Dead Space Chapters: the Story of All 12 Chapters

Dead Space is split into 12 chapters: New Arrivals, Intensive Care, Course Correction, Obliteration Imminent, Lethal Devotion, Environmental Hazard, Into the Void, Search and Rescue, Dead on Arrival, End of Days, Alternate Solutions and Dead Space. The 2023 remake keeps all 12 names in the same order. Eleven chapters take place on the USG Ishimura, deck by deck, and the last one on the planet Aegis VII below it. Full spoilers below. (Dead Space; Dead Space (2023))

This page goes chapter by chapter. For the plot as one story with the ending explained, see the Dead Space 1 story explained. (Dead Space)

Chapter 1: New Arrivals#

The CEC repair ship USG Kellion answers the Ishimura's distress call, and on the way in Isaac Clarke watches a worried message from his girlfriend, Nicole Brennan. The Kellion crashes into the Flight Deck. Necromorphs ambush the team in the flight lounge, and Isaac is cut off from security chief Zach Hammond and computer specialist Kendra Daniels. He finds a plasma cutter and repairs the tram system, and the wrecked Kellion explodes behind him. The chapter ends with Isaac taking a tram to the medical deck to find the captain. (Dead Space)

Chapter 2: Intensive Care#

On the Medical Deck, Hammond needs Captain Benjamin Mathius's RIG for access to the rest of the ship. The morgue is barricaded, so Isaac gathers thermite and a shock pad to blast through. Inside he finds the captain's body and a video of how he died: Dr. Terrence Kyne tried to sedate him and the needle went into his eye. An Infector turns the corpse into a Necromorph, and Isaac has to kill the captain to take the RIG. A dying survivor gives him the kinesis module, and Hammond warns that the ship is out of fuel and falling towards the planet. (Dead Space)

Chapter 3: Course Correction#

On the Engineering Deck, Hammond lays out two problems: no fuel in the engines, and the gravity centrifuge offline with trillions of tons of rock pulling the ship down. Isaac refuels the engines, restarts the centrifuge and ignites the engine by hand, pulling the Ishimura out of its decaying orbit. Logs here first describe the madness that had gripped the colonists on Aegis VII. (Dead Space)

Chapter 4: Obliteration Imminent#

The ship is now drifting into a debris field. On the Bridge, Kendra presses Hammond about the Marker, and he admits only that the crew brought an alien artefact aboard. Isaac reroutes power to the asteroid defence system, runs into his first Brute, crosses the hull under a meteor storm and mans a defence cannon by hand until Hammond gets the automatic tracking back. Along the way Hammond launches an escape pod with a trapped Necromorph inside to keep it out of the captain's nest, a choice that comes back four chapters later. (Dead Space)

Chapter 5: Lethal Devotion#

Kendra reports that something is poisoning the air in Hydroponics. Isaac goes back to the medical and science labs to make a poison for it, and meets Dr. Challus Mercer, a Unitologist who has been breeding Necromorphs. Mercer releases his creation, the Hunter, which regenerates any limb Isaac cuts off. It stalks him while he gathers the chemicals, until he freezes it in a cryogenic chamber. (Dead Space)

Chapter 6: Environmental Hazard#

On the Hydroponics Deck, corrupted creatures called Wheezers are pumping toxins into the air. Isaac kills them, resets the air filtration and feeds the poison into the system, but it doesn't kill the thing in Food Storage. He fights the Leviathan and kills it. Kendra then loses Hammond's RIG signal and suggests a new plan: send a distress beacon from the mining deck. (Dead Space)

In the remake, the botanist Elizabeth Cross survives to help Isaac here instead of only leaving logs. Under the Marker's influence, Isaac comes to see her as Nicole. (Dead Space (2023))

Chapter 7: Into the Void#

On the Mining Deck, Isaac fetches an SOS beacon, attaches it to an asteroid waiting to be smelted, shoots out the gravity tethers holding the rock and launches it into space. "Nicole" appears to him, apparently alive and well, and helps him reach the beacon. Kendra then finds that the comms array isn't responding, so nobody who hears the beacon can be answered. (Dead Space)

Chapter 8: Search and Rescue#

Back on the Bridge, the EarthGov ship USM Valor has answered. Isaac repairs the comms array and hears the Valor's message: it has picked up an Ishimura escape pod, the same one Hammond launched in chapter 4. Kendra needs the blast doors open to warn them, but the Slug is blocking them. Isaac kills it with a defence cannon, but the warning comes too late. The Valor's crew die, the ship rams into the Ishimura, and Hammond resurfaces to say its singularity core could power an escape shuttle. (Dead Space)

The remake drops the Slug. Instead the Leviathan, thrown into space in its first fight, has latched on to the comms antenna and has to be finished off there. (Dead Space (2023))

Chapter 9: Dead on Arrival#

Isaac clears radioactive debris in ore storage and boards the wrecked Valor, already overrun from the escape pod. He finds the singularity core, but Hammond is killed in front of him by an enhanced Brute. Isaac kills it and escapes the exploding ship with the core. Only he and Kendra are left of the Kellion team. (Dead Space)

In the remake Hammond's death is different: caught in a Marker hallucination, he is killed by the Necromorph that had been his crewman Chen. (Dead Space (2023))

Chapter 10: End of Days#

On the Crew Deck, Isaac collects the navigation cards needed to repair the executive shuttle. Kyne makes contact and argues that the Marker must go back to its pedestal on Aegis VII to stop the outbreak. Mercer's followers have killed themselves here, and Mercer is still at work. The Hunter thaws and comes back for Isaac, who traps it behind the shuttle and burns it to ash with a test firing of the engines. (Dead Space)

Chapter 11: Alternate Solutions#

On the Flight Deck, Isaac helps Kyne load the Marker onto the shuttle. As Kyne prepares to leave, Kendra shoots him dead and reveals she is an EarthGov agent sent to recover the Marker, which she says is a man-made copy built by the Sovereign Colonies. She flies off with it. "Nicole" meets Isaac in flight control, and together they recall the shuttle by remote, forcing Kendra into an escape pod. Isaac flies down to the colony with the Marker. (Dead Space)

Chapter 12: Dead Space#

At the Aegis VII Colony, Isaac carries the Marker to its pedestal past what's left of the colonists, and it releases a pulse that quiets the Hive Mind. Kendra returns, takes the Marker and makes Isaac watch the end of Nicole's message: Nicole killed herself before the Kellion ever arrived, and every conversation with her was the Marker working on him. The Hive Mind kills Kendra, Isaac kills the Hive Mind, and he escapes in the shuttle as the planet's cracked crust falls. In the final seconds a bloodied vision of Nicole lunges at him. (Dead Space)

The remake adds a secret ending in New Game Plus. If Isaac places all 12 Marker fragments, the shuttle is covered in Marker symbols at the end and he tells "Nicole" he has to build something first, pointing straight at Dead Space 2. (Dead Space (2023); Dead Space 2)

What comes after chapter 12#

Dead Space 2 picks Isaac up three years later, in 2511, on Titan Station's Sprawl. The Dead Space timeline shows where the Ishimura incident sits among the other Marker outbreaks, and Dead Space games in order lists every game. (Dead Space 2)