Forget the Dead Space Remake, this free PS1 demake is the true retelling of Isaac Clarke's story

Isaac Clarke looks at the words "Cut off their limbs" written in blood on the wall in the Dead Space Demake.
(Image credit: Fraser Brumley)

This year's Dead Space (opens in new tab) remake was pretty good. In fact, if you forced someone like PCG's Sean Martin to put a number on it and publish that number in an international videogames outlet, he'd say it was 84% good (opens in new tab). But that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. What if, for example, its searing, high-res textures were replaced with a swimmy clatter of pixels? What if its sleek UI were substituted for an array of brutally functional squares? What if it ran on a PS1, not a PS5?

These are the questions that only Fraser Brumley's Dead Space Demake is brave enough to ask, and what's more, it's asking them for free. Available on Itch.io (opens in new tab), the Dead Space Demake is more of a demo than a full-on game, and it captures about ten to fifteen minutes of Dead Space's intro in full fifth-generation, the-polygon-harvest-was-poor-this-year glory.

Isaac battles a monster in the Dead Space Demake.

(Image credit: Fraser Brumley)

"Dead Space Demake has everything you want and more," writes Brumley, "from necromorph limb dismemberment to affine texture mapping errors". "You've played Dead Space (2008) and you've played Dead Space (2023) it's time to soak in the horrid vibes of Dead Space (1998)".

I'd say 'it works surprisingly well,' except I think I write some variant of that almost every time I write about a demake project, so I guess I'll say it works unsurprisingly well instead. The shambling horrors of the USG Ishimura take on new life in their new low-fi environment, but you can still hobble them just as easily. Being both free and short, it's definitely worth your time to check out.

It sounds like it's not going to be the dev's final venture into PS1-era game design, either. "This project was mostly a way for me to learn Unreal and the PS1 aesthetic," Brumley explains on the game's Itch.io page, "so look forward to what I'll be putting together in the future". I have been curious what Resident Evil 4 would play like if it had been done in the style of RE1 to RE3, I suppose.

Joshua Wolens
News Writer

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.