Welcome, friend, to the good year of 2025. Scavengers Reign has just been renewed for its third season, Greggs have starting doing their festive bake all year round, and the Dead Space remake sold gangbusters.
Wait, no, sorry. This is the bad timeline. Scavengers Reign was acquired by a company who actively balk at anything people might want to watch with their entire faces, and Dead Space apparently didn’t sell well enough for EA to greenlight more. It’s with a certain melancholy then, that I recommend the Steam Summer sale’s offering of Dead Space remake at 80% off (£10/€12/$12/perhaps a sillier price if you live somewhere Valve doesn’t consider important).
Deep discounts aren’t always a sure indicator of success in either direction, of course. The brilliant Resident Evil 4 remake is 50% off its already very generous usual price and apparently did very well. But I can’t help get abandoned bargain bin vibes from this one. It deserved so much better.
I’ve already written basically everything I want to say about why I love Dead Space so much elsewhere. As curt and nuance-muffling as such labels are, it feels almost dismissive to call the remake ‘perfect’ and be done with it, but that’s basically how I feel about it. It recreates so well while leaving well alone. Curb-stomps with the lightest touch. So much of the Ishimura’s mood is about how light and sound echo in its murky spaces – how it obscures and teases lurking horrors. In scaling up some environments and making others feel that much more tangible, the remake set itself the task of interpretation instead of just imitation; a task I reckon it pulled off with real soul. Maybe this faithfulness is what damned it. It does initially seem workmanlike next to something like the Resi 4 Remake, but that same quiet confidence struck me as containing an immense amount of creativity in holding on to the original’s spirit.
Anyway, do give it a go if you haven’t had a chance yet. Liam was fond of it too in his review. What’s sad and strange is this wasn’t even the only “great but actually devastating if you think about it for a moment” discount I noticed over the weekend. Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is 75% off, a game I bought but won’t be able to play without feeling wistful for developer Mimimi.
Let me know if you’d like to see more posts in the experimental ‘melancholy commerce’ genre. GOG is also having a Summer Sale at the moment.
