Dead Space Remake is a scary game! That in of itself is not a very controversial statement, I don't think. There are parts of it, however, that far outweigh others on the USG Ishimura's special sliding scale of disgusting to horrifying. The Mining Deck, a little over halfway through the game, is far and away the best example.
Every part of the Ishimura has some kind of horror thing going on, medical is full of dead bodies that could all jump up and attack you. Hydroponics is full of blight, but the Mining Deck is loud. That may not sound like it's the most inherently scary thing in the world, considering the other things you go up against, but in terms of making the player constantly uncomfortable, Mining Deck has it all beat.
There's a lot to find on the mining deck, and all of it is awful to look at. Very little of it is monsters, or the fleshy growth that infests so much of the rest of the ship, though, it's usually just the terrible machines that are all supposed to be there. Big devices designed to blast ore out of space rock, or incinerators meant to melt down any leftover waste, and none of them ever take a break from generating decibel shattering noise, especially not when you want them to.
The scariest part of Mining Deck isn't the monsters, or the games most gruesome audio log, it's this endless cacophony. You are never not around some huge machine making a terrible symphony of industrial noise. The entire level is covered from top to bottom in banging fans, spinning drills, lasers, fires and every other dangerous thing you've been repurposing this entire game to fight off the Necromoprh's, only here they're still being used for the intended purpose, for the moment. Somehow, their intended purpose makes my skin crawl more than using the force gun tool to blast all of a monsters skin off.
If a big part of cosmic horror is the idea that something gets into your head, and you can't get it out, I'd say the constant industrial noise of the mining deck counts pretty cleanly towards that. It may not seem like the best outward candidate for the scariest part of such a famous horror game, but the Dead Space Remake makes an excellent case that somehow, this place that hasn't changed nearly as much as the other areas, is the scariest of them all.
