Going to the Resident Evil 4 comparison, obviously, you've made a slight reference, but, one of the things that I thought was so successful about Resident Evil 4 is that your character was a little sluggish. You mentioned that you sped your protagonist up a bit, but you're still not sprinting around -- it grounds you and makes you feel like, "OK, I've got to deal with this, whatever's right here. I can't just run away." Very claustrophobic.

CB: It's true. No, true, we don't have you anywhere near the speeds of, like, a shooter, where you're running, and you're blowing ammo out of your -- everything -- and [there's] just gunfire everywhere.

But we're more responsive than the traditional, sluggish, like "little girl with a knife in the corner" kind of thing, limping around on a broken foot. So, we don't have that, but we're in the middle. Like you said: trying to establish and stay within the survival horror genre, and then keep the mechanics upgraded in our own version as well. It's been a hell of a challenge to get it to work.

I don't know if this was deliberate on a visual design side, but the way the character looks almost drives that home for me; he almost looks like a tank or something.

CB: Yeah? How funny. Because he's carrying all this stuff around? I don't think that's part of why he's sluggish, nah. His visual design is people envisioning what a mining, an "oil rig floating in space" guy is going to need, right? Because the ship can decompress at any time -- it's kinda fragile -- and it's zero G, so we had him able to withstand that at any point in time.

Very functional.

CB: Yeah, it is; we tried to be really functional. Everything is driven by the fiction of why it is, what it is, so that you'd stay in a believable space. Science fiction is very disassociative -- like a hologram, and a creature with tentacles on its head, and it just makes you stop believing in things, so you're not really scared.

Horror is all about how everything is very believable, and you believe you're there... so when something gross happens, you're freaked out. So those two butt heads a lot, sci-fi and horror. Our game is a smaller part sci-fi, like the background setting... and then the horror is is really real. That's why Isaac looks real, and is like a human, and is all relatable. It's just not super-super sci-fi.

I don't know if there's much more that you wanted to say about your influences, but if you just wanted to speak on what you guys looked at -- because it definitely feels like a game that is trying to aggregate a number of things that are fairly modern, in terms of the past few years. Some of the landmark design decisions.

CB: Yeah. Absolutely, there's a lot of inspiration we draw from games that we consider are really good. Like you were saying, Half-Life 2, with their design of that whole movieless event; that was really a major... "We want to do that! We want to do that!"

And then the look of the game. We wanted our game to be so art-directed that people could look at a frame of Dead Space and say, "Oh yeah! That looks like Dead Space!" As opposed to, "It looks like that, looks like that, looks like that..." You know, people have stopped calling us Doom 3 now, because they've seen enough of our game, or go, "Maybe it's not Doom 3, but Doom 3 did that; they did their own look."

And Blade Runner has its own look, and Alien has its own look, right? So we wanted to go for our own, and it's really hard, because every look has been explored, right? But our art direction focused really hard on trying to give us that.

One of the interesting things, I think, about the art direction, is that unlike most games, the interface becomes an organic part of the art direction, instead of being another layer. It's almost like the Minority Report thing. I mean that, if someone takes a screenshot that includes the UI, I think then you really know...

CB: You're like, "Oh, that's Dead Space!" We're really proud of the whole UI thing. "Not break the fourth wall" became this big design ethos, and it kind of came out of the whole "no movie scenes", being immersive. So we started figuring out how we were going to keep everything all real, all the time, and we put everything on Isaac.

And then, fortunately, it was not a licensed property, so we had all the creative freedom we needed to make the fiction fit with what we needed. So that's always really powerful, right; you get where you need to go. And with that -- putting all the HUD and the UI in the screen worked for us really effectively.

The other thing I was going to tell you about was some of the gameplay influences, and how we came to make the game that we made. The influences as far as movies were Alien, and The Thing, as far as look goes, and some of the way the emotional feel of the game is supposed to be.

Because you know how Ripley gets to that point where she's not really supposed to be in this situation, and she ends up being alone. Then towards the end she's in that hallway, and it's just that flashing hallway, and it's kind of steamy, and she has to get past it to get to the shuttle. All she has is that shotgun with the flamethrower taped to it, and she knows she has to cross the hallway, and it's extremely likely that the Alien is in that hallway, and you sit there for a minute in that hallway, and she's like, "Aw, God, I've gotta go through this hallway."

That emotional moment -- like you don't know what's in the hallway, and it's just a hallway, but it's a really freaking scary hallway? That's what we were trying for in most of the design. It's like, if you tease people that don't know what's happening, everything is frightening; every blind corner is frightening. So those are the emotional targets that we're shooting for.

It's funny that you mention that, because most developers often cite that series as an influence, but most of them cite Aliens. The second one. It's funny, because I haven't actually seen that movie.

CB: Really?

Although I have seen Alien, the first one, and it's funny to hear you cite that instead of the other one.

CB: They're vastly different movies. Aliens is a brilliant movie. It's great, but it's vastly different from Alien; it's not a slower, simmering terror, kind of ponderous film by Ridley Scott. Aliens is like, "Wah! Bang bang!" you know?

You've got marines shootin' stuff, and it's a great, great, great sequel. But it's nothing like the first one, as far as the mood; and we're literally going for that first one, that mood that is just eerie and terrifying. And if you're playing it, you kind of get the sense that a lot of it's that combat tension; that, "I'm gonna die! I'm gonna die!" Yeah, so, we tried to hit it as hard as we could.