![]() And I was so happy, because even people on the team were figuring this out really quickly, and I realized we didn’t need to tutorialize this at all. We tested that idea, and players figured it out really quickly. If I remember correctly, the A button made go down, and the B button or the Y button or something made it go back up. So it changed color, and then of course the second thing players do, they press the A button. So the player would learn that that was a positive signal. A door he had to go to or a button you have to press, those are always cyan. Blue, that cyan color that we used for the user interface in Dead Space - cyan was the color that we used to help guide you through the world. I think it went from red to blue, or something like that. So players would learn really, really quickly that you could move this thing, and it was telling you by changing color what you had to do. The left stick moves that around, and then it changed color when it went over Isaac’s pupil. I think the left stick moves the little laser beam that came out of the bottom of the needle. So the idea was that you would learn how to play this game at first doing what I thought was really intuitive, which is - you know, the first thing players do, if they don’t know what to do, is use the sticks. I wanted the player to get a really deep sense of anxiety about this, which I thought would come naturally from the fact that you are driving a needle into your eyeball, but I wanted to amplify it by having Isaac on the screen, reflecting his anxiety, too. Again, I wanted you to be more immersed and horrified by what you had to do, more than the fact that you were deeply challenged by it. It was so fun designing it, because I thought, the point here isn’t to make this really difficult. I wanted it to be a minigame, but I wanted it to be something that was so intuitive that it required no thought, and I wanted the player to feel like they were discovering how to play this little minigame and being horrified by the realization of what they had to do. And what I didn’t want to do is to have a little minigame that you played where we had to give you a tutorial and break your immersion, and get you into some kind of abstract thinking mode, where you’re thinking about playing some kind of minigame. For a game like Dead Space, it’s of vital importance that the player stays immersed. I took that idea and ran with it, and I wrote a design for what we called “the eye-poke scene.” I remember it vividly, because I actually wrote the design pretty quickly. And I remember somebody said, “What if we try to make that into a moment that happens in the game?” And then we were talking about, like, “What if you stick this needle into his brain somehow to extract information?” And I remember one day - if I remember correctly, I might not be right about this - but there was a producer, I think John Calhoun, who threw out the idea of the old children’s saying, “Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.” That came up. I remember that there were some folks working on trying to figure out how some of the final scenes played out in the game. But the guys who were working on the story and the writing, they came up with this thing where they were incorporating children’s nursery rhymes into the game, as part of Isaac’s hallucinations and journey into insanity. ![]() Wright Bagwell: So I wasn’t heavily involved in writing the dialogue or the story. Polygon: Why don’t you start by telling me the conception of this scene? ![]() In honor of Halloween, I reached out to Dead Space 2 creative director Wright Bagwell to ask him to explain why he and the rest of the designers at Visceral Games did this to Isaac’s brain and to mine. I played Dead Space 2 when it came out in 2011, and this scene has haunted me ever since. During this horrifyingly interactive scene, the player must guide that needle into Isaac’s pupil while he’s strapped into the machine, twitching in barely contained agony. This data has to be inserted through his eye into his brain via a needle, because sure. Near the end of the game, protagonist Isaac Clarke climbs into an eye surgery contraption so he can receive some data about the monsters he’s been fighting. If you’ve played through Dead Space 2, you remember the “stick a needle in your eye” scene.
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