Dead Space: Ignition Story Explained

Dead Space: Ignition is a short downloadable prequel released in October 2010, a few months before Dead Space 2. It's told as a motion comic, and it follows Franco Delille, an engineer on Titan Station, through the night in 2511 when the Necromorphs first broke loose. The story branches, so there's more than one version of what happens, but every route ends in the same place: Franco opening Isaac Clarke's cell in the opening minutes of Dead Space 2. This page covers every branch, so it has full spoilers. (Dead Space: Ignition; Dead Space 2)

Before the story begins#

Three years earlier, Isaac had survived the Ishimura and Aegis VII. EarthGov picked him up and brought him to Titan Station, a vast city also known as the Sprawl, along with another survivor, Nolan Stross. Under Director Hans Tiedemann, EarthGov mined both men's minds to build a new Marker, the Site 12 Marker, and kept Isaac locked in the Titan Memorial Medical Center with his memory suppressed. By 2511 the station was seeing a spike in violence and madness, just as Aegis VII had before its fall. The Church of Unitology wanted Isaac for itself. (Dead Space: Aftermath; Dead Space 2; Dead Space: Ignition)

Act one: a shift full of faults#

Franco's supervisor, Weaver, sent him to the CEC Facility to fix a broken door. His girlfriend, Sarah Andarsyn, an officer with the city police, came along to help. Franco noticed the door had been tampered with. The next job, a computer fault, turned out to be a virus. It felt like someone was breaking things on purpose. (Dead Space: Ignition)

Then came a spacewalk to repair a damaged solar panel. Franco hated spacewalks, and when he started to drift off the hull, Sarah grabbed him. A meteor strike had breached the airlock seal while they were outside, and they barely got back in. Weaver called with news of an "outbreak" somewhere on the station that he couldn't explain, and told them to stay on duty. Franco received a coded message on a personal device. When Sarah asked who it was, he said it was a wrong number. (Dead Space: Ignition)

At the tram station a crowd came stampeding in, chased by a Slasher. Sarah tried to shoot it, was knocked down in the crush and lost her gun, then grabbed a plasma cutter and cut it apart. More creatures came. Franco herded the survivors onto a tram and Sarah held the platform until the doors shut. (Dead Space: Ignition)

Act two: the lights or the hostages#

On the tram, Weaver told Franco the lights had failed in Sector 45 and security needed them back. At the same moment Sarah's old partner, Hodgkens, called her for help with a hostage situation in Sector 27. Here the story splits for the first time. (Dead Space: Ignition)

Sector 45. Franco and Sarah crossed the dark sector until Necromorphs drove them into the vents, which came out in the Titan Station Church of Unitology. A priest welcomed them. Franco repaired the church's security shields while Sarah, at his suggestion, looked round the mausoleum where the dead were kept in cryostasis, and came back unnerved. Afterwards Franco got the sector's lights back on. (Dead Space: Ignition)

Sector 27. A computer engineer called Armado Creeg had gone mad, convinced the government was spying on him and that his family was in on it. He was holding them at gunpoint and had hacked the building's security cameras to watch the officers outside. Franco took the system down, Hodgkens's team stormed in, Creeg was killed and his family was saved. (Dead Space: Ignition)

Act three: the paths split again#

From the church. Heading for the hospital, Franco and Sarah watched a group of survivors cut down in front of them. They could take the direct route or the longer, quieter way through the Inverted City, the lower half of the Public Sector. On the direct route they found survivors at the hospital waiting for rescue. Franco fixed a shuttle on the roof that had been sabotaged and got the wounded aboard, but as it lifted off, Sarah was caught by the Pack, a swarm of small, fast Necromorphs, and dragged down. Via the Inverted City, they rode a maintenance lift down, helped two engineers with a damaged gravity generator, and found the lower city silent. In a school Sarah insisted on opening a sealed panic room, hoping for children, and found only a Necromorph and the dead. When she finally demanded to know what Franco was hiding, he shot her as she climbed through a hatch, telling her he couldn't be delayed any more. (Dead Space: Ignition)

From the hostage scene. Weaver ordered Franco to seal off the levels below them. Franco was horrified, since it meant leaving everyone down there to die, but Sarah talked him into it: losing some people was better than losing everyone. They headed for the outer rim to evacuate and met no one alive on the way. When a Slasher burst out of a ceiling vent, they realised the creatures were using the vents to get past the quarantine. Then came the last choice. If they took the spacewalk Weaver wanted, to fix life support, they learned that Necromorphs could survive vacuum. One tore Sarah's suit. Franco patched it, but her air ran out before he could get her back inside, and he couldn't revive her. If they went the interior route instead, they cleared a smoke-filled corridor and Franco got another message he wouldn't explain. When the creatures came out of the vents, he hacked a door open, stepped through and let it close on Sarah, telling her she'd understand "in the next life". (Dead Space: Ignition)

So two of the four deaths are accidents, and on those Franco tries hard to save her. The other two are his doing, and even then he looks like a man who doesn't want to do it. (Dead Space: Ignition)

The ending explained#

Every route comes together in Act Four. Alone, Franco made his way through the hospital to the psych ward, thinking over everyone he'd lost that night. He hacked his way into the cell block, found the right pod and opened it. The last shot shows the patient's name: Isaac Clarke. (Dead Space: Ignition)

The scene continues as the opening of Dead Space 2. Franco told Daina Le Guin he'd found their target and tried to tell the confused, straitjacketed Isaac that he was in terrible danger and needed to trust him. Before he could explain, an Infector stabbed him through the chest and head and he turned into a Necromorph in front of Isaac. Isaac ran, and Daina's voice guided him out of the hospital. (Dead Space 2)

So what was Franco doing? The answer is in the audio logs he left behind, which turn up in Dead Space 2. Franco was a Unitologist working under covert orders from Daina, and his mission was to free "Target Zero", Isaac, from the asylum. The coded message he brushed off as a wrong number was most likely from his handlers. Sarah was a problem from the start. She didn't know about his faith or his orders, and his logs complain that she kept slowing him down. One log reports that his "partner situation" has been resolved, which is the canon confirmation that she died that night, though not of how. (Dead Space 2; Dead Space: Ignition)

What Ignition doesn't settle is how much Franco knew. He spends the night trying to save people, and the quarantine order clearly horrifies him, which doesn't fit someone who wanted the Necromorphs loose. It's likely he was a pawn, like the Unitologist saboteur Karrie Norton in the mobile game, given a single job without the full picture of what the Church had planned. The tampered doors and virus-hit computers of Act One hint at that wider sabotage, though Ignition never names who was behind it. (Dead Space: Ignition; Dead Space (mobile))

His reward was the same as everyone else's. The Church needed Isaac out of his cell and didn't much care what happened to the man who opened it. (Dead Space 2)

Where it fits#

Ignition runs alongside the 2011 mobile game, which follows the saboteur known as Vandal across the same hours, and leads straight into Dead Space 2 story explained. Before it comes the 2011 film, explained in Dead Space: Aftermath (2011 Film) Explained, which shows how Stross ended up on Titan. The Dead Space timeline puts all of these in order. (Dead Space: Ignition; Dead Space (mobile); Dead Space 2)