Arms free, you still have to find a way to defend yourself, and relief only comes when you finally get hold of your first weapon.

It is an incredibly tense sequence, as you duck and weave past explosions, and dodge the spiky limbs of the Necromorphs trying to impale you. This opening salvo has you running through the psychiatric ward as all hell breaks loose, unable to free your arms and defend yourself. And then something to goes horrible wrong the Necromorph turn up and start murdering everyone in sight. After being picked up and dumped into a hospital for a few years, you pick up control of him as he wakes up, bound to a table and strapped tightly into a straitjacket. Understandably, he was pretty traumatized by all this, and has gone a bit mental.

Also, his missus was on board the ship and is, predictably, dead. However, instead of finding Alan Grant from Jurassic Park gouging out his own eyeballs, he found that the crew had dug up some alien artefact called “The Marker” during their expeditions and an outbreak of a horrible alien virus had turned them all into disgusting, meaty monsters – the Necromorph. Dead Space was pretty much Event Horizon. In Dead Space 2 you pick up the story of Isaac Clarke, A simple engineer stuck with a ham-fisted tribute name, who ended up on board the ‘Planet Cracker’ class spaceship the Ishimura. One of the games that came close was the original Dead Space. Even its direct sequel couldn’t better it, despite practically copying it scene for scene. You’re left going on pure instinct – a baptism of fire – and few games come close to the heart-in-mouth intensity of this introductory sequence. You’re subjected to this with only a bare bones understanding of how the game works.

The opening fifteen minutes of Resident Evil 4 will forever be part of videogaming legend encountering the Ganados, the long walk to the village, and the sudden siege of villagers coming at you in ways you’d never experienced before.

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