Video Game / Dead Space 2

The Marker changes all.

"Isaac, we're all gonna burn for what we did to you..."

Dead Space 2 is the sequel to the well-received Dead Space and the second game in the Dead Space series. The game continues the story of Isaac Clarke, the only surviving member of the team sent to the planet-cracker USG Ishimura. In search of his girlfriend Nicole, Isaac quickly discovered that there was more to the outbreak than meets the eye, and was thrust into a life-or-death struggle against the undead creatures known as the Necromorphs.

Three years later, Isaac wakes on a hospital in the labyrinthine space station called Titan Station, or The Sprawl. Somehow, Isaac is still alive, but his mental state has deteriorated, and now hallucinates visions of his girlfriend. The horror aboard the Ishimura may have been contained, but the Necromorph outbreak is already beginning all over again, and Isaac is the only one who can stop it.

While still a horror-themed third-person shooter, Dead Space 2 streamlines many aspects and makes things more accessible, including making some weapons more viable, adding more action setpieces, and speeding up abilities like stomping and Kinesis. Isaac can now also weaponize Kinesis directly by impaling enemies with various pointy and sharp things scattered around, or throwing explosive objects to take out entire crowds. On top of this, Isaac is Suddenly Voiced, gaining a lot more personality and character, and thus, more investment in the story instead of his original Heroic Mime portrayal.

Dead Space 2 was released on January 2011 for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. The first trailer can be found here. Exclusively for the PS3, Dead Space: Extraction, originally a Nintendo Wii release, was also bundled with the collector's edition of Dead Space 2. In March 2011, a DLC was released called Dead Space 2: Severed. It follows Gabe Weller and Lexine Murdoch, two returning characters from Dead Space: Extraction as they try to get off the Sprawl. It is only available for the console versions of the game.

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Tropes:

Dead Space 2 Tropes

• Abandoned Area: Pretty much everywhere you visit is either already abandoned or will be in very short order...
• Abandoned Hospital Awakening: The game begins with Isaac waking up in a hospital on the Sprawl. It's not abandoned at the time, but by the time you gain control, it's smack in the middle of the Necromorph infestation and thus devoid of human survivors.
• Actionized Sequel: While the original isn't lacking in action, the sequel ramps up the scale of the set-pieces and speed of the pacing a lot.
• Action Survivor: Isaac seems to be this to some degree. He's not a trained soldier, just an engineer. He still is determined to survive, and manages to use modified tools and his environment to overcome impossible odds, including things like overcoming a small army of security guards waiting for him.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Present and prevalent as ever, with Isaac's survival dependent on the Sprawl's plentiful automated stores which happily cough up lethal weaponry and heavy armour in exchange for stolen credits, despite the unfolding crisis situation engulfing the station. You would expect the stores to at least let you run up a debt, but no.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: ANTI, the A.I. in charge of the solar array. While her attempts to impede Isaac are an aversion, since he's actively circumventing normal security procedures, she was very much malfunctioning before the necromorph outbreak began. Just ask poor Howard Philips.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Isaac can climb into some Jefferies Tubes at certain points. He cannot use his weapon in them. ...but that's okay, nothing will attack you in them. However on the first playthrough this adds to the scariness of the game - being helpless if you are attacked, though you won't be.
• All There in the Manual: Although he is key to the plot, Nolan Stross' background is very lacking in the game. It's only by going through the expanded universe (namely watching Dead Space: Aftermath) that you find out details about his life, like who he's chasing and talking about during his hallucinations.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Happens twice in quick succession during the sequence where Daina reveals herself to be a Unitologist; just before her goons can haul Isaac off to a shuttle, an EarthGov gunship appears and effortlessly takes down both her and her subordinates, forcing Isaac to flee into a nearby emergency shaft to escape.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Multiplayer unlocks for the Human Security team include a lot of variations on repainting the exact same Security Suit.
  • Single-player unlocks are scattered around levels, so one will have to play through the game at least twice to get a full set. All suits are reskins of four types of RIGs (Engineering, Security, Vintage and Advanced) and have a wide range of bonuses.
  • Isaac also gets an extra suit for single-player: the Riot Security Suit — if you link the iPhone tie-in game to your EA account.
• An Economy Is You: The automated stores which dot Titan Station sell the game's weapons, ammunition, assorted armor, and medkits. Likewise, emergency supplies consist of ammo, medkits (okay, this might be a logical emergency supply) and cash cards.
  • The store at least is a justified example. When you first access it, the store welcomes Isaac by name and job title — the items offered are customized to his exact preferences, and his security clearance as a CEC engineer permits him to purchase weapons and armor. Also, half the weapons are engineering tools anyway, simply applied in a way that is not how the manufacturer intended.
• Annoying Arrows
  • If a telekinetically-thrown spear-object doesn't do enough damage to kill a necromorph, it will get up and continue trying to eat Isaac. Justified in that Necromorphs are alien zombie-things that can survive limbs being removed; an arrow isn't going to stop them if it doesn't hit the right spot.
  • In the encounter with Tiedemann. Isaac pulls out two Javelins, one of which must've deflated his lungs. He can even heal after the final battle, meaning he literally shrugged it off, via the same first-aid magic that can heal him from within an inch of death after a Necromorph mauls him.
• Anti-Frustration Features: If you don't move after getting a text log, the game will be gracious and give you plenty of time to read it. If you DO move, you may activate a Necromorph event that was down the hall a little bit.
• Anyone Can Die: Of the characters Isaac meets in this game, exactly one survives to the end.
• Apartment Complex of Horrors: The Cassini Towers apartment complex was one of the residential areas on Titan Station. It was here that untold numbers of Unitologists committed suicide upon learning of the Necromorph outbreak on the Sprawl, many of them in front of the nearby Church of Unitology or inside the apartment building itself.
• Apocalyptic Log: Back in grand tradition.
• Arc Words: "Step 1: Crawl into the dark machine. Step 2: The screws go tight, all around. Step 3: Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a needle in my eye. Step 4: She'll be waiting."
• Armor Is Useless: Isaac seems to have serious issues with his Collapsible Helmet coming off at exactly the worst times.
  • Justified in the scene where the hallucination of Nicole tries to kill you since it is pretty much a fight between Isaac and his schizophrenic mind which means that Isaac most likely deactivated the helmet himself without consciously knowing it.
  • Also at least partly justified in the fight against Stross as he first stabs into the connection between your suit and your helmet apparently causing a malfunction and thus deactivates the helmet.
• Artifact of Doom: The Marker, as in the first game, emits a dangerous signal that drives people violently insane while also compelling people to build it on a larger scale.
• Artificial Brilliance: The Stalkers are programmed very well- they're capable of playing long hide-and-seek games and flanking effectively. Stalkers will also attempt to run away if you successfully use stasis on them while they are behind a box. They will attempt to run the opposite way so that they are still in cover, making it hard to determine if you used stasis on them. By that point, though, all you need to do is poke your head around the box; but if you didn't stasis them, they will rush the corner and knock you down before you can get a single shot off. I hope you didn't attempt to run around that corner.
• Artificial Stupidity: On the other hand, you can keep throwing down trap mines in the places they need to run by to get into new cover. They'll continue running into every mine you place. As a result, if a mine goes boom, you can just replace it and the next stalker will kill itself on it in the exact same manner.
• Artificial Gravity: Isaac will have to solve several puzzles that can only be done through zero-gravity gameplay.
• The Assimilator: Possibly the true goal of the Markers, if evil Hallucination Nicole's words are to be taken this way, where her Boss Banter screams "YOU WILL ALL BE ONE! MAKE US WHOLE!" One log you find suggests that the compulsion to build more Markers, even for justified reasons such as technological study, is all some sort of long-term alien mental influence. This is all confirmed in Dead Space 3.
• Ate His Gun: More like "Ate His Spear", but similar principle. Fail to banish the image of Nicole in the ending sequence and Isaac loses it.
• Author Appeal: This is the third Visceral game in a row to feature Undead Children. The first was the original Dead Space and the second was Dante's Inferno.
• Back for the Dead: You may remember Franco from Dead Space Ignition (which was released in the fall of 2010). He dies less than a minute in.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: At no point in the game does Isaac ever fight human soldiers, even though he's ostensibly being hunted down by them. At any point in which human soldiers start gunning for him, Necromorphs will conveniently show up to kill them. This is just as well, as these few encounters seem to show that Isaac isn't really equipped to be fighting trained soldiers armed with military weaponry as opposed to mindless monsters.
• Bag of Spilling: Three years after escaping the Ishimura, Isaac wakes up on the mental ward of the medical bay of the colony on Titan (one of Saturn's moons), and has to gather and upgrade new equipment to to stop this new Necromorph infestation.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Isaac keeps seeing a very hostile hallucination of Nicole that repeatedly gives him "The Reason You Suck" Speech, so this was inevitable. Subverted, when he seems to come to a milestone about accepting Nicole's death and she immediately becomes more helpful and normal-looking. Then double-subverted when she goes evil again at the end and he really does have to fight her! Poor Isaac can't catch a break.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Even at the end of the game, when Isaac is at one tiny fragment of Hit Points and has canonically been shot through the shoulder and hand, there's no blood or sign of injury to be seen.
• BFG: Practically all of Isaac's ordinance feels this way, but the Force Gun and Contact Beam stand out.
• Bilingual Bonus: For anyone who remembers how to decipher the Unitologist Runes from the cheat sheets in the first game, since well over half of the graffiti is scrawled in it.
