Before the Dead Space remake launched, I was slightly concerned about the changes EA Motive was making to the original. An open-ended Ishimura, a chattier Isaac, and an AI controlling Necromorph spawns all felt wrong to me. Fortunately, those changes feel natural, elevating the game rather than just being bolted on for the sake of making things feel more ‘modern’.
There is one change I’m sad about, though: the crying lady in chapter five is gone. It’s such a small thing, so much so that people probably missed her completely back in 2008, but her removal takes with it one of the subtlest pieces of tension-building in the entire game.
This article contains spoilers for both the and the Dead Space remake.
In both the remake and the original, chapter five takes Isaac back to the Medical Deck to try to synthesise a way to improve the declining air quality aboard the Ishimura. This time, you get to explore areas that were closed off before, having your first real encounter with one of the game’s major antagonists, Dr. Mercer. It’s also the chapter you’re introduced to Dead Space’s take on Resident Evil’s Mr. X or Tyrant, the Hunter – a regenerating Necromorph who will pursue you relentlessly.
Lethal Devotion marks a turning point for the game, where it shifts from the Necromorph outbreak a natural disaster that hit the Ishimura, to a wider conspiracy involving Dr. Mercer, Unitology, and a grand plan to “make us whole”. In all that chaos, just after the Emergency Room and before you enter the Chemical Lab, it’s easy to walk past a lengthy corridor with a lone, crying lady in it.
She’s clearly not alright – most of her skin has been flayed, she’s missing an eye, and she doesn’t respond to Isaac in any way. She just stands there, quietly whimpering over a corpse on an operating table. We’ve seen plenty of survivors up to this point, although most of them have died shortly after meeting Isaac, so her being there isn’t all that strange. On closer inspection, though, there’s something very wrong about this scene: the body on the table has the exact same character model as the crying woman, right down to the wounds.
You could brush this off as 2008 technology forcing the repeated use of a character model. That’s the boring answer, though. Instead, it is one of the earliest hints that Isaac is starting to lose his mind under the effects of The Marker. The crying woman never reacts to Isaac, and is gone by the time you have to rush back through to re-engage life support a few minutes later. It’s from this chapter where Isaac’s sanity is called into question more frequently, as both him and Kendra begin to hallucinate more frequently, and Isaac has full-on encounters with the long-dead Nicole.
Whether it was originally a technical oversight doesn’t really matter, it’s since become a foreshadowing of Isaac’s deteriorating mental state. This makes it such a shame that, in the remake, the crying lady has been completely stripped out. Though the layout of the Medical Deck has been mostly kept from the original, a new door has been placed on the far end of the Emergency Room. This door opens onto exactly where the crying woman used to be.
It's possible Motive simply forgot this woman even existed, or she was removed because she would’ve been right in Isaac’s face after going through this new door. Part of the chilling effect of this encounter is that she was so quiet, and so tucked away down an incredibly long, dark corridor. Had she stayed there, she would’ve become more of a jumpscare than a source of slow, creeping fear, which is worse than her not being there at all.
Regardless of why she was removed, her absence feels like a loss for the remake. She feels like the sole victim of Motive’s drive to make the Ishimura a more open-ended environment, tossed out for the sake of doing something new.
Her absence is also a good example of the remake’s less subtle storytelling – you have entire sidequests explaining things that were a single line of dialogue in the original, Isaac outright tells you why he’s doing some of the things he does, and character motivations are more pointedly thrown out in the open.
The original Dead Space was often confusing, and it was easy to miss major story beats to the point where some people felt it lacked the cohesive story of its sequels. The remake wants to make sure you understand what’s going on, and how all of Isaac’s back-and-forth across the Ishimura fits together.
Most of the time, this works well, but, in the pursuit of greater openness, both in the story and level design, the Dead Space remake left out one, crying lady and the gut-wrenching dread she invoked.