Dead Space 2 director on designing the eye-poke scene: ‘I could barely watch it’

‘I remember everyone in the room still was cringing. That was the only thing in Dead Space that would do that.’

If you’ve played through Dead Space 2, you remember the “stick a needle in your eye” scene. 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. This data has to be inserted through his eye into his brain via a needle, because sure. 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.

I played Dead Space 2 when it came out in 2011, and this scene has haunted me ever since. 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.

Wright Bagwell: So I wasn’t heavily involved in writing the dialogue or the story. 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. I remember that there were some folks working on trying to figure out how some of the final scenes played out in the game. 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. 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?”

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. It was this fun thing to work on. For a game like Dead Space, it’s of vital importance that the player stays immersed. 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. 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. Because it didn’t really tell you. It was so fun designing it, because I thought, the point here isn’t to make this really difficult. 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.

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.

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 think the left stick moves the little laser beam that came out of the bottom of the needle. The left stick moves that around, and then it changed color when it went over Isaac’s pupil. 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. I think it went from red to blue, or something like that. 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. A door he had to go to or a button you have to press, those are always cyan. So the player would learn that that was a positive signal. So it changed color, and then of course the second thing players do, they press the A button. If I remember correctly, the A button made [the needle] go down, and the B button or the Y button or something made it go back up. We tested that idea, and players figured it out really quickly. 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. Again, the goal was to make something that we didn’t have to explain it all.