• Black Dude Dies First: Franco (from Ignition) dies about twelve seconds into a new game.
• Blood Is the New Black: One of the DLC suits is the Bloody Vintage Suit, which boosts damage to the Javelin Gun, Force Gun and Flamethrower, plus it comes with Bloody versions of those weapons.
• Bloodier and Gorier: It's almost hilarious how tame the first game is compared to this one in terms of violence.
• Bloodstained Glass Windows: An early segment of the game involves Isaac fighting through a Unitologist cathedral.
• Blown Across the Room: A good Javelin or Kinesis-impalement will do this to a Necromorph, usually accompanied by them being stuck to the wall.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Marker Intelligence seems to function in this manner, as it attempts to enact its Assimilation Plot with Isaac's contribution a necessity, yet incessantly sends Necromorphs after him with lethal intent.
  • The Marker doesn't need Isaac alive...
  • A example that spans both games is the fact that the Marker was seemingly benevolent in the first Dead Space, manipulating Isaac into helping it stop the Necromorph infestation, while in Dead Space 2 the Marker Intelligence seems to be the driving force behind the Necromorphs. Although there are alternate explanations.
• Blunt "No": A Game Over sequence sees Isaac in a one-hand chokehold by a specter of his dead girlfriend Nicole from the first game, who's been haunting him the entire game. Isaac whispers that she can't possibly be real, to which specter-Nicole says "WRONG," before snapping his neck.
• Body Horror: Franco is killed by a Necromorph Infector moments after Isaac wakes up. Not only does this showcase how fast the Necromorph virus infects dead tissue, but it demonstrates how horrific the transformation of a corpse to a Necromorph is in excruciating close-up, as his face splits to reveal the howling musculature beneath. Isaac promptly headbutts it and escapes. The way he was transformed, you'd think he didn't quite completely die before the transformation began. It's really Fridge Horror if you think about it too much (imagine your face splitting like that).
  • Tiedemann. When he finally confronts Isaac, half of his body, including his head, has been burned past the musculature. Think Two-Face in The Dark Knight and you got it.
  • If Isaac is cut in half by a automated pressure lock door, a small part of his spine will twitch in a spastic manner. It's disgusting beyond all reasonable measures. Many of the other deaths count as well.
  • The two guards that confront you at the beginning in the psych ward are dragged up into the vents by an unseen necromorph. A few seconds later one of their torsos is dropped back down, cracked open like a lobster tail and completely emptied of all internal organs (and, in the case of the face, most of the skull and the entire jawbone).
  • Normally all Necromorphs qualify for this due to their nature, but the Slashers of this installment takes the cake. There are several variations on them (as opposed to the single model used for all other necromorphs) that shows all the creative ways the virus can screw up your corpse; giant tumors growing out of your back, your face exploding into a mass of moving tentacles, your jawbone broken to form a new lopsided jaw, twisting your torso around 180 degrees before turning you into a slasher, or completely skeletonizing your upper half till it's not even recognizable as anything human anymore. The other necromorphs can be considered almost merciful in this respect, as at least their mutations make it somewhat harder to discern how they twisted the body.
• Boring, but Practical: The Seeker Rifle. Zoomed in, it has the same damage as the Contact Beam without the charge up delay, and two shots will kill anything short of a Brute, but it's a one shot rifle in a game full of magnetically levitated chainsaws, industrial cutting tools, and flamethrowers.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: How do you cheat an ID scanner? Odds are there's a nearby mutilated corpse with sufficient clearance...
• Boss Room: It starts getting painfully obvious by the time you reach the tripod nest.
  • The areas where you encounter Stalkers also invariably give themselves away with their familiar array of peek-a-boo obstacles (which essentially function as waist-high walls for the enemy).
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: At one point a mentally deteriorating Stross begins shouting at Isacc to stop staring at him, after which he quickly glances at the camera shouting "Stop staring, stop it!".
• Break Out the Museum Piece: Isaac can equip a "Vintage Suit". Like its name says, the suit is very antiquated. The suit design is possibly hundreds of years old, as it appears less advanced and bulkier than even the S.C.A.F. suits in Dead Space 3 (and the S.C.A.F. suits are around 200 years old!). Bonus points due to acquiring the "elite" version of this suit by breaking the suit's display case in the front window of a museum, literally breaking out the museum piece!
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: There are several DLC packs with suits and weapons that can give you a leg up on the early parts of the game. Not only are they free (so your cash can be spent upgrading them), but the suits are superior to anything you can buy in the short term (a decent replacement doesn't come around for five chapters).
  • While the armor definitely provides a leg-up in the early game, the weapons aren't so useful. They have small bonuses to effectiveness (very small, some of which may NEVER actually come into play) and since the weapons aren't inherently better than one another, getting them early is mostly just a luxury allowing you to use your favorite weapons earlier. Ultimately, you're only saving the initial cost, which is less than the cost of a single upgrade. Likewise, the Rivet Gun can only be obtained through DLC or Pre-Order, and is likely the worst weapon in the game.
  • In the case of the PC version, this is subverted. There are no DLC packs available (suits and weapons/tools). However, PC gamers discovered that they are coded into the game and managed to find a save-game exploit to enable them. Apparently, EA updated the PC version of the game to include all of that extra content, free of charge. This can be jarring to newcomers as they can suddenly see all the extra armor and weapons available to them at no cost in-game. In other words: you can unlock almost all the weapons and get the second suit upgrade stats (10% armor and 15 item slots) as soon as you find the first shop and obtain them, free of charge!
• Bullet Time: A shootable version of it with the stasis module. Many enemies move much quicker now, especially Leapers, plus it regenerates at a slow pace (about one shot per minute), giving you all the more reason to use it. This is what the developers were aiming for, since most players only used Stasis for puzzles and rarely for enemies in the first game. That said, they severely scaled back the charges (start with two, four at most) compared to the first game.
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: Well, more like "By The Lights Of Their LED-lit Engineering Suit". If the Environment is pitch black, Isaac's glowing ports on his suit will always be visible, most likely to keep his surroundings lit when he's in dark maintenance shafts.
  • Isaac's eyes are just barely visible on the cover art (which is the page image).
• Call-Back: Isaac's initial running sequence ends with him being attacked by a Necromorph that gets itself sliced in half by a pressure door, just like the first one that pursued him in the original game, until the elevator doors destroyed it. Thank goodness No OSHA Compliance works both ways in this game!
  • An entire chapter is based on the Ishimura, where you must ride the tram to fix the main centrifuge... again. Isaac even lampshades this and visits the Medical Deck where two levels of Dead Space took place.
  • When Isaac flies away in the ship with Ellie at the end, it begins the same as the ending of Dead Space 1. Slumping up against the chair, exhausted, and typing in a few commands before some overdue rest. Then the ominous music starts up, and Isaac is obviously freaking out, knowing what happened last time, looks to his right to see...normal, helpful, human Ellie.
    Ellie: (looking confused) What...?
• Cat Scare: Dead Space 2 takes this trope and runs with it. Lights flickering, balloons popping, blaring commercials appearing on TV screens, loud machinery suddenly activating as you pass by, the list goes on and on...
  • One embarrassing variation has Isaac spooked by a cartoon sun falling from the ceiling.
  • Another one is an alarm clock that goes off when Isaac leaves an apartment. There are several similar-looking clocks, but this is the only one that goes off in the whole game, and it goes off at a time when no enemies have appeared for a while.
• The Cavalry: Ellie during the ending.
• Censored Child Death: While you never see it happen, it's averted in that it's made completely unambiguous that certain Necromorph types are infested Infants, Children, and even Fetuses.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: Averted in the same fashion as the first game; literally, changing clothes is a free action, everything else is not. The only other time you can't be attacked is at save stations.
• Checkpoint Starvation: Hardcore Mode. It only allows you to save three times in the whole game, and there are no checkpoints.
• Church of Happyology: Visiting a Unitologist community is a large part of the game; they put on a nice front, but you can find a document near their indoctrination center where a machine has analysed exactly how psychologically vulnerable to manipulation a potential convert is.
• Closed Circle: Isaac is confined to the Sprawl in the same way as when he was trapped on the Ishimura.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Isaac's Suddenly Voiced in Dead Space 2, and though most of his melee-attack grunts are the same, if you keep mashing the "Stomp" button, his grunts give way to a small flood of obscenities at whatever he's stomping. Doing so is incredibly cathartic after one of the little buggers gets the jump on you.
  • Tiedemann, on the other hand, seems oddly restrained even with things going wrong and people dying around him. The worst thing he calls Isaac is an idiot.
• Collapsible Helmet: Isaac Clarke has various versions of his Resource Integration Gear, all of which have a helmet that can fold away and be stored in his suit. Often however, the helmet appears to unfold at points where it would not necessarily be a good idea. For example, when Stross attacks Isaac.
  • This is at least partly justified, since Stross apparently causes a malfunction in Isaac's suit with his first stab.
• Collision Damage: Whatever you do, do not let Nicole touch Isaac during the Final Boss fight, unless you're keen on witnessing yet another example of Have a Nice Death.
• Competitive Multiplayer: Dead Space 2 features a new multiplayer mode, a first for the series; it takes the form of team-based gameplay, with one side playing as the human engineers, and the other side playing as different types of Necromorphs: The Pack, The Lurker, The Puker and The Spitter. The humans will be tasked with completing a specific goal, and will be armed with the same kinds of weapons and tools Isaac uses, while the Necromorphs have to stop the humans from completing that goal, and will receive help from several Necromorph NPCs spawned to assist them. It plays much like Singularity with even more gratuitous Body Horror.
