8 Video Games Where Everyone Loses
3. Dead Space
Isaac Clarke can’t have nice things.
Arriving on the USG Ishimura to find
his girlfriend Nicole, Isaac is instead greeted with hordes of
horrifying monsters known as The Necromorphs; former humans driven
mad and mutated into inhuman abominations, turning the adrift mining
ship into a setting that makes The Event Horizon look like The Magic
Schoolbus.
As Isaac travels through the Ishimura, trying to find a way out and uncovering the truth of the situation with help from Nicole, he discovers The Red Marker; an alien artifact transmitting the signal that drove the crew insane before mutating them into Necromorphs. Realizing that The Marker has to be destroyed, Isaac returns it to its original burial site on the planet Aegis VII, defeating the colossal Hive Mind final boss and putting an end to the infection.
The victory is bittersweet, however, as Isaac discovers the Nicole who had been helping him throughout the journey was nothing but a hallucination, Nicole having committed suicide before the events of the game to escape the chaos onboard. As his ship departs and he sits back to reflect on the horrors he has just witnessed, ‘Nicole’ appears to him once more, but has returned as an aggressive apparition, lunging violently at Isaac as the screen cuts to black.