isaac clarke shouldn't talk
and in dead space (2008), he doesn’t.
(spoilers for that game, and minor ones for its sequel, to follow. we’re not going to talk about the remake and its choice to give isaac a voice, largely because I haven’t played it and am not really interested in doing so.)
silent protagonists are a tradition in video games, going as far back as when dialogue was an impracticality (does pac-man’s WOKKA WOKKA count as dialogue?). even well after dialogue (of the voice-acted or text variety) was not just possible but expected in video games, silent protagonists are easy to find: Link, Doomguy, Gordon Freeman, Mario, Crono. in JRPGs in particular, the notion of a wordless player character is something of a narrative trope.
generally speaking, a voiceless player character means that a specific character’s expressions, reactions, and so on are not being transposed on top of, or in contrast to, the player’s own reactions. in other words, the character is silent because you can’t say two things at the same time, and the game is attempting to set up a framework where you are the character. it’s a fundamental tool for player-character immersion.
I’ve talked about this before (“silent protagonists are ciphers”), but here’s also a youtube video, pulling from the book The Game Designer's Playbook, that lays this out as something of a generalizable rule:
“the goal of silent protagonists is to create a character who is inherently relatable through a lack of definite features, giving players a ‘blank slate’ on which to project their own motivations and personality. for most games, the real defining quality of a ‘blank slate’ protagonist is simply their silence. even in a game with a significant narrative context, silent protagonists can work without disrupting the story. in games where a total lack of dialogue is inappropriate, other characters may remark on the player character’s reluctance to speak. another common choice is to provide some companion characters, which speak for the protagonist in a sense, commenting on the situation and interacting with the player’s character. in a game where the main character is primarily a vessel for players to inhabit, companions can help to provide some extra personality and opportunities for dialogue.”
I think this is broadly right in cases like Link from the Zelda franchise, but it doesn’t account for what silence is doing for isaac in the original dead space.
some of it applies, sure. isaac has companions — kendra and hammond — who speak to him throughout the game to give him (you) exposition on the plot, not to mention directions on where to go and what to do. they aren’t quite as irritating in this respect as, say, link’s fairy companion navi screaming “hey listen!” every few moments — and notably they are not solely serving as companions, instead having their own motivations and characterization that sometimes puts them directly at odds with isaac instead of at his side.
otherwise, though, it’s weird to think about isaac as a “vessel for players to inhabit” because he is a person with his own expertise and motivation. his silence, his lack of reaction in almost all instances to moments of plot, doesn’t make those things more accessible to the player, but more opaque.
he’s not just voiceless but faceless for the entirety of the game’s playable runtime; in the opening cutscene, his helmet materializes over his face with his back to the camera, and it never lowers again until the game’s final camera shot. (more on that in a minute.) players do not get to see his expressions or reactions (unless he’s being eviscerated by some horror or another) in a situation of extreme distress or panic for everyone else around him.
and it’s not like isaac clarke is some hardened, nigh-sociopathic alien killer; he’s just an engineer, brought along on what he believes to be a reconnaissance mission to a ship where his girlfriend works. he has a human motivation to do this and a blue-collar job; why then is he stalking around the ishimura like michael myers, too stoic even to be called “grim” in his work? the players’ reactions — to monsters, to betrayals, to revelations — become not replacements for isaac’s, but contradictions to them, or to the lack thereof.
and all these people talking to isaac seem to think he’s perfectly capable of responding — indeed, talk to him as though he is responding. how else to make sense of dr. kyne’s eventual trust, or hammond and kendra’s continuing dependence? are they hearing something the player isn’t? is everyone in this universe just a weirdo, no moreso than hulking silent weirdo isaac himself?
dead space’s AAA credentials reinforce the weirdness here. every other person in this game has fully-voiced dialogue and an expressively animated face. at no point does any one of them comment on or allude to isaac being quiet, overly reserved, weirdly unresponsive, or anything else. it is a jarring gap that forces the player away from the character, rather than closer to him.
and that distance is crucial for the real story of the game, which isn’t so much the “religious cult embraces/becomes monstrous aliens” angle as it is isaac’s own deep, deep repression and isolated mental state. this is made manifest in the form of the last recording of nicole.
a brief recap if you didn’t play or don’t remember: nicole’s recording is played in its apparent entirety at the top of the game, framed as a cry for help, establishing Isaac’s motivation for being here in the first place. only at the end of the game is it revealed that we did not watch the entire video — that the video is in fact a suicide note, the act itself included. kendra “reveals” this to isaac by way of telling him to watch the “whole” video.
had isaac watched this before and simply rejected it? it’s impossible to imagine a scenario where the guy cut off a message like this midstream without at least strongly suspecting where it was going. but at the game’s start, it’s presented without any flinch or jarring cut; at the start of the game, isaac has convinced himself (and therefore us) that nicole is alive and needs his help.
is this the dastardly alien Marker influencing his thoughts and distorting his worldview to get him to come do whatever “make us whole” is supposed to mean? is it just old-fashioned denial and repression? kendra calls him “insane” because of this rejection of reality; is she right?
it doesn’t ultimately matter. what does matter is that in this scene where we get to watch the whole video, we also get the only notable time in the entire game where isaac reacts to something — not verbally, but physically, holding his head and buckling over in grief as the video plays. it is an astonishingly effective moment because of our distance to isaac, because up to this point it’s been hard to imagine him reacting to anything; it is an extremely visible crack in the wall on an otherwise opaque protagonist.
and even this, an actual reaction, may bump against the player’s own perception of events! even if you haven’t sussed out the truth about Nicole by this point, it’s very hard to imagine she’s still alive in here, certainly not in tip-top shape the way she briefly appears in the (conveniently all at-a-distance) sequence mid-game where she helps isaac through a series of doors. isaac’s stifling not just the reality but the possibility of that reality to a point that’s troubling at best.
this may be the only example of an unreliable silent narrator I’ve seen in media? ironically this might also represent the best way to achieve the effect of an unreliable protagonist in games: take the baseline assumption that player and character are unified beings — the latter a vessel for the former — and twist it around itself until it snaps. this approach gives dead space shocking amounts of nuance for a AAA Xbox 360-era title.
even the very last scene, which is a clever riff on the classic carrie style of jump-scare ending, is unnerving for its long-awaited reveal of isaac’s face. he takes off the mask, and he’s just… the most generic-looking guy possible, with a flat mouth and a blank expression. “that’s… him?” you might ask yourself, searching for traces of his true personality, distracted enough that the jolt of corpse-monster-nicole hits you like a freight truck before the credits roll.
all of this capacity for discomfort and nuance evaporates in dead space 2, and a big reason for that is that isaac talks now, and also he sounds and behaves mostly like nathan drake from uncharted. “that’s a bad idea,” someone tells him mid-game, and he quips back “I’m full of bad ideas.” (someone was so proud of this trite exchange that it gets a callback at the end!)
isaac’s guilt and repression become exposited text instead of weirdly understated subtext; the game world becomes mostly a generic take on aliens with a cult-y twist.
give me silent weirdo isaac clarke over that any day.