• Continuity Nod: When you're forced to go aboard the Ishimura, Ellie asks you, "Is it safe?" This was a very common piece of graffiti in Dead Space, often in places that might be safe for now, but just reading that message was Paranoia Fuel, given that it was ALWAYS written in blood.
  • Failing a particular action sequence results in Isaac being killed. The camera pans in for a close-up on his severed arm floating in space, looking just like the cover box art of Dead Space.
  • Isaac receives a video of Stross trying to kill Ellie with a screwdriver in the eye. The captain of the Ishimura died from being impaled through the eye with a sedative syringe. This time around, though, Ellie survives and returns the favor to Stross, and winds up having to wear an eye patch for the rest of the game.
  • Isaac can find two audio logs from Vandal (the protagonist from the Dead Space iOS game), as well as her corpse in Chapter 11.
  • In the ending, as their gunship flies away, Isaac starts to relax and look at the seat beside him, only to see Ellie, who gives him a confused "What?". This references the first game's ending with Necro-Nicole.
  • Chapter 10 takes place on the Ishimura and you must visit the places where the first six levels of Dead Space occurred. Humorously, you have to fix the centrifuge again, which was notoriously frustrating in the first game because as soon as it was fixed, you had to outrun it, something Isaac even lampshades. Additionally, on that same level, Ellie says that the necromorphs are coming in through a hole in the medical deck. This is probably the same place in Dead Space where Isaac had to travel through to get to "Zero G Therapy".
  • If you pay attention on the Ishimura, the room where he hallucinates Nicole's video is the Hunter room, and you come from where Mercer was standing when his baby popped out.
  • The Ishimura escape pod located in the Captain's Quarters that Isaac uses in Dead Space 2 is the same one that was jettisoned in the first game with a Necromorph inside, presumably replaced.
  • At least one poster on The Sprawl advertises zero-G basketball, a sport which Isaac got to try his hand at in the original game.
  • Isabel Cho was mentioned in an audio log in Chapter 10, where she was the Scapegoat for the incident at the O’Bannon and the Ishimura.
  • And, of course, there's always Peng.
• Cover Drop: There is one for both Dead Space 2 and Dead Space:
  • If the player is killed by The Tormentor, Isaac's arm will float in space, resembling the cover of the first game.
  • After buying the Advanced Suit, there will be a close-up of Isaac's helmet, as on the cover of Dead Space 2.
• The Corruption: The official name of the organic goo that covers walls and floors during a Necromorph outbreak.
• Critical Existence Failure: As with the first game, Isaac will limp and breathe raggedly when he is severely injured. However, any final blow that does not provoke one of The Many Deaths of You, no matter how minor, can cause his limbs to fly off amusingly, despite his full body armour. It doesn't evoke terrifying mutilation so much as Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: You could start a gallery based just on this one game. They have, and it's here.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: You HAVE to turn off the power to the government sector which kills 200-250+ people. Likewise, you HAVE to kill Stross. He's an Asshole Victim to some degree (okay, maybe a big degree... YMMV), but he's still a good guy who is driven insane by guilt and Marker influence. The Marker proceeds to gloat about it causing Isaac to hit a very angry Heroic BSoD.
• Cut and Paste Environments: A variation. Titan Station was built Levittown-style; you travel through two or three apartment blocks and mall strips that look very similar in general layout, but have different damage, graffiti, bodies and other clutter in the area to differentiate them. For the most part, in Dead Space 2, there is no backtracking. Two of the mall strips ARE the same. They are the ones before the Unitology Church. You go through them after a lot more damage has occurred so it's hard to tell, but you can tell the Unitology entrance is the same. The best way to tell is that the statue of the Space Cadet is the same both times if you travel through there. If you didn't destroy it the first time through, it will be intact. If you did destroy it, it WON'T be intact.
• Cutscene Boss: Tiedemann. It consists of two action button mashings to pull two-foot javelin spikes out of your body and aiming the Javelin Gun you just stole at his head and pulling the trigger.^note  And if you miss, he dies anyway, since you punctured his throat. There's also The Tormentor, whose battle is essentially a series of aiming mini-games.
• Cutscene Incompetence: When Isaac finally meets Daina face-to-face, he gets seized by two unarmed Unitologist staff. Hard to believe that he's unable to resist after dismembering and beheading monsters that took over the station a couple of hours ago.
  • This gets contested frequently, as Isaac has never demonstrated any kind of willingness to harm humans before (or after; you are unable to attack the security forces when they show up) that point. Isaac has also demonstrated sufficient intelligence to use it as a "Get my questions answered, then resist" situation.
    • You can't even shoot the security forces before the scripted event where the lights come on and they start shooting at you. If you aim where they are and try to fire, Isaac will lower his weapon.
  • Isaac also has a strange compulsion to remove his helmet any time someone's trying to stab him in the face, though this may just be a flaw in the design of his armour.
    • Supposedly, this is used to reflect upon his subconscious suicidal behavior. It makes sense; most other men would either kill themselves, go insane, or both after seeing the things Isaac has. Of course, he is kind of insane.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Often averted: many of the large scale events such as when Isaac is rocketing towards the Sprawl at terminal velocity gives the player much control over your direction or your gun.
  • Played straight in one sequence where Isaac is beaten up in ways that would be easily be fatal or highly damaging in standard gameplay, yet he comes out with no health damage at all. However, the only fight after this event is in Isaacs head, and therefore physical damage might not apply. That doesn't excuse him not bleeding all over everything though.
  • Played straight after the above-mentioned High-Speed Missile Dodge when the player has control. The following cutscene has Isaac breaking through a glass roof, through various bits of duct work, and even with the use of his rocket-boots lands with enough force to crack metal flooring. All this without a single scrape, cut or broken bone that he should have suffered from all this at the speeds he was falling.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Oddly enough, the fact that Isaac isn't nearly as sluggish and slow as he was in the first game (and that the mouse movement is much more precise) will throw off players who now have much more fluid controls to work with. On Consoles, the controls have changed from reload and activating things both being the same button to separating the two and they've made way for a new quick stasis pack button.
• Dangerous Windows: For tolerably obvious reasons, what with the Sprawl being a space station and all, although they're most often "temporary" glass for areas under construction or repair; the "permanent" glass is marked with a strong-man symbol and is bulletproof. The real question is why the emergency shutters don't always close automatically, but that can be filed under Rule of Drama.
• Death Course: Done spectacularly when Tiedemann turns on the CEC factory's processing plant with you in it, in zero-gravity, no less.
• Destination Defenestration: There's an achievement for shooting a necromorph with a javelin gun straight through a breakable window into space!
• Developer's Foresight: If at any time you use the Objective Marker system when you have no coordinates to your next objective ^note (such as when you don't have access to a Voice with an Internet Connection), Isaac mutters "No objective? What the hell...?"
  • In the climax, you shoot Tiedemann in the neck with the Javelin Gun during a quicktime event. You then have the option of: firing again and blowing his head apart, using the secondary fire to electrocute him via the javelin in his neck or do nothing and let him bleed to death on account of the punctured jugular.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Unitology, particularly as you're visiting their recruitment center, looks like the absolute distillation of absolutely every bad thing that has ever been so much as rumored about Happyology.
• Door to Before: Used liberally in the Unitology church, which is one of the few places you can backtrack.
• Drill Tank: For all your Fast Tunnelling needs.
• Dungeon Bypass: Instead of looking for the door to the government sector, Ellie ploughs straight through its foundations.
• Dying Vocal Change: Exhibited by ANTI. Already malfunctioning, taking a plasma cutter to her internal mechanisms causes her to lapse into Max Headroom-style stuttering before trailing off in slow motion.
• Dynamic Loading: You'll only see a loading screen when starting the game or restarting from death. Most elevator rides are the game's way of disguising loading times, but even those are livened up with a radio call, usually. This also results in cutscenes being unskippable, since they're all "in-engine" and live.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After all the horrible things Isaac had to go through over the past few three years and the events of this game, he finally manages to defeat the Eldritch Abomination masquerading as his dead girlfriend. He simply sits down and waits to die when Ellie comes in on an awesome Big Damn Heroes moment. Is it over? Not by a long shot: Isaac's likely a fugitive, and while there are still other Markers, or whatever that thing that wants to be "reborn" is, Isaac finally seems to have a semblance of peace and has come to terms with Nicole's death. Out of ALL current Dead Space multimedia, this game probably grants the happiest ending to be seen in the story so far.
• Easter Egg: A few, mostly in the form of stuff you can read on the walls. For example, you may notice that the X-rays of people's heads have a "V" watermark on them, making it the Visceral Games' logo. You may also notice that the elementary school is putting on a play about Kafka's Metamorphosis. (The hell?!)
  • The hair salon in the mall area features pictures of various hairstyle models out front, one of whom bears a striking resemblance to Dead Space 2's executive producer, Steve Papoutsis. It's fairly hilarious.
  • While exploring the elementary school in Chapter 6, the player may notice children's drawings depicting various familiar things from the Dead Space universe, including a slasher, the Peng Trophy, and a man in a Security Rig using the propulsion jets to fly.
  • There's a working scale in the room where you trade in your patient's outfit for an engineering space suit. Walking onto it before and after you get your suit shows off how much of a weight difference it is.
