In Dead Space: Downfall, an animated collaboration between the games’ publisher, Electronic Arts, and Team Roman, they’re questions without answers.ĭownfall provides a helpful counter-argument for this lacklustre explication – it’s a prequel to the original Dead Space, it’s closing moments set within minutes of the game’s opening, and it’s clearly intended to function as a portion of the overarching storyline. In the games, they’re functional hooks on which to hang the dismembering and impalement, and that’s all they need to be. The Dead Space games also concern telepathic alien artefacts and the bizarre cult that worships them, which, again, is hardly fertile creative territory. The Dead Space games are action-oriented sci-fi horror adventures that, like a lot of video games, depict situations that exist beyond the parameters of human experience – in this case, the slicing and dicing of space monsters with various industrial tools. When you adapt a video game story, when you make it passive, you lose what makes video games wonderful. Very few stories can survive that kind of trauma, but very few gamers care – they’re there for the interruptions. The narrative needs to be interrupted every few minutes for as long as it lasts. Storytelling in games has to account for a unique form of audience disruption.

The action-oriented video game, in particular, has inherent dramatic limitations, most of them related to the player’s (justified) expectation of gameplay. One of them is that most game stories are profoundly silly. Take a peek at the litany of big-budget, big-screen adaptations, from Hitman to Need for Speed to Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed. Browse briefly through the catalogue of German madman Uwe Boll.

As a general rule, video games make terrible movies.

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