8 Ways Video Games Blew Your Mind (Without You Realising)

There's nothing quite like that feeling of launching a brand new video game and bathing in all the new wonderous vistas and visuals that it offers.

Epic rolling landscapes now lie before you just waiting to be explored, and as the sun bounces off your armor and weapons you may even catch yourself fully committing to the idea that this fantasy world is most definitely real.

However, appearances can be deceiving my friend, because even though things look polished to a mirror sheen on the surface if you peel back even one frayed edge of most current video games you'll find a wheezing skeleton with bones held together by duct tape propping up the experience.

This is because game design, to the surprise of nobody, is a bloody hard thing to do, and even the biggest triple-A video games are usually cobbled together with code that on paper literally doesn't make sense.

This is because of the ever-evolving nature of video games, of how they change ideas and mechanics all the time and thus have to adapt old frameworks to fit new resources which naturally causes things to come into conflict. Therefore we're left with examples that will blow your mind for just how they've been stitched together, or of a dev team that put far more work and effort into just one area than many other teams do for their entire project.

It was with a collective sigh of relief that the recent Dead Space Remake arrived on the scene with both style and grace earlier this year, doing justice to the original source material whilst adding in significant quality-of-life improvements that show others in the same field how things should be done.

One of the tweaks made to the game is, on paper tiny, but has a huge impact on the player experience overall, and it concerns the necromorphs and the concept of "flesh tearing". As pointed out by MandaloreGaming in their review of the remake, they noted how in this version the player has to not only shoot through the bone of the Necromorph limbs in order to defeat them but now through the muscles and flesh that surround it.

This means that players will need more ammunition overall to rip through the muscle in order to expose the bone, and it's even possible to shred off tissue to slow the movements of these horrors, as now without sufficient strength, they will crawl and stumble around the area. This all creates a greater sense of tension and horror in the player as they will need multiple pinpoint shots to down a foe, but can also strip the Necromorphs of their speed in ways unseen in the original.

This also plays into the fact that there are countless Necromorph designs features, all of which come with limbs of varying tissue coverage, meaning that the same shot on the same enemy won't work to the same extent, meaning that players have to read and adapt to each enemy as if it were entirely unique. And that is utterly terrifying!