  • In several areas there are notes on a notice board that say "Family killed by necromorphs, need money for plasma cutter and beer". Another talks about free kitties with a picture of what appear to be two black panthers.
• Eldritch Abomination: The final battle implies the Markers' purpose is to incarnate one somehow, presumably by using human flesh during a convergence event. Confirmed in the next game.
• Elevator Action Sequence: Twice: all the way up to the solar array and up the mine shaft.
• Empty Room Psych: Subverted: on the Ishimura, you enter a decontamination chamber and have to wait in near-darkness for the cycle to end. Savvy players or those who've played through the first game will be on-edge, waiting for the inevitable Necromorphs. They actually attack when you come back a second time.
  • The entire first half of the Ishimura, in fact. There are no enemies. Behind the corner... no enemies.
• Epiphanic Prison: In a way. Isaac is unable to accept and come to terms with Nicole's death, so her specter hounds him throughout the game. Only when he finally comes to terms with it, does she become normal. And even that is a subversion (The Marker was using him all along). And then by the end, he's finally accepted and come to terms with her death and is free of it.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Against the orders of his superiors, Director Tidemann broke the quarantine on his station to evacuate as many people as he possibly could before Isaac made himself known. It is only after Isaac evades death enough times that Tidemann finally pulls out all the stops and re-quarantines the station.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: Serves as The Stinger to possibly set up another installment.
• Evil Versus Evil: In this corner, the corrupt, dystopian government that destroys planets for resources. In the other corner, a bunch of crazed cultists who believe that the Necromorphs are the future of humanity. Isaac chooses to fight against both of them.
• Evolving Title Screen: When you play the game for the first time, the main menu shows neural pathways representing Isaac's brain. As you progress through the game, more and more Marker shards will start swirling about each time you come back to the menu, until forming a full Marker after you beat the game for the first time.
• Explosive Decompression: A risk in Dead Space 2, due to the game taking place in a space station. There's even an Achievement/Trophy for getting a number of Necromorphs blown out into space this way. Of course, you have to keep Isaac from being blown out, too!
• Extinct in the Future: Bees, dolphins, hippos, bears, chimpanzees, eagles, giraffes, elephants, wolves and penguins are all extinct. An advertisement on Titan Station describes a toy line for them called Extinct Animal Friends.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The plot proceeds almost entirely in real time - no time skips, no cuts to black^note except for one instance late in the game where Isaac gets knocked out briefly, but this can't have lasted for more than a minute, probably less - meaning the Sprawl outbreak takes as long as it takes you to play through the game (about 8 hours on average).
• Eye Scream: Implied multiple times, depicted twice. And the second depiction is a mini game! Failing it is bad. Succeeding at it...isn't much better.
• The Faceless: Now that Isaac's got a voice, he also has a face to go with it: one of the last images of the first trailer was a shot of Isaac's face before his helmet covered it. Naturally, the game uses this to notch the death scenes up to eleven. For example, Isaac getting his helmet ripped off and a Necromorph Tripod's spike shoved down his throat.
• Facial Horror: Depicted in glorious detail during the intro. You may also want to view (former) Unitology clergy corpses through the Seeker Rifle's zoom scope.
  • Happens to Isaac in the final battle if you get too close to Marker Nicole and she consumes you. See: Ate His Spear.
  • Also happens to Tiedemann before the final battle - he has had most of his face (including his nose) burned off and is horribly still alive.
• Fake Difficulty: Hardcore Mode, only unlocked after beating the game once, is genuinely tough due to severely limited ammo/health and highly lethal enemies. The "Fake" part comes from only allowing you to save a grand total of three times in a 15-chapter game and deleting all checkpoints. If you die, you're kicked back to your last save. But since you're only allowed three, this means that one death could cost you literally hours of progress. Thank you, Visceral.
  • In the PC version however, that is three saves per session meaning that you can have your three saves, quit and return with the counter reset.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out: At first, the ending heavily suggests that Isaac will die when the Marker explodes. Cue Ellie piloting the gunship.
• Fan Disservice: The female spitter is actually naked, with visible breasts and nipples. It's far from arousing, however. Same for the Nests.
• Five Stages of Grief:
  • Marker-Nicole indicates that this is what Stross' "Steps" are, as well as a Build Your Own Cthulhu construction kit.
  • Bit of an odd case, though. Marker-Nicole states that "Step Four is Acceptance", indicating that Bargaining was skipped entirely. Also, since Stross' Step Three was to gouge people's eyes out with a screwdriver, Anger and Depression seem to have switched places.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Several of the log entries were recorded by people facing imminent death, who recorded instructions (such as methods on how to dispatch Necromorphs) for anyone else who comes across them.
• Food Pills: Posters reminding children to eat their "Suplicaps" (namely fruit and veggies) can be seen in the school.
• Forced Tutorial: Learn to run or die, learn to use stasis or die, learn to use telekinesis or die and so on. The stasis tutorial is quite a bit more forced than the other tutorials; after a short hacking minigame, Isaac equips his RIG with the stasis module. A split-second later, a Slasher drops out of the ceiling, and you literally only have time to stasis it and do nothing else before it kills you in one hit.
• Future Spandex: Most of the truly advanced RIG suits look quite tight fitting.
• Gaiden Game: One was released for the iPhone/iPad system, simply titled Dead Space (usually referred to as "Dead Space Mobile"). It features a backdrop to Dead Space 2, where a mysterious protagonist codenamed "Vandal" is tricked into releasing Necromorphs into the Sprawl at large by the Church of Unitology, and struggles to correct it. Some of Vandal's logs can be found in Dead Space 2, minus the voice filter disguising the fact that she's a woman.
  • There's also one you can play on the Xperia Play. Not so great, though....
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The Hacker Suit (an Old Save Bonus from Ignition) leaves Isaac's neck and ears exposed. Even when he goes extra-vehicular. "Space Is Cold" nonsense notwithstanding, this should cause depressurization problems, as your ears are connected to your lungs.
  • Titan's atmosphere has a surface pressure about one and a half times that of Earth's. On the other hand, Titan's temperature at surface level averages around -180°C, so while pressure wouldn't be a problem, hypothermia certainly would. Eh.
  • No real space suit would have an air supply of 3 minutes or less, but it is good for dramatic moments.
• Gas Leak Cover-Up: The deaths of everyone on the Ishimura and its illegal mining colony were explained away as a "terrorist attack," and since this was in a remote area of space they could get away with it. They're going to have a lot harder time explaining away losing a major metropolis in the Sol system. Additionally, the coverup is a literal coverup; when you get to the Ishimura, most of the areas that have been cleaned up are covered in taped-up plastic sheets with the bloodstains washed away.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: An enhanced gameplay feature: using kinesis on a Necromorph will automatically pluck off one of their blades/claws to be hurled at another, whereas in the original it was of limited effectiveness. You can also throw regular bodies, though this is not nearly as effective.
• Hacking Minigame: Used when Isaac is fiddling with gizmos to make them work (or to make them stop working).
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Most of The Many Deaths of You leave you in this state.
  • Which can glitch and lead to a Good Bad Bug. In this case, Isaac is only a pair of disembodied legs running around with a gun floating and firing.
• Hallucinations: A common occurrence thanks due to Isaac's Sanity Slippage. The ones on the Ishimura let the design team reuse old animations.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: The final boss fight between Isaac and The Marker, as seen here.
• Harder Than Hard:
  • Hardcore Mode, which must be unlocked, grants you minimal ammo and med packs, and only allows you to save three times. If you die, you do not continue from the last checkpoint, but from the last time you saved (so make sure you save when you need to!) You'll need to play very carefully and make full use of the Stasis and Kinesis Modules' abilities to impale enemies to save yourself. The reward? The ultimate weapon: a red foam hand you put over Isaac's hand. It doesn't shoot bullets: instead, he makes "Bang! Bang!" and "Pew! Pew!" noises with it. It's a guaranteed One-Hit Kill on Necromorphs.
  • It should be noted that for Xbox 360 players that the game is split between two discs. A checkpoint will be made when the disc needs to be changed, so in hardcore mode, there is precisely ONE checkpoint. Use that to your advantage.
  • For PC gamers, the unpatched version of the game also reset the number of saves you were allowed to make every time you reset the game.
• Harpoon Gun: The Javelin Gun, which fires barbed spears at enemies.
• He Knows About Timed Hits:
  • Early on, Isaac gets a message from Daina reminding him to kill Necromorphs by dismemberment. His response is simply, "I know: I've had a lot of practice."
  • Several of the Apocalyptic Log entries recorded by survivors on the station also reference the gameplay tactics the player can use, with several specifically reminding anyone who will listen to "Cut off their limbs!" and another outright showing how to use spikes off Necromorphs (pulled with Kinesis) to dispatch other enemies.
  • However there are three more reminders, a message in blood, a panicked marine on the radio and a recorded message.
• Heroic BSoD: Isaac has a very angry outburst when Marker Nicole gloats about him having to kill Stross. Isaac blames the Marker for making him kill him. It's left ambiguous if he's referring to the Marker manipulating him, Stross, or both. He then has his worst hallucination soon after because his mind is in such disarray over the event. In fact, it's the only hallucination where Marker Nicole can DIRECTLY kill Isaac instead of forcing him to commit suicide... Maybe.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Isaac is convinced that Redemption Equals Death when it comes to making up for causing Nicole's death, and thus forces Ellie to escape while he goes after the Big Bad and be a Big Damn Hero
  • Inverted through Ellie who, being the Determinator, turns around her escape ship and smashes it into the Sprawl to save Isaac.
