Players navigate level-based sections of the spaceship Ishimura, completing narrative-driven missions, solving physics puzzles within the environment, and fighting monsters called Necromorphs.

Attempts to weaponise the Marker and its copies led to the creation of a virus-like organism that infected corpses and transformed them into undead creatures called Necromorphs.

Following its discovery and the Ishimura's arrival, first the colonists, and then the ship's crew, begin suffering from hallucinations and eventually severe mental illness, climaxing in the emergence of the Necromorphs.

[14][17] The game's protagonist is Isaac Clarke, an engineer who travels on the Kellion to find out what happened to his girlfriend Nicole Brennan, the Ishimura's senior medical officer.

The Ishimura's illegal mining operation on Aegis VII, which was designated off-limits by the Earth Government, was meant to find the Red Marker for the Church of Unitology.

Isaac finds the two remaining survivors of the Ishimura crew: science officer Dr. Terrence Kyne, who has abandoned his belief in Unitology, and his colleague Dr. Challus Mercer, who has gone insane and worships the Necromorphs.

Their twin approaches of early demos and aggressive internal promotion ran counter to Electronic Arts practises for new games at the time.

[25] Electronic Arts eventually approved the game after seeing a vertical slice equivalent to one level, by which time all the basic gameplay elements had been settled upon.

[32] A two-person co-op multiplayer option was prototyped over a three-month period, but was eventually cut so that the team could focus on making a polished single-player experience.

To make the sequence work, the team shifted to a "layered" production structure which focused on finishing one section at a time, so that they could pinpoint problems with ease.

[34] The zero-G sections were in place alongside the setting, and the team performed extensive research on real space exploration and survival to get the atmosphere and movement right.

While technically easy to achieve by switching off gravity values in Havok, reprogramming sections to be convincing and fun to play presented different challenges.

[34] Due to the number of ways Isaac could die, his model was given dozens of points where he could be torn apart, and the death scenes became a part of the game's visual identity.

[22] A key issue for the team when designing the horror elements was not reusing the same scares too many times, and allowing for moments of safety for the player without completely losing the tension.

[33] When the game was still titled Rancid Moon, Schofield envisioned a scenario similar to Escape from New York, set on a prison planet in outer space.

[42] Creating Unitology was an easy part of development, and the team were fairly relaxed about the themes surrounding it as it was intended as an analogy of religion as a whole rather than specific criticism of a single belief system.

[40] Several elements made reference to other science fiction movies: Isaac's struggle was compared to that of Ellen Ripley from Alien; the dementia suffered by characters referenced Solaris; the sense of desperation mirrored that in the story of Sunshine.

Swenson was described as a jack of all trades, working on a wide array of elements and in particular creating impact sounds and handling the more scripted linear sections.

[51][52] Isaac is a masked silent protagonist, so the team worked to incorporate personality into his appearance and movements, with a large number of animations for his various conditions and actions.

[48] One of the tools they created was dubbed "Fear Emitters", which controlled the volume of music and sound effects based on distance from threats or key events.

[57][58] The final in-game score for Dead Space was three hours long and recorded over five months, several times more than Graves had composed for previous video game titles.

According to Creative Director Nick Braccia, the aim was to take pieces of the Dead Space lore and "blow [them] up" in ways that could only work in this environment.

[75][76] The two episodes were "Misplaced Affection", which told of a hiding medical technician remembering his attempted affair with another crewperson; and "13", which focused on a government sleeper agent planted aboard the Ishimura.

[11] Jeremy Jastrzab of PALGN summed the game up as "easily the most atmospherically intense, genuinely scary and well-built survival horror experience of this current generation".

[11][86][87] Several retrospective journalistic and website articles have ranked Dead Space as one of the greatest games of all time, pointing out its innovations in the survival horror genre.

[93][94][95][96][97][98] A 2011 GamePro article noted that the game promoted Electronic Arts as a potential home for original IPs, and generally found a balance between action and horror despite some contemporary reviews having mixed reactions.

[99] At release, Dead Space reached tenth place in North American game sales, compiled in November by the NPD Group.

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello said that the company would have to lower its expected income for the fiscal year due to multiple commercial disappointments including Dead Space.

[61] In February 2009, Electronic Arts CFO Eric Brown confirmed that all versions of Dead Space had sold one million copies worldwide.

The game also takes advantage of the newer consoles' solid-state drive systems to create a seamless experience between levels without any loading screens.