Another peek at the Dead Space remake is just around the corner, gurgling

On Friday, developer Motive will livestream a new progress report on its upcoming remake of EA horror classic Dead Space. The studio teased the stream on Twitter, implying that the topic of this behind-the-scenes tour will be all the noisy gurgling, clanking, and distorted whispering that you have to have in a game about dismembering alien-human hybrids on a ghost spaceship.

“👂 closely,” the developer wrote.

The stream will start Friday at 10 am Pacific on YouTube. If it's really about sound design, then perhaps it'll take us to a few locations on the mining ship Ishimura to demo the remake's spatial audio. Or maybe we'll just hear all the squishing sounds alien DNA can produce.

Whatever the stream is about, it could be fairly substantial, at least in comparison to the old scary corridor teaser embedded in the tweet above. The Dead Space remake was announced last year and is probably a ways off still, but the previous developer livestream wasn't as coy with in-progress footage as you might expect: Motive showed us prototype footage of its rebuilt alien dismembering tech. (See the Twitch clip embed below for a clip of a Necromorph's flesh being mined off its bones.)

“The body destruction technology that we're developing, that is allowing us to really remove the flesh off of the bones of the enemy, and to give you a good sense not only of gore … but also of how much damage am I doing to the opponent?” creative director Roman Campos-Oriola said at the time. “Is my weapon actually useful against this one? How close is it to dying? That's something that to me is really interesting.”

As that quote implies, the new Dead Space is embracing modern technology. It's a full rebuild of the game using EA's Frostbite Engine, and somewhat like the Resident Evil 2 remake, it won't be a 'shot for shot' replica of the original. Thanks to SSDs, there won't be any loading screens, for instance.

Regardless of the changes—and we really don't know how significant they'll be—the Dead Space remake will just be called “Dead Space,” as far as we're aware. On that note, it occurs to me that “Dead Space” is a funny name for a game. It's two of the most general words you could choose to describe the contents of the game, and the only other context in which I can imagine hearing it is an interior designer's critique of a dining room's poorly utilized corner, and yet somehow it works as a horror title. (It is apparently a medical term, but not one related to becoming an alien-zombie.) According to an old dev diary, Dead Space was briefly called “Rancid Moon” during development, which leads me to imagine a rotting cheese-moon. I'm not sure which I prefer. Even if the “moon” bit doesn't make sense because the game ended up being set on a mining ship, it's a cool name.

There's no release date for the Dead Space remake yet, but we might get a hint as to how far along the remake is during Friday's stream.