• Hero of Another Story: Late in the game, Isaac can find two logs left by Vandal, the protagonist of the iOS game. She unwittingly released the Necromorphs, and sacrificed herself to stop the Sprawl reactor from going critical.
• Hide Your Children: Very much averted. The first game had reanimated toddler corpses (Lurkers) with Combat Tentacles, and Dead Space 2 isn't any different. In addition to the Lurkers, we now have Crawlers (exploding babies) and the Pack, which are five-year-old, screaming Glass Cannons that will attempt to Zerg Rush you.
  • Visceral Games isn't even trying to hide it this time. While before it was hinted that the babies who became Lurkers were in fact clones used for growing lost limbs and were little more than vegetables in vats, this time around they've actively shown that these were normal human children, namely by having them appear near daycares, schools and children's shops.
    • One scene has a mother picking up a Crawler and cradling it in the nursery as Isaac watches helplessly from behind a window. The scene ends exactly as expected.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: You wind up killing Tiedemann with his own Javelin Gun. Additionally, try catching the projectiles spat out by Pukers or Spitting Slashers and throwing it back at them— it's a one-hit kill!
  • It's also interesting to note that Isaac fixes the Solar Array in Chapter 7 only to have it used against him in Chapter 9.
• Holographic Terminal: A common occurance throughout the game.
• Homicide Machines: Many and varied, as mentioned in the No OSHA Compliance entry.
• Human Popsicle: The frozen bodies of Unitologists and the stasis beds in the hospital. Isaac has also spent time in stasis.
• Human Resources: What the Necromorphs run on.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Dead Space 2 introduces a new weapon called the Javelin Gun which pins anything straight to the nearest wall.
  • And it's disturbingly realistic in the end when Isaac uses it on himself.
  • The Kinesis Module is much stronger than before, and grabbing hold of any rod-like object or a Necromorph's claw allows you to easily hurl it straight through any Necromorph.
• Implacable Man: The appendage-regenerating Necromorph makes a return appearance. This time, it looks much less like the Hunter and more like a true alien creature in its own right^note its face somewhat resembles a miniature version of the Hive Mind from the first game. Perhaps it's a very, very early-stage new Hive Mind? . Worse? It's only barely glimpsed before you encounter it ^note when you cut the power to the Government Sector, and drops through vents to follow you.
• Improvised Weapon: Like the previous game, most of Isaac's weapons are actually re-purposed mining tools. Taken to extremes with the Plasma Cutter in this game, constructed by Isaac from a surgical plasma tissue "laser" combined with a flashlight. It is a improvised-improvised weapon!.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The fully-upgraded Contact Beam. It even gets a damage bonus from the Riot Security Suit. The final boss battle can be completed in just a few shots, and alt fire is perfect for keeping away the swarming demon children.
  • There is also the reward for beating hardcore mode. It can kill any Necro in one hit, has infinite ammo and just happens to be a red foam finger.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Nicole's redesigned appearance (which even extends to the flashbacks to the first game) looks suspiciously similar to her new voice actress. Stross and Ellie look just like their voice actors, too. In the case of Ellie they made her hair longer and changed her eyes to blue.
  • Isaac has also be slightly redesigned to resemble the likeness of Gunner Wright, his voice actor.
• Insane Equals Violent: Subverted with Isaac, who acts only out of self-defense on the necromorphs and to destroy the Marker. Played straight with Stross.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: Exaggerated. In addition to Isaac having managed to survive an entire game (to date) without ever learning to jump, there is one puzzle involving these laser beams that revolve around an axis. You're supposed to Stasis them and run from niche to niche while they're delayed... but the lowest one is waist-high, meaning that Isaac could easily have just crawled under them. That is, if he had ever learned to crawl.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Just like in the original game, players have to carefully manage Isaac's upgradable yet still constantly undersized Grid Inventory. Most of it will be stuffed with ammo and medkits at any given time, and deciding what to leave behind so you can lug that new weapon schematic you just found to the next store can be agonizing.
• Ironic Nursery Rhyme: As if "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" wasn't unnerving enough for the original, the devs have given "Ring Around The Rosie" the same treatment for Dead Space 2.
• It Can Think: The Marker is self aware enough to Mind Rape the EarthGov scientists creating it and use visions of Nicole to trick Isaac into following its plan for convergence.
• It Makes Sense in Context: You are forced to fight the memory of your dead girlfriend who is the psychopathic embodiment of a man-made 'ancient' alien artifact's will. Did we mention this all takes place in what might or might-not be your own psyche? ...Yeah.
• Jet Pack: Isaac gets this along with rocket boots in his armor. They only work in zero gravity.
• Jump Scare: Oh, you think?
  • An excellent subversion in the ending. As Isaac slumps into his chair, clearly exhausted, he immediately tenses up and realises that this is an exact mirror of the ending of the first game. Isaac turns his head to the right, with an absolutely terrified expression on his face- only for Ellie to turn to him, completely normal and say "What?"
• Kill It with Fire: One of the most item-drop efficient ways to face off the Pack. The Pack all die in one hit, and swarm in numbers of up to a dozen at a time, but the game de-spawns enemy corpses if they are too numerous, and you won't have time to stomp on all of them to get all the items. Enemies that are killed by the flamethrower, however, automatically drop their item (because the lingering flames continue to damage their corpse).
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Franco, who is killed less than 30 seconds after waking Isaac up. Just to mess with you even more, the subtitle shows the full text of his speech, leaving you to suspect nothing as you read along.
• Kinda Busy Here: Played straight during the first stalker encounter.
  Daina: "Isaac! I..."
  Isaac: "NOT NOW!!"
  • And later:
    Ellie: Isaac, they're swarming all over the ship!
    Isaac: (fighting off half a dozen necromorphs) I KNOW! I'll call you later!
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Isaac once again takes anything he can find, even when a PA message makes it clear evacuation teams will shoot looters on sight. Of course, the government's already trying to kill him, so what's a few more stolen health packs, right?
• Laser-Guided Karma: Only seconds after performing a Batman Gambit, Daina is gloriously gibbed by an EarthGov Gunship.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: If you didn't play the first game, promotions for Dead Space 2 often spoil the fact that Nicole is dead. However, it rarely includes the fact she was dead by the start of the first game.
  • For Dead Space Extraction, the Severed DLC features Gabe and Lexine, meaning they did survive the Gaiden Game's ending. Tragically, this means Nathan may have been the Necromorph from the ending of that game. Cutting off his arm to escape after being stabbed in the arm didn't help.
  • Another Late-Arrival Spoiler for anyone who played Dead Space Ignition: Franco (the nice guy who wakes up Isaac) is a Unitologist spy who's just very good at acting nice. No surprises, then, that the woman he's working for, Daina, is also a Unitologist with an agenda.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": Or "vroo-oo-oo- BEEP!" in this case. There's also the Cysts, little necromorph land mines that spit out an explosive bouncing-betty-like thing; the cysts aren't always easy to see, but betray their location by the constant gurgling noise they make.
  • Unless you encounter them in a vacuum, of course.
• Late to the Tragedy: Less so than in the original game, but enough that it makes no real difference.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: When Stross is hallucinating on the tram before Tiedemann cuts the colony in half and you re-board the Ishimura, he apparently sees an unidentified "he" — presumably his murdered son — and yells at this apparition to stop staring at him. From the camera angle, Stross seems to be staring right out at the player.
• Limited Loadout: Isaac can only equip 4 weapons at a time. The rest must be either kept within the safe (accessible from any of the Sprawl's store consoles) or sold to those stores to free up space.
• Loophole Abuse: Daina believes the Unitologist church is a safe rendezvous because separation of church and state means EarthGov can't track anyone inside or jam communications. However, pretty much as soon as Isaac reaches the church, Tiedemann does exactly that. Just because the government doesn't do those things by law, doesn't mean it can't, especially during a state of emergency caused by a Necromorph outbreak.
• Lost in Transmission: In the Unitology church. Doubles as Paranoia Fuel when Daina warns Isaac about the crypt.
• Made of Iron:
  • Isaac manages to survive a confrontation with both an EarthGov gunship and the Tormentor at the same time, effectively using explosive canisters to take care of both threats in one shot. This only occurs after he has been shot at by the gunship, slides several metres down through an emergency hatch, gets chased through a collapsing tunnel by said Tormentor, blown out into the open sky by the gunship's attacks, then blown back into the station by the resulting explosion. He simply carries on like nothing happened.
  • When Isaac is doing his space flight back to the sprawl from the solar array, he crashes into a glass roof on top of a building and fires his reverse thrusters for a few seconds before landing on his feet. By all rights, the amount of force that he is using (which causes the metal to develop cracks where his feet land,) should have shattered his bones on impact, even maybe outright killing him when crashed through the glass. Then again, it was awesome.
  • Ellie survives everything that Isaac does, without the benefit of Isaac's suit of armor. She loses an eye, but it doesn't seem to slow her down.
• Made of Plasticine: Any corpse you come across can have its limbs cleanly removed through careful application of Isaac's boot, as if he were wearing heavy metal skates. This even applies at the start of the game when Isaac isn't wearing heavily armoured boots.
• Major Injury Underreaction:
  • Ellie's "You owe me an eye, you bastard!" And this was right after she smacked Stross with a length of pipe.
