only 10-15 minutes long, and it seems unlikely it will ever get any more extensive than that. I gave it a try, and it… sure is Dead Space as depicted through chunky polygons and unfiltered textures.
“I’ve been working on this for a lot longer than I planned and the end product is probably shorter than you expect but I hope you have fun playing it,” Brumley said on the demake’s Itch page. “This project was mostly a way for me to learn Unreal and the PS1 aesthetic so look forward to what I’ll be putting together in the future.”
It’s kind of hard to say this is what the actual Dead Space would be like on the PlayStation 1. It still utilizes the over-the-shoulder camera angle that wasn’t really popular until 2005’s Resident Evil 4. It presents some dialogue through a heavily compressed cutscene, and I did find it amusing that Dead Space Demake keeps pestering you to “shoot off their limbs” multiple times, even after your first necromorph encounter.
Rather than an earnest attempt to fit a modern game on older hardware, Dead Space Demake feels more like a light-hearted homage. Sort of a fond love letter to both Dead Space and the PS1 hardware. In that sense, it succeeds. Just don’t expect anything in the way of fun technical magic.
You can download the Dead Space Demake right now from itch.io.
