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 have that number published in an international video game magazine, he would say it was 84% good (opens in new tab). But that doesn't mean it can't be better. What if, for example, those searing, high-resolution textures were replaced by the swimming, clattering sound of pixels? What if the sleek UI had been replaced by a brutally functional array of squiggles? What if it ran on PS1 instead of PS5? [These are questions that only Fraser Brumley's "Dead Space Demake" can bravely ask, and "Dead Space Demake," available on Itch.io (opens in a new tab), is more of a demo than a full-length game. It contains about 10-15 minutes of the intro to "Space" in all its 5th generation, 5th year, polygon-harvested, poor-quality glory.

"'Dead Space Demake' has everything you want and more, from necromorph limb amputations to affine texture mapping errors," writes Brumley. play "Dead Space" (2008), and "Dead Space Dead Space" (2023), it's time to immerse yourself in the horrific atmosphere of "Dead Space" (1998).

I'd like to say "surprisingly well done," but I feel like I write that almost every time I write about a demake project, so I'll say "surprisingly not well done" instead: the shambling horror of USG Ishimura is a new new life in a lo-fi environment, but it can still be just as easily stalled. Free and short, it is definitely worth your time to check out.

For the developers, it doesn't look like it will be their last attempt at PS1-era game design. As Brumley explains on the game's Itch.io page, "This project was primarily about Unreal and the PS1 aesthetic." I've always wondered what Resident Evil 4 would look like if it were made in the style of RE1 through RE3.