  • Isaac gets his left hand and torso punctured with two foot long javelin projectiles, and seconds later he seems to have forgotten this ever happened as he has a relaxed sit down during the Fake-Out Fade-Out then rocketing to salvation rather than messily bleeding out through his collapsed lung.
  • He also recovers from a needle in the eye rather quickly, but maybe the game is simply accommodating the fact that Isaac can take ludicrous amounts of punishment and heal himself with simple med packs... but then again he is never seen medicating any of his Cut Scene injuries and his rig doesn't indicate an increase in well-being.
• The Many Deaths of You: Just as varied as the original. There's all the Press X to Not Die sections, plus failure to hit the switch on blown-out decompression windows causes Isaac to be smushed messily by the pressure door when it automatically closes. See all of them here. (Warning: Contains spoilers... and Squick)
• Mind Rape: This is the Final Boss' finishing move to Isaac. The Marker also did this to the government researchers who built it. They didn't have the ability or knowledge to finish it on their own, so the Marker implanted it into their minds through dreams. One of them realizes they didn't build the Marker, the Marker built itself using them and he's understandably terrified at the implications.
• Mind Screw: Since Isaac's close proximity near the Red Marker during the last parts of the first Dead Space, his brain hasn't been in the right place. At several points in the game, Isaac must face hallucinations of Nicole and come to terms with her death.
  • After you use the needle machine, when you kill one Necromorph, it suddenly screams "NOOOOOOOO!" in a human voice.
• Monster Closet: The necromorphs pop out of vents, floor tiles, the ceiling; outside of a few rare circumstances you never run across them in the open. After a while you can pick out exactly what parts of the wall the Necromorphs will pop out of. Not content with the vanilla version of this trope, the game will now happily spawn Necromorphs from thin air while your back is turned.
  • All three games have vents. And 2 has several sequences where the player themselves must crawl through service tubes. You can tell where this is going.
• Mood Dissonance:
  • The game ends on a Continuity Nod joke instead of a Jump Scare or Bitter Sweet Ending. You're unlikely to get this if you haven't seen the first Dead Space ending.
  • Also embodied by the numerous upbeat posters/announcements/messages you come across, as well as by EarthGov's ubiquituous catchphrase (Good things are happening!)
• Mooks, but no Bosses: Unlike the first or third games, or even the Gaiden Game Dead Space: Extraction, Dead Space 2 doesn't really have any elaborate boss fights. The Tormentor is a Cutscene Boss, the Ubermorph is more of an Invincible Minor Minion than a boss, and even the "final fight" against Yellow Marker Nicole is more of a scripted sequence than an actual boss fight. The closest the game has to traditional video game boss fights are a couple of Boss in Mook's Clothing fights against Tripods, which are very similar to Brutes, only somewhat faster and more agile.
• Moving Beyond Bereavement: A common feature of the test subjects affected by the brain-warping influence of the Marker is that they have experienced loss in their past and are unable to move on, resulting in hallucinations of their dead loved ones that eventually drive them insane.
  • In one case, Nolan Stross killed his wife and child while under the influence of a Marker shard, and as a result, sees his dead family taunting him from beyond the grave. Unable to confront his own guilt, his denial drives him to become dangerously obsessed with the "Steps" instituted at Titan Medical Centre, until at the absolute nadir of his insanity, Stross is attacking Isaac with a screwdriver, screaming that he has to "face her for me" and "tell her I didn't mean to do it." This confrontation ends with Stross having his screwdriver driven back into his skull.
  • In another case, Isaac Clarke is haunted by the death of his girlfriend back in the first game, and spends most of the narrative haunted by an illusory version of Nicole. Worse still, the hallucination only becomes more aggressive as the game continues, sneering at his efforts to survive the crisis and mocking his inability to move on. Close to the finale, she confronts Isaac one last time and demands to know why he can't let her go: failing the quicktime event will result in Isaac denying her existence - then having his neck snapped; however, if you succeed, Isaac finally confesses that without Nicole, he has nothing left. With this, he finally reaches step four - Acceptance - and his symptoms abate.
• Nerf Arm: Your reward for beating the dreaded Hardcore Mode is the Handcannon, a ridiculous foam finger...that just happens to completely decimate whatever it "shoots".
  "Pull Right Trigger/R2 to go Bang Bang, Press Right Bumper/R1 to go Pew Pew Pew."
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: One part of the game has Isaac needing to infiltrate an area cordoned off by the military and blocked by an energy barrier keeping the Necromorphs away. After Isaac disables the generator the barrier is swarmed by Necromorphs...who then move into the area that Isaac needs to get into. He also inadvertently triggers a Convergence event by letting them get to the Marker.
  • Also, though he has no control over it, Isaac was responsible for creating the Marker in the first place.
  • If he had just gotten on the ship with Ellie, hundreds of people might still be alive. Then again, thousands more might have died; it's hard to tell for sure.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • When Daina betrays Isaac and is about to shove him into stasis, the EarthGov gunship that's been trying to kill Isaac inadvertently saves him by killing all the Unitologists present and giving him a chance to escape.
  • Immediately afterwards he gets chased by a giant, rampaging Necromorph Tormentor. Isaac is quickly cornered, but the gunship shows up again and causes the two of them to get blown out into space — hanging onto the gunship! Then the Tormentor knocks loose some of the gunship's fuel pods, which Isaac detonates. This blows up both of Isaac's problems and throws him back onto the station. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!
• Nightmarish Nursery: Titan Elementary, both a school for older children and a daycare for kids in the infant-to-toddler range. By the time Isaac gets there, the only residents are of three very specific types of Necromorphs: the Lurkers, the Crawlers, and the Pack - all of which used to be children attending the school. Needless to say, the brightly-coloured childish surroundings and motherly-sounding automated messages over the loudspeaker only make the place even more disturbing.
• No-Gear Level: The very beginning of the game. In a straitjacket (thanks to Isaac being in a mental institution), and with an alarmingly low health bar. Have fun!
• No One Could Survive That!: The game offers a clever example which spans both the single player and multiplayer campaigns. When playing as the Sprawl Security Forces in multi-player, the engineers can attempt a mission in which they send firing coordinates to the solar array. The fire mission being depicted is actually the one ordered by Tiedemann at the end of Chapter 9 of the single player campaign. If the engineers succeed in their mission, thus enabling the energy beam attack which cuts the Sprawl in two, one engineer can be heard to say "The Array is firing. He can't survive that," referring to protagonist Isaac Clarke at whom the attack is directed. Naturally, Isaac survives.
• No OSHA Compliance: The Game: Part Two. Justified like the previous game: Isaac either climbs into places unfit for human passage or has to deal with damaged safety devices. All the more reason to show off those (no longer off-screen) engineering skills!
  • Still plays it straight a few times though. Probably the worst example is the giant rotating laser grid room in the Government Sector, where literally the only way to reach the controls that shut them off is to outrun the incredibly lethal spinning laser arrays that entirely fill the circular room. That, or crawl under them, but then all the Necromorphs doing the same would get you.
  • Also played straight with the breakable Expansion Planned windows. Who in their right mind would install windows that someone could break by accident when the other side is a vacuum? If a plastic pane used to cover a broken car window is lost, that's just some plastic. These break and there could be several deaths. For that matter, why does the metal shutter designed to seal hull breaches need to be manually activated to work immediately (instead of cutting you in half after a short period), and why is the activation switch placed in such a manner that it needs to be shot to trigger it?
• No Ontological Inertia: Off-screen, but you find a log stating that all of the Necromorphs remaining on the Ishimura just melted after the Hive Mind and Red Marker were destroyed.
  • But, their remains start to reanimate in the presence of a marker signal.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The first several minutes onboard the Ishimura are agonizing.
• Notice This: This game isn't as blatant about it as the first one. Collectible objects do still glow, but not nearly as brightly. It is entirely possible to not notice some items without a close inspection. For a more subtle example, most of the rod-shaped items that you can pick up to shoot with kinesis have a tiny shine or glow on one end, similar to a fiber-optic cable.
• Nostalgia Level: You revisit the Ishimura to get the tram moving again, and come across locations from the original game, as well as experience flashbacks to the original infestation. The Sanity Slippage pours a hefty helping of Paranoia Fuel onto the fire.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Of course, only Isaac knows the creature's proper names, so he's pretty much the only one to call them "Necromorphs." Everyone else calls them "those...things!"
• Old Save Bonus: If you have a Dead Space save, you get a free "refurbished" plasma cutter from the first game. If you have an Ignition save, you get the Hacker RIG suit, along with several additional areas that will open up in the basegame that give additional credits and audio logs from the main character of the former.
• One-Hit Kill: You can be hit by several, mostly triggered by standing too close to dangerous objects like the Guardian and the Drill Tank's cutting blades, but Isaac can dish them out as well — the Contact Beam's primary fire will instantly de-limb anything human-sized or smaller, regardless of the difficulty level. Very useful against the fast, deadly, and tough-as-nails Elite necromorphs.
  • The final boss has one. It also has a Flash Step. Frustration can ensue.
  • An odd example is during the first level; during the part where Isaac gets his stasis ability, a Necromorph will jump out of nowhere and will kill him in one hit if he's not fast enough; probably defeating the point of making it a tutorial.
• Only Smart People May Pass: The Marker infects almost everyone with a special form of dementia. According to one log, if you're smart you get to learn the process required to make a Marker replica; if you're not, enjoy going stark raving mad whilst drawing incoherent nonsense everywhere before you kill yourself to make it stop... and if you're really unlucky, proceeding to be resurrected as a screeching beast rampaging against your friends.
