The Dead Space remake is being hit with complaints from idiots who think that changing around a few characters is a sign of it becoming "too woke".The Dead Space remake is finally upon us, letting everyone experience a reimagined version of Isaac Clarke's first traumatic encounter with the Necromorphs. Although most of Dead Space has been kept the same as it originally was, EA Motive took the chance to change some things around, such as including more discoverable lore that hints at some late-game story beats, adding gameplay elements like the gross new peeling system, and making Isaac a little bit more chatty to better fit in with his characterisation in the sequels.Beyond that, Motive has also tweaked some of the characters, from changing Isaac Clarke's face to more closely match his voice actor, to adding more detail to side characters like Kendra Daniels, who is revealed to have a girlfriend in the game's intro. This wasn't in the original game and is an addition from Motive, which of course means that the game has gone "woke".
At least, that's according to several posts that have popped up on social media following the Dead Space remake's release. Heading over to the Steam forums for the game shows a ton of different threads accusing it of being too "political". Get ready for some real brain worm takes here.
One discussion thread points out some of the ways that the remake has been changed to push this apparent woke agenda, including Johnston being replaced by a black woman who survives the attack, Kendra and Nicole both looking closer to their actual age, and advertisements around the Ishimura including black and Asian people. Another issue that's brought up in a similar thread is that the bathrooms on the Ishimura are genderless, which was apparently enough to make someone refuse to buy the game outright.
The misplaced anger even spreads over to the Steam reviews. One negative review mentions that the characters are "wildly different", that "history is rewritten from 2008", and that there are a lot of "subtle changes that signal that game's politics". Another review mentions that, although the graphics and gameplay are "amazing", the tweaks to the narrative were enough for them to immediately stop playing, because they hate that "modern-day politics have been inserted where it is not needed".
One example of someone being strangely outraged by the changes was pointed out by games analyst Chris Ray Gun, who shared a clip from an unnamed streamer. In the clip, the streamer is asked how he's finding the game so far, to which he says that Motive "added a lot of gay woke shit that normies are going to ignore because it's not shoved in your face constantly". He then goes on to say that it's "not subtle either", which doesn't even make sense.
The reaction to the Dead Space remake changing a few things around to make the world more inclusive and comparable to our own probably won't come as much of a surprise considering the same "woke" accusations being thrown around at the Mario Bros. Movie for including Rainbow Road, but it's still pretty sad that something as simple as bathroom signs and wrinkles can get people so worked up.