We’re all only too well acquainted with games that are heralded by a fanfare of hype but ultimately prove disappointing – but very, very occasionally, the opposite happens. Dead Space is a classic example of a game which seems to have appeared from nowhere, without anyone fancying it much. But it turns out to be excellent, with inventively varied gameplay, a cracking (though not intrusive) storyline and absolute lashings of deeply menacing and often truly scary atmosphere.

It’s a third-person action-adventure effort, developed by the mighty Electronic Arts’ internal Redwood Shores studio (and it will be available on other platforms as well as the PS3 from 24 October). Set in a future in which space-travel is commonplace, you play Isaac Clarke, you have been sent to the USG Ishimura, a deep-space mining ship which has stopped communicating with the outside world. Your brief to restore its communications.

Naturally, things go terrifyingly wrong from the moment at which you dock with the Ishimura, and rather than getting the ship’s comms back online, you have to keep yourself and your two crew-members alive. For the Ishimura is now populated by truly scary mutant creatures containing recognisable bits of what was once its crew.

Isaac is an everyman type with no special skills, but luckily, he has a whizzy suit and a laser-cutter weapon that lets him do all sorts of stuff. At this point, we must admit that, when we first started playing Dead Space, we remained sceptical for a while. Initially, it seems to have nicked all sorts of ideas from other games – the gravity gun (which you don’t actually need to use much) from Half-Life, the ability to slow down time from Max Payne – although this only acts on particular targets – and the ability, in certain gravity-free areas, to walk along walls and ceilings, just like in the long-forgotten Prey. But what at first feels like a mish-mash swiftly gels into something which has its own form of logic, and provides a gameplay experience which is refreshingly dissimilar to any other games out there.

The first time you meet one of the freaky mutants (even the most basic ones are pretty scary), you’re told that the only way to kill them is by shooting their limbs off. Which sounds a wee bit fiddly. But luckily, by holding down the left trigger, pointing your gun at an object and hitting the square button, you can freeze that object in time for a short while. Which turns the process of limb-severing into a whole lot of fun (although that ability, called Stasis, is finite, so you have to refill it periodically from Stasis dispensers or power-ups). Although it becomes trickier when you have several mutants taking you on, rather than just the odd one or two.

As Isaac runs around the city-sized Ishimura using its tram system (your first task is to get it running again), all manner of pitfalls befall him: in fact, just about everything that can go wrong does. Although there are a few short cut-scenes, the storyline mainly unfolds through audio clips, and your colleagues send you holographic video messages, so there is mercifully little time wasted discovering what is going on.

Dead Space is by no means just a third-person shooter: it contains a lot of puzzle-solving, incorporated into some extremely varied gameplay. You might have to use Stasis to freeze moving bits of machinery in order to get where you have to be – sometimes in combination with jumping from surface to surface in gravity-free areas – there is a sequence in which you shoot incoming asteroids with a fixed gun, and you often find yourself on the outside of the Ishimura, where you have to hurry, otherwise your air supply will expire. And as you put all your skills together and perform your assigned tasks, you build up to some pretty fearsome boss-battles. Eventually, you discover there are mutants which can’t be killed by shooting off their limbs – and not all of the crew have died. Luckily, you can upgrade your favourite skills using workbenches and “Power Nodes”.

We won’t ruin things for you by divulging any more details. It may have seemingly come from nowhere, and it may not seem particularly fashionable, but Dead Space proves to be a cracking game. Try it, and you’ll see what we mean.