• On Second Thought: When Isaac is stopped by the lock-down, Daina yells at him for not hurrying. He then yells back that he doesn't need her help. She yells, "FINE! Let's see how long you can survive on your own," which happens to be punctuated by breaking vents and a crap-ton of slashers coming out of the wood work. Isaac then contacts her claiming he DOES need her help. Turns out, she just got busy finding him a new path while he was thinking it though.
• Pater Familicide: Nolan Stross murdered his family after being mind raped by the Aegis VII Marker.
• Personal Space Invader: Par for the course with the Necromorphs, but now there are more variants with ranged attacks to harry you at a distance.
• Pet the Dog: Tiedemann orders the Sprawl to be evacuated against direct orders from his superiors in EarthGov, and risks losing his career because he does not want everyone under his governance to be killed.
• The Plan: The Sprawl scientists wanted Gabe and Lexine to have a child so they can study the child for Marker immunity — It's implied that these men are actually the Oracles that were hinted at in the main game and shown in Salvage.
• Playing with Syringes: In an odd twist, you are forced to do it to yourself at one point. Arguably the most squick-worthy moment of the entire game. It's about 20 times worse if you fail.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner:
  Isaac: "Goddammit, I trusted you! Fuck you, and fuck your Marker!"
• Press X to Not Die: Certain events require the player to fend off Isaac's Sanity Slippage, or risk Isaac suffering life-ending consequences.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: This is what happens if Marker-Nicole succeeds in touching Isaac during the Final Boss fight.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: YOU WILL ALL BE MADE ONE! MAKE! US! WHOLE!
• "Rear Window" Witness: The game grants you a front-row seat for several deliciously gruesome scenes, including the first appearance of a Creeper where its interaction with a distraught nurse results in the room getting a nice red paint job, and — later on — Ellie's (failed) attempt to rid herself of the Stross problem.
• Retcon: The Red Marker suppressing the Necromorphs by design has been retconned out, more or less; it was a byproduct of being on its pedestal, but Dead Space 2 downright states the Markers are the true source of the problem. Word of God admits to this Continuity Snarl.
  • Word of God subsequently stated that while the Marker affects Necromorphs, it doesn't cause them, and this will be elaborated on in the future.
• Red Shirt Army: Tiedemann's vaunted army of two hundred security officers get wiped out in a matter of minutes after the Necromorphs breach the Government Sector.
• Respawning Enemies:
  • Some sections of the game have nigh-constant spawns intended to overwhelm Isaac unless you advance.
  • And sometimes multiple waves respawn if a player backtracks to a save point in order to trigger a checkpoint.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Most of them are already smashed up, but you can find a couple of vending machines or ATMs that are in pristine condition. Busting them up may give you money or medpacks.
• Rewatch Bonus: At the beginning of the game, Daina tells Isaac that the Unitologist church of the station is a safe place since, thanks to the separation of church and state, the government can't block her radio messages there. When Tiedemann starts interfering with her signal anyway, she spends the last seconds she has before getting blocked sounding offended and yelling out that the government can't do that instead of continuing to tell Isaac crucial information. Appropriate, since she's an Unitologist herself.
• Room Full of Crazy: Returns with a vengeance in this game, especially in the Church of Unitology, who, being a corrupt cult, were already one foot in the crazy camp.
• Rule of Symbolism: The final boss battle may be a reference to a certain movie about a man driven to suicide by some demon kids. Add the hallucination of Nicole tempting Isaac into abandoning all hope, and you get some Fridge Horror bonus. Isaac is even pierced through his hand seconds earlier.
• Running Both Sides: The Red Marker is responsible for the Necromorphs and is guiding Isaac, making Isaac believe that Nicole is the product of his guilty subconscious, and siccing the Necromorphs on Isaac to reinforce the illusion. All this is to make him believe that he is destroying the Marker, when in fact he is helping it. Furthermore, a log reveals the Marker has been influencing the Unitologists to constantly make more Markers to spread its influence, by making them think Necromorphs are the next step in human evolution.
• Sanity Slippage: People have been exposed to the Marker (either another replica, or these are more survivors scrounged from the Ishimura) and a recurring problem with them is being haunted by symbols. One such subject deteriorates throughout the game as a foil to Isaac's more grounded state. Another subject bites an orderly and, since they use memory suppressants, he had to be told why his jaw was broken every time they had to wake him up.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: The Handcannon: primary fire causes Isaac to say "Bang Bang", secondary causes him to say "Pew Pew".
• Scenery Gorn:
  • Titan Station is a beautiful place with lots of detailed environments, covered in blood and rubble and things on fire. The black-lit sections of hallway (to show biological matter on the Ishimura's medical decks) are gorgeous.
  • Of special note is the Unitology church in chapters 4 and 5, which can essentially be described as a sci-fi Catholic cathedral designed by H. P. Lovecraft.
• Sequel Escalation: Actual play time may vary, but unlike in Dead Space there is virtually no backtracking, so there's a lot more new-content-per-time. Apart from reusing maps from the first game on the Ishimura. A sneaky move on behalf of the game designers, seeing as reviewers can't point this out without spoiling the plot. However, this is more of a deliberate Nostalgia Level, and most of the areas have undergone changes (unsettling plastic sheeting everywhere, for starters).
• Shapeshifter Baggage: Present as always, and the close-up view of a Necromorph transformation only confirms the physical impossibility of the alterations they undergo. And if that really bothers you, well...
• Short-Range Shotgun: The Force Gun is effectively this, mixed with a little Magikarp Power. Unupgraded, it mostly pushes enemies over unless you're at point-blank range. Upgraded, you can tear enemies completely apart in one hit, provided you're close enough. No matter the upgrade level, it's still murder on the pack (provided you don't get caught reloading, of course).
• Shout-Out:
  • System Shock 2 players will feel right at home in the Von Braun The Sprawl.
  • Also the Achievement/Trophy for surviving the first Stalker ambush is called "Clever Girls".
  • Folding RIG helmets and Zero-G propulsion system built into boots are crying Iron Man.
  • A line gun-related Achievement/Trophy is called "My Boom Stick".
  • Howard Phillips is almost certainly a Shout-Out to H. P. Lovecraft.
  • Many song titles from the soundtrack are examples, like "It had to be Unitology" or "War And Pieces."
  • The name "The Sprawl" is an obvious shout out to William Gibson.
  • This bit of graffiti outside the Church of Unitology may be a send-up of the Slender Man. That page's graphic is the very first Slender Man photoshop; note the way he's posed with the child.
  • The Inception horn sound blares when Nicole drags Isaac in the Battle in the Center of the Mind.
  • The triple-ringed gravity drive from Event Horizon, the inspiration for the style and tone of the first game, makes an appearance.
• Space Is Noisy: Once again, averted; you hear nothing but sounds that travel through vibrations, such as your own weapons fire or large shocks striking the ground you're standing on. Even the music that plays for thrilling outer-space sequences is muted and understated.
• Space Is Slow Motion: Isaac's RIG thrusters are not terribly fast when navigating in interiors, but really, you wouldn't want to move fast in a zero-G environment because you'd be banging into the walls like crazy. When you use the dash button, you can go a good bit faster.
• Spring-Loaded Corpse: Common enemies use this as a tactic, just as they did in the first game. However, the Warmup Boss also does this after you've "killed it". Made worse by the fact that it even drops an item beforehand, which is a common sign that an enemy is going to stay down.
• The Stinger: During the end credits as Isaac sits on the ground, exhausted and defeated, his videoscreen activates:
  Ellie: You complete bastard! Was this your great plan? Dump me off and die?
  Isaac: I'm full of bad ideas, remember?
  Ellie: Yeah, well here's another one. I'm crashing through the roof to get you. Now move your ass!
  • After the real credits, there's a conversation where we learn there are at least 11 other man-made Markers.
• Sniper Rifle: The Seeker Rifle, which does more damage when zoomed in. Make sure to target the enemy's limbs, of course, since headshots in this series are of limited effectiveness.
• Space Station: The Sprawl, a massive cityscape the game takes place in. It's formed from when they mined almost all of Titan until nothing was left but the space station they built around it.
• Stopped Clock: All clocks are permanently stopped at 12:00.
• Suddenly Voiced: Isaac goes from a Heroic Mime who had nothing more than Voice Grunting and a Face Palm to express himself to a full on character this time, complete with Cluster F Bombs when the moment calls for it.
• Suit Up of Destiny: Isaac has a pretty cool one when he buys his first engineering suit, changing out of the straitjacket that he woke up in. After the suit up, he smiles slightly and the player knows that it's finally time to get down to business.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Isaac's method of clearing a path through the government facility's blockade is to open the gates and let hundreds of Necromorphs rampage through the place and kill them.

• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity:
  • A big empty room with lots of ammo pickups is never good news...
  • Neither is a room with a save station, a store, and a workbench. Slightly subverted by the gift shop in the Unitology Church which has them there because there are A LOT of doors to before.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: Security checkpoints occasionally use R.I.G. scanners to limit access. They're unable to tell when an authorized R.I.G. is connected to a corpse, however.
• Take My Hand!: The Stinger. Failure to do so is... unpleasant.
