If Dead Space was the Stephen King of survival horror, then Dead Space: Extraction is surely the Garth Marenghi version. It might be slightly too harsh to compare a master of the craft to a stripped-down parody of the genre, but that’s exactly what this feels like – a horror game without anything that makes horror work.

For starters it doesn’t know what game it wants to be. It’s dressed in the skin of a lightgun game, but it’s screaming about being a serious survival horror. It’s a lot like a bloke who’s turned up to a fancy dress party as pumpkin but keeps telling everyone within earshot that he swears blind he’s come as James Bond. At some point you’ll need to have a quiet word with him and inform him that James Bond doesn’t dress as an orange beach ball, but that moment keeps getting further and further away because the whole concept is so ridiculous it borders on being charming. A lot like this game.

The game is set in the hours before Isaac Clarke and his team arrived at the USG Ishimura to find it overrun by Necromorphs. At the start, the marker is discovered and hoisted to the surface, causing an instant outbreak of batshit craziness in the colonists. You spend most of the game in the rather awesome shoes of Nate McNeill, a – get this – SPACE COP working on the colony where the marker was found. His CV must look fantastic, ‘Space Cop, Space War Veteran’ – it’s like hitting every point on a list of really cool things to be. McNeill is forced to flee for his life as the madness spreads to every corner of the colony, armed only with a rivet gun, his friends, and his balls of steel.

Extraction’s route takes you on a guided tour of the fairly massive colony (and the utterly enormous Ishimura) by the most boring path imaginable. Get used to seeing empty metal corridors, grey pipes and vent shafts. Yes, despite the original game working overtime to give you a huge variety of locations, Extraction takes the bland road and opts to give you a system of tunnels and aquaducts. While there are a fair few rooms and locations you’ll recognise, they actually feel like snatched-away glimpses of hope. Hydroponics, the morgue, the bridge, the shuttle bay. Every time you enter one of these areas you’ll think that things are finally about to become visually interesting. But, no, these are more like gift shops on your tour of the museum of pipes and sewers. Of course if you haven’t played the original game, you probably won’t notice.