The grunt soldiers chant in devotion, they hobble around, at times on all fours, their heads cinched up in sacks, their tortured bodies carved up to ribbons, with twisted sharp blades where their hands once were.

The conceit that cultists put the Necromorphs on a pedestal and disfigure themselves to 'transcend' is a nifty one. This is easily the most provocative bit of dark imagination in all of Dead Space 3, and it represents both smart art and gameplay design. In the time since Unitologist leader Jacob Danik was killed on Tau Volantis, a fringe group of Unitologists (the craziest amongst the crazies) led by a zealot named Randall Carr have cobbled together an extremist uprising focused on a much more disturbing way of expressing their faith: they cut off each other’s hands and carve themselves up in a sort of hardcore Necromorph cosplay. Once aboard the Terra Nova, things take a turn for the bizarre and. This involves a long series of backtracking through the buildings, hallways, and the many, many elevators of Tau Volantis, and eventually up to the elevators of the Terra Nova, the giant Sovereign Colonies starship hanging in the orbiting flotilla where the majority of the space sections of Dead Space 3 played out. Awakened is spread across three separate beats, following Isaac and Carver as they attempt to escape from Tau Volantis and get back to Earth in one piece. Granted, we are talking about a game where alien sculptures wub-wub and transform people into spider-like necro-beasts with super-vulnerable limbs, so you do sort of need to just play along. The survival rate for that is estimated at around zero. After all, in the finale, they were caught in a free-fall through the heart of a cataclysmic atmospheric storm kickstarted by a moon-sized Necromorph collapsing into the planet.

That’s appropriate, because I seriously wanted to know the same thing.

Awakened picks up the story as Isaac and co-op sidekick John Carver attempt to figure out how they actually survived.

If you finished the main game and watched the credits roll to the end, you know that Isaac Clarke is alive.

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