LoreReads
The Marker's history and the side stories the games only hint at
EA's science fiction horror series was made mostly by Visceral Games (first called EA Redwood Shores) between 2008 and 2013. Engineer Isaac Clarke goes from the mining ship USG Ishimura to the Sprawl on Saturn's moon Titan and then to the ice planet Tau Volantis, fighting Necromorphs, the dead brought back by alien artifacts called Markers, and the Church of Unitology that worships them. Spin-offs and story add-ons fill in the people around him, and Motive's 2023 remake retells the first game.
The books were part of the plan from the start. Antony Johnston's comics cover the Aegis VII colony and the Ishimura once Isaac has left it, Ian Edginton's Liberation sets up Dead Space 3, and Brian Evenson's two novels go back centuries to the first Marker and the man Unitology is built around.
Play Dead Space first, because several of the books give away something it saves for late. After that, Martyr is the one book to read, and Liberation is worth an hour right before Dead Space 3.
Play the games in release order, spin-offs and add-ons included, and read each book after the game it builds on. Almost everything assumes you've been on the Ishimura, so Dead Space goes first. Johnston's comic about the Aegis VII colony comes next, then Extraction, which shows the same collapse, then Martyr and Salvage, as they were published. Ignition leads into Dead Space 2, and Severed and Catalyst follow it. Liberation goes right before Dead Space 3, since it ends where the game starts, and Awakened closes things out. It suits anyone who wants the books without losing any of the first game's surprises.
It's 2508, and the planet-cracker USG Ishimura has gone silent over the planet Aegis VII. Isaac Clarke, a ship systems engineer, joins the small repair crew sent to find out why, partly because his girlfriend Nicole is a medical officer on board. The docking goes wrong, the crew is stranded, and the ship turns out to be full of reanimated, rearranged bodies. Isaac has his mining tools and a lot of dark corridors ahead of him.
The last five weeks of the mining colony on Aegis VII. Colonists dig up an artifact they take to be a sacred Marker, in an illegal operation the Church of Unitology is paying for. As it comes out of the ground, people start turning paranoid and violent, and security sergeant Abraham Neumann tries to hold the colony together while the Ishimura arrives overhead to collect what they've found.
The first game only lets you see the colony on Aegis VII through logs and wreckage. This is the colony while it's still alive: Neumann, colony leader Hanford Carthusia and the dig that started everything, written by Antony Johnston, who also worked on the first game's story, and drawn by Ben Templesmith of 30 Days of Night. It's short, a sitting or two. Titan's 2013 paperback also adds a short comic about Nicole Brennan's posting to the Ishimura. Read it after the first game and before Extraction, which shows the same collapse through other eyes.
Back on Aegis VII, the colony has dug up its Marker and people are starting to see things and turn on each other. Detective Nathan McNeill, security officer Gabe Weller and a handful of colonists, Lexine Murdoch among them, try to get off the planet as the outbreak spreads from the colony up to the Ishimura in orbit. It's an on-rails shooter, first made for the Wii, that changes viewpoint between survivors from chapter to chapter.
Some two hundred years before the games, geophysicist Michael Altman is working on the Yucatán coast near the Chicxulub crater when a strange signal turns up from deep under the seabed. The signal leads to something buried in the crater. Soon people in the nearby town are seeing their dead, and Altman is the one asking the questions the people paying for the dig don't want asked.
The games are full of Altman, from the Unitologist chants of "Altman be praised" to a church that treats him as a prophet. This is the man himself and the first Marker, centuries before the Ishimura. Evenson writes horror outside the games too, and the slow way the Marker gets into ordinary people's heads works better here than in most tie-ins. It's a slow burn rather than an action story. If you read one Dead Space book, make it this one, but play the first game before you start, because it gives away something Dead Space saves for late.
Some time after the first game, a crew of illegal scavengers called the Magpies finds the Ishimura drifting and starts stripping it for parts. They aren't alone on board. EarthGov agents are racing to claim the ship, the Church of Unitology wants what it might still hold, and the dead crew of the Ishimura are starting to get back up.
This is the Ishimura after Isaac leaves it, told through a crew you've never met, so there's nobody from the games to follow. The plot is thin, and what you'll remember is Christopher Shy's painted art, washed in greens and blues and unlike anything else in the series. It's an original graphic novel rather than collected issues, and a quick read. It's optional: nothing in the later games depends on it, but it's a good extra hour on the Ishimura once you've finished Dead Space.
Franco Delille is an engineer on the Sprawl, a city built into the remains of Saturn's moon Titan, when the station's systems start failing and people start dying. He works his way through jammed doors and broken security as the outbreak spreads around him. The story plays out in motion-comic scenes between hacking puzzles, with choices that branch toward different endings.
Three years after the Ishimura, Isaac wakes up in a straitjacket in a hospital on the Sprawl, with no memory of how he got there, just as the station is overrun. He's still seeing things and someone still wants him, and this time there's a city of civilians on the station with him. Unlike the silent hero of the first game, Isaac now talks.
After the Dead Space 2 campaign
Gabe Weller, the security officer from Extraction, is stationed on the Sprawl with Lexine, now pregnant, when the outbreak starts. In two short chapters set during the events of Dead Space 2, he fights through parts of the station to reach her, with the station's own security working against him. It plays like the main game, with Gabe in place of Isaac.
Brothers Istvan and Jensi grow up in the poorest dome on the planet Vinduaga. Istvan has never been like other people, and Jensi has spent his life keeping him out of trouble. When Istvan is sent off-world to a high-security prison, Jensi follows to find a way to keep him safe. Meanwhile EarthGov is tampering with technology from the Black Marker, found on Earth eighty years earlier, and the prison is hiding a secret.
This fills in the decades after Martyr, when EarthGov tries to turn what the Black Marker taught it into something it can use, which is the thread that leads to the Markers in the games. Most of the book is about the two brothers, so the Marker history arrives slowly. It's less important than Martyr, and you won't miss anything in the games without it. Read it after Dead Space 2, when the second game has shown you what EarthGov's Marker research ends up doing.
Right before starting Dead Space 3
EarthGov soldier John Carver is home with his wife Damara and son Dylan, and not doing well at it, when a Necromorph outbreak hits. He ends up working with Ellie Langford, a survivor of an earlier outbreak, and Captain Robert Norton, following a lead on where the Markers came from while Jacob Danik's Unitologists close in. It's set shortly before Dead Space 3.
Played alone, Dead Space 3 keeps Carver as a supporting character, and his own story sits in co-op side missions you might never see. This is that story: his family, how he falls in with Ellie and Norton, and why Danik matters to him. It's a short graphic novel by Ian Edginton, painted by Christopher Shy, and it leads straight into the opening of Dead Space 3, so read it just before. Ellie's in it, which tells you how Dead Space 2 ends for her, so finish that game first.
A few years after the Sprawl, Isaac is living alone on the Moon when EarthGov soldiers come asking for help: Ellie Langford went looking for where the Markers came from, and her team has gone quiet. With Sergeant John Carver, Isaac heads for the frozen planet Tau Volantis by way of a graveyard of old ships in its orbit, while Jacob Danik's Unitologists chase the same secret. The whole campaign can be played in co-op, with the second player as Carver.
After Dead Space 3's final chapter
A story add-on set straight after the ending of Dead Space 3, so its opening only makes sense once you've finished the main game. It's short, a couple of hours, and plays solo or in co-op through more of Tau Volantis and the ships above it, against Unitologist survivors and whatever the Markers have left behind.
Last reviewed October 22, 2026