Dead Space 3's 'Awakened' DLC coming next week

The first major DLC for Dead Space 3,  Awakened, will be released for the PC and Xbox 360 on March 12, and PlayStation 3 gamers can grab it on March 13. The DLC will cost 800 Microsoft Points on the Xbox 360, and $9.99 (approx. Rs 530) on the PlayStation 3 and PC.

The company has stated that Awakened will feature “the franchise’s darkest chapters,” and the battle against the Necromorph will be more gruesome. General Manager of Visceral Games, Steve Papoutsis has said Awakened would feature some of the “most disturbing content” players have experienced in any Dead Space game yet.

Something dark and sinister is getting ‘Awakened’… get it?

Awakened is set to take place immediately after the events of Dead Space 3, which ended on a cliffhanger. If EA’s press releases are anything to go by, the DLC promises to bring back the horror elements fans had found missing from the main game.

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The Dead Space games put you in control of Issac Clarke, a ship systems engineer who must fight his way through a futuristic world infested with “Necromorphs”, which are human corpses reanimated and mutated by an alien virus. In the first game in the series, Clarke has been hired to help repair the USG Ishimura, a planet cracker-class starship hovering over Aegis VII that has sent out a distress signal. Unfortunately, the shuttle Clarke is travelling on is damaged, his team is attacked by the Necromorphs that have infested the ship and he gets separated from the rest of the team, necessitating the repair of several areas of the ship to reunite and find a way off. Clarke also has a personal stake in fixing the Ishimura; his girlfriend Nicole Brennan is somewhere on the ship and Isaac has to rescue her.

Dead Space 2 takes place nearly three years after the events of Dead Space on an enormous space station called the Sprawl. Clarke finds himself on the Sprawl, but his traumatic experience aboard the Ishimura has messed him up for good. His memory is failing him and he’s constantly haunted by the images of the girlfriend he failed to save. This overpowering guilt mixed with trauma gives way to a severe case of dementia where Isaac has trouble differentiating fiction from reality. As if seeing random flashes of his dead chick wasn’t bad enough, another Necromorph infestation breaks out on the Sprawl, leaving Isaac to fight for survival and figure out why his luck sucks this bad. Dead Space 2 was also the first game in the series to have multiplayer.

Dead Space 3 takes place three years after the Titan Station incident. A radical Unitologist group known as the “Inner Circle” has started rioting and has been destroying Marker test labs on major colonies to spread the Necromorph infection. The game kicks off as one such riot starts off on the New Horizons Lunar colony, where Isaac has been living.