Horror is a lot like comedy – you can tell a joke once, maybe twice at most, but then it starts getting stale.” We’ve asked Derek Chan, associate producer on EA’s Dead Space, if there’s a chance that players might become fatigued by the relentlessly oppressive setting of the dilapidated deep-space mining vessel, the Ishimura. Apparently not.

“Dead Space is full of one-offs,” says Chan. “We have a certain sound here, or a necromorph popping up a certain way – it’s the dev team’s job to break the pattern as much as we can. And to get to a 15- to 20-hour horror experience, you need to be doing that a lot. So what you’ve seen so far is not all of it. We’ve got corridors, sure, but we’ve got vast spaces as well. We’ve got game mechanics we haven’t shown yet.”

Although the section we played featured a fairly consistent drip-feed of combat against necromorphs – the gruesomely corrupted crew members that now stalk Ishimura’s hallways – Chan promises that huge sections of the game will rely on puzzling your way through derelict environments. Equipped with telekinesis and the ability to slow time in localized areas, there is potential here for a combination of the two to create stimulating challenges. The examples from our playthrough were a little underwhelming in their simplicity, however – a malfunctioning door needed to be slowed so the player could slip through; an elevator needed a battery inserted in order to power it up.

With sparse ammunition, however, both these abilities come in useful in combat. As in Resident Evil 4 (the game that also inspires Dead Space’s over-the-shoulder viewpoint), battles are more a matter of crowd control than carnage. The stasis power is useful for constricting the flow of enemies, and telekinesis can be used to turn the Ishimura’s decaying clutter into weaponry. Rather than kill enemies outright, your guns are better used to blow off limbs in order to hamper each necromorph’s particular attack style.

Potentially interesting in mechanical terms, the necromorphs’ design has a problem in that they aren’t immediately scary, despite an abundance of fangs, viscera and talons. Dead Space is keen to echo horror tropes – The Thing and Event Horizon being the two most obvious touchstones – but the aesthetic of both these films, though unpleasant, was not what made them unnerving. The Thing was fraught with paranoia over who remained human; Event Horizon warped the perception of reality. Though not evident during our play session, Chan says that the player will encounter other humans who add a more psychological dimension to the horror: “It would be a pretty boring game if it was just you. Claustrophobia sets in. You get used to the horror, right?”

Dead Space is making big claims for its frights, and with some substance behind the grime and gore. That its sights are set higher than delivering a succession of gross-out shocks only bodes well.