• Take Your Time: At one point, Tiedemann is getting away, and Isaac has to employ some Gravity Tethers (aboard the Ishimura) to pin his escape vehicle in place. It is impossible to be too late to do this. (Partially justified in that said "escape vehicle" is a chunk of a moon, and just how fast could such a thing go?)
• Tears of Blood: Isaac momentarily has these from his right eye after he drives a needle into it.
• Technology Porn: Whenever Isaac exchanges his RIG for another at one of the in-game stores, it's always accompanied by a short sequence of him flexing his arms, sections of the suit moving, and the helmet closing into place.
• Teleport Spam: Nicole does this when you fight her, though she uses it offensively because letting her grab you doesn't end well.
• Tempting Fate: Done to you, but still unpleasant.
  Ellie: At least you won't have to go through the Medical Deck.
  Computer: Obstruction ahead. Stopping. Welcome to the Medical Deck.
  Isaac: Crap.
• That Thing Is Not My Child!: Horrifically averted the first time you encounter the baby necromorphs. A deranged mother lets a crawler come to her and be held in her arms. The results are messy to say the least.
• Throat Light: A certain recurring hallucination has this.
• Trailers Always Spoil: In the trailer with The Smashing Pumpkins song, after seeing Ellie talking to Isaac, there is a cut to a ship pulling away from a dock, and if you look in the background, you can clearly see an upset Ellie talking to someone. Then it cuts to Isaac standing in the same room wearing the same color suit as the person Ellie was talking to, and the ship gone. He then looks upset and slides down the wall. Granted, knowledge of the ending helps, but it's still not exactly subtle.
  • Also done frequently in several trailers; EA frequently used the same clip of Stross lunging at Isaac with an eye on a screwdriver, sort of hints that things don't go too well for them.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Two text logs found in Titan Elementary School details misbehaviors performed by children. One log written by a teacher named Walter Blake noticed the children having "imaginary friends" of their deceased grandparents and not paying attention in class, while another written by a nurse wrote how brutal the children are beating each other up, believing that space is no place for children. This misbehavior is the result of the Marker.
• Truth in Television: An audio log explains that more intelligent people are less affected by the Marker's dementia and instead can make out "instructions" from it. The effects of real-world dementia like Alzheimer's are lessened for people who perform mental exercises, such as puzzles, regularly. Isaac is an engineer frequently problem-solving and fixing VERY complex machinery, which may account for his resistance to the Marker's dementia and his ability to defeat the Marker in a Battle in the Center of the Mind that leaves it effectively "brain dead".
• Turbine Blender: The only way to permanently kill the regenerating Ubermorph is to force it into a giant fanblade. It's probably a glitch, and as such is completely optional to those too busy running for their lives.
• Undead Child: Lurkers are babies made into long-range shooters with three tentacles that fire darts, Crawlers are babies made into grotesquely large explosives, and The Pack are mutated school children who make up for the weakness of their bodies by swarming and clawing in unison until their prey is dead.
• Universal Universe Time: Averted. The opening has Nicole calling Isaac over video phone, and waking him up because he was asleep. Nicole even explicitly mentions that she forgot about the time difference between them.
• Unwanted Assistance: In-universe example, Isaac invokes this when he claims he doesn't need Daina's help in the hospital after he misses her planned escape route... until he's attacked by a wave of Necromorph Slashers. Isaac quickly changes his mind. This is true even if Isaac manages to thresh through them without any difficulty, but that could be because he's trapped.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: The Javelin Gun impales Necromorphs upon walls for its primary attack. Its secondary attack electrocutes the target, and then explodes inside it with the correct upgrades. The Rivet Gun fires explosive bolts into the enemy, and its secondary fires rivets that ricochet wildly, damaging all nearby Necromorphs.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Most of the returning weapons in the game have completely identical stats compared to the original game. The flamethrower is the exception, as it has been rebalanced to address complaints that it was completely useless in the first game. It now does quadruple damage compared to the first game, making it more useful for bringing down Necromorphs. It still chews through ammo at an insane rate, though.
• Villainous Rescue: An inadvertent one early in the first chapter. When a wounded Isaac in his straitjacket is advancing after escaping the numerous Necromorphs, he encounters a couple well armed security guards who spot him, recognize him and prepare to open fire on him. Before they can execute him, a Necromorph in the ceiling grabs, drags them into the vents and kills them.
  • After Isaac gets captured by Unitologists led by Daina, an EarthGov gunship kills them and frees Isaac. It wasn't intentional as the gunship was sent by Tiedemann to kill him.
• Virtual Paper Doll: As the game progresses, this trope becomes more apparent, as RIG upgrades (inventory space) carries between suits, making the player's choice of armor for Isaac purely cosmetic. The game even incentivizes this, as it has several Old Game Bonus and pre-order DLC suits that work just as well as the ones in the basegame.
• Wall Slump: Isaac, twice. He's had a long, hard day.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: According to Tiedemann's logs, the only reason that he wanted to study the Marker was to get research grants for Titan Station and breathe some life into it. Also, he hoped to eventually use the Marker to bring about a new era of peace and prosperity for humankind, though that probably wouldn't have worked.
• Wham Line:
  Isaac: Daina... you're a Unitologist?
  • Also:
    The Marker: Thank you, Isaac. Now... time to die.
  • And then after the credits:
    ...Marker Site 12 is a total loss.
• What Happened to Mommy?: Early on you will encounter a young couple fleeing an apartment complex. The woman doesn't want to go, claiming that she "can't leave mother behind", but the man eventually drags her away. If you decide to make a detour and visit their apartment, you will find out what happened to mommy...
• What Happened to the Mouse?: After chasing Isaac around the final stage like a bloodhound, the regenerating Ubermorph just up and disappears when Isaac reaches Tiedemann.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Tiedemann unleashes one of those at Isaac after he cuts the power to the Goverment Sector compound. To be fair he had a damn good point as Isaac became guilty, by proxy, of murdering the only group of humans with any reasonable chance of surviving the Necromorph outbreak. Sadly, he didn't have much choice as he needed to destroy the Marker and those soldiers were in his way, and actively trying to kill him.
• With My Hands Tied: Isaac wakes up in a straitjacket, and the only guy who could help him has just been necromorphed. So what does he do? Headbutt said Necromorph and run away. He even manages to push an attacking slasher into a high-pressure door and open doors without using his hands before finally getting out of his bonds.
• Your Worst Memory: The memory of Nicole's suicide looms heavily in Isaac's memory, and the Marker exploits this by tormenting him with visions of her - even recreating her final moments in an early scene.
• Zombie Puke Attack: Spitters and Pukers. Pukers play this more straight, with the short-ranged jet of acid and all.

Dead Space 2: Severed Tropes

• Continuity Nod: Gabe short-circuits a power cell that Isaac must replace, and Gabe later sees the corpse of Isaac's first Boss Fight.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Levels 1 and 11 from the original game are where Gabe travels through, but in the other direction. At first, you're there before Isaac, and then later you are there after he left.
• Downer Ending: Gabe dies and his corpse is taken for research, and Lexine is now a fugitive.
• Face–Heel Turn: Gabe's teamate, Vic, betrays him and attempts to kill him. He succeeds.
• Heroic Sacrifice: After losing his leg, Gabe stays behind to open the hangar bay doors and allow Lexine and their unborn child to escape.
• Jumping on a Grenade: After a quick fight, Gabe manages to take Vic's grenade and throw him onto it. It doesn't help much.
• Just Following Orders: Vic claims that he doesn't really want to kill Lexine, but that he is just doing his duty and following orders.
• Last Stand: Gabe gets one of his legs blown off, and must hold off Necromorphs while shooting the safeties off an airlock, so his wife can escape.
• Meaningful Name: Severed refers to the series' main mechanic, Weller being separated (a synonym for severed) from his wife and searching for her, and Gabe's leg being blown off from a grenade.
• The Men in Black: Or Dead Space's version being the Oracles, wearing all white garb and referring to Necrmorphs as their servants, along with possible psychic powers. They are the secretive arm of an authority possibly above EarthGov itself, with Lexine and Gabe Weller being (or at least were) unwittingly part of their Oracle program.
• Official Couple: Gabe and Lexine are married now. He even got her pregnant.
• Pair the Spares: For Dead Space: Extraction, Lexine and Weller got married. Very much a case of this trope, since in Dead Space: Extraction there was basically no indication of any romantic interest between the two of them, if anything any romantic buildup in Extraction was between Nathan and Lexine. It seems Nathan didn't survive the ending of Extraction, however.
• Red Shirt: Colin Price, the last surviving member of Gabe's security team, is brutally killed by an infector minutes into the game and transformed into the game's first Twitcher. Somewhat justified as he was heavily wounded as seen by his RIG meter at the beginning.
• Red Shirt Army: All regular members of Gabe's and Victor's security teams barring Colin Price perished in the outbreak before the game even starts. Colin Price meets the same fate some 5 minutes into the game.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Gabe died defending Lexine, but she survived bearing their child.
• Super-Speed: The Twitchers, Necromorph security guards which can move very fast, make their return after being absent in the main game.
• Taking You with Me: Vic arms a grenade and attempts to blow up Gabe with it. He succeeds.

• The Power of Love: Gabe shot his way through hundreds of Necromorphs and disobeyed direct orders to get to Lexine. Even getting his leg blown off from a grenade still doesn't stop him from defending his wife until his last breath.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The only other survivor from Extraction, Nathan, isn't seen, or even mentioned. Word of God states he was the Necromorph that attacked Lexine at the end of Extraction.

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