Scary is hard to pull off. I'm one of those - the hardened horror junkie that barely bats an eyelash at decapitation or bloodshed or disembowelment (Fear Zone readers can probably empathize). It sucks, because I LOVE horror, love, love, love it, but spend more time then not sighing at movies or books or video games. Especially the latter. Games can be thrilling and fun, but scary? Not likely.

A quick roundup: RESIDENT EVIL? More gross than scary and saddled with a ridiculous storyline. SILENT HILL? Creepier, I guess, but still goofy and gross. What else? THE EVIL DEAD games (HAIL TO THE KING and A FISTFUL OF BOOMSTICK)? Blech! FATAL FRAME? Boooooring. F.E.A.R? Scary little Asian girls again?

Here's the thing, every time a horror game is released I buy it. From THE DARKNESS (Mafioso evil in dire need of Mapquest), to THE CALL OF CTHULU (who ever thought Lovercraft could be so tame?), to CONDEMNED (horrible game play), to every other title in between, and every time I've been let down. This isn't to say that these games aren't fun (though some aren't) or interesting (though some aren't), but I wouldn't classify a single one of them as SCARY.

That being said, I went into Electronic Art's DEADSPACE with extremely low expectations.

Another horror game in space?

I've played DOOM 1, 2, and 3 (to death), and ALIENS vs. PREDATOR, and on and on, so I wasn't too excited. I ignored the hype surrounding its initial release and opted for a few other titles before finally running out of things to play and giving it a shot. And you know what?

This mutha is scary with a capital S! And fun - more fun then I've had with any other horror game before. The whole time I played I kept kicking myself for not trying it sooner.

You play as Isaac Clarke (Isaac Asimov + Arthur C. Clarke), a 26th century space ship engineer accompanying a team responding to a distress signal sent from a massive mining ship, the USG Ishimura. The Ishimura, a "Planet Cracker," mines resources from...well, planets. While cracking Aegis VII, a planet somewhere in deep space, something goes horrible wrong and a mysterious evil (which is revealed through a surprisingly compelling plot) infiltrates the ship, mutating its two-thousand plus employees into Necromorphs, wonderfully grotesque monstrosities that want to eat Isaac's head and do equally horrible things to the rest of his body.

Complicating matters, Isaac's girl is among the Ishimura's staff, and, upon contact, the engineering team's shuttle is caught in a disruptive gravitational field, conveniently crashing, making escape seemingly impossible. The game gets underway as Isaac searches for his missing love, moving from repair mission to repair mission (the Ishimura is constantly a fix away from crumbling to space dust) in hopes of escaping the indominatible horror trying to assimilate him into a gooey, gangrenous collection of slithering slimy parts.

This is all pretty standard survival-horror stuff, but what elevates DEAD SPACE is the stellar game play and a number of interesting features. It does something few new titles try - it takes risk, veering from tried and true formulas and offering something new.

First off, the game looks FANTASTIC. Its menus are slick and intuitive and Isaac's RIG (an engineer's space suit) bundles all of the typical adventure game standbys into one, efficient, beautifully designed harness. Inventory, health and combat upgrades fuse with the suit in ingenious ways. As a result, the HUD (heads up display) is virtually nonexistent. Isaac's life bar is incorporated into his RIG (a sexy, glowing, segmented spinal column snakes up and down his back - when you lose health, you lose a segment) and the upgrade system (via "stores" and "workbenches") works like a charm.

Combat is tense and satisfying. Hinged upon a fabulously executed "dismemberment" mechanic, it gives DEAD SPACE its fresh, inventive feel. As an engineer, your weapons aren't laser guns or plasma death rays, but standard engineering equipment. A wide variety of futuro-utilitarian tools do a nice job eviscerating necromorphs - a flamethrower, a line cutter, a ripper (a saw blade like apparatus) - but my favorite (and oddly enough the first weapon you acquire), the plasma cutter, works like a pistol that fires three cutting beams. A secondary fire allows you to switch the axis of the beams from horizontal to vertical, which comes in extremely handy when taking the enemy apart. You see, this isn't your typical run and gun gorefest (though it has gore for days) - in order to kill the baddies you have to dismember them, severing all of the limbs from their heinous bodies until they are nothing more than incapacitated heaps of gristle.

Destroying the enemy requires more than filling them full of hot lead ala almost every other game on the market, rather it takes a bit of precision; this makes combat a frustrating, fun, freaky experience. Trying to line up a shoulder blade or kneecap while a flesh hungry mutant-thing barrels toward you is as nerve wracking as it sounds, but oh the joy when your plasma cutter does its job and sends a beastie's limbs a-flying, their bulbous ass losing balance and tumbling like slop to the Ishimura's industrial flooring.

I had such a blast slicing and dicing ugly, snarling mutant-zombie-things, the combat alone would have sold me, but a number of things had me nodding my head in astonishment. I most appreciated that you never get lost. The game has you creeping around the internals of a massive, gargantuan, humongous ship - it houses over two thousand crew members - and there are tons of nooks and crannies that look the same, and the scale feels right, it feels enormous, but developers Redwood Shores not only give you a fairly functional map, but a simple, click the right stick feature emits a thin blue light from Isaac's RIG that points you in the right direction. I hate games were I spend inordinate amounts of time wandering aimlessly (I'm busy dammit!). This nifty little addition borders on brilliance (I hope to see it in more dungeon crawling type games), preserving the pace and giving DEAD SPACE the pep of a fast, brutal horror movie rather than a slow grind where gaming elements trip you up and make you feel like you are playing a game.

Another element that took me aback, were the Zero G segments. I was leery - they seemed too gimmicky, too outer spacey, like this is a space game and we need our hero to spend some time in zero gravity, but leaping from floor to ceiling while dismembering necromorphs in mid air kicked mucho ass, and, more importantly, the three hundred and sixty degree movement added a bit of pizzazz and variety to engineering puzzles (another plus on the pacing side - nothing kills a game faster than repetitious puzzles).

So then, DEAD SPACE surprises with a slew of ingenious tricks, the combat rocks, and it is polished to perfection, but where's the scary? Fear not, my hardened horror fanatics - it's EVERYWHERE.

The game takes its design cues from horror films like ALIEN and EVENT HORIZON. It's freaky and dark and you never know when or where a necromorph is going to attack. The ship itself wreaks major havoc, and worse, Isaac's brain coughs up a fair share of unsettling hallucinations. The evil infecting the Ishimura goes beyond the slobbery, slimy mutations - in it's war for our hero's body (and soul) it torments him with ghosts and memory, loss, sorrow, regret, you name it, a host of human weaknesses set the stage for a few genuinely frightening sequences revolving around Isaac's search for his girl.

Of course, none of this would matter without a formidable collection of baddies to fend off. DEAD SPACE delivers in spades. The necromorphs are sick, half human, half goop messes that contort and thrash and click and exhibit all manner of horrible, horrible gesticulation while hunting our intrepid engineer. That dismemberment mechanic amps the thrill. If a necromorph gets too close, you have to run and then line up another shot, but sometimes there's nowhere to go and things get real ugly real fast. Oh the pain, the pain!

The necromorphs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Mutated from the remains of dead crew members, there are little bastards that scurry about and jump at you, there are dismembered heads with spindly legs and tentacles that fire projectiles, there are skinny little dudes with bulbous growths for hands that blow up when they get too close, there are long limbed terrors and fat, lumpy behemoths and particular nasty, armored beasts that can only be taken down by shooting them in between the plates protecting their gushy bodies.

Electronic Arts is famous for their sports games and movie ports (the abysmal LORD OF THE RINGS games), but have been making some impressive strides in publishing some original IPs (the ultra smooth, free runner, MIRROR'S EDGE, comes to mind). With DEAD SPACE they raise the bar and prove that the soulless evil empire, the man, the gaming machine that only exists to pump out hack jobs and suck away our hard earned dollars, can distribute true art. DEAD SPACE is a class act all the way, a pleasant surprise given EA's action-adventure pedigree. It's fun, inventive and the rarest of digital birds, a genuinely scary, disturbing gorefest that works from beginning to end.

Buy this game now!