Your enemy is an alien species called Necromorphs, a virus that can re-animate the dead bodies of the crew and kill all they see. The new infected corpses travel through the ship via the air ducts and can pop up at any point. there are various ways to kill them, one type die in one way, but others need to be killed differently, to find out what is needed to kill them look out for scribbles on the wall and audio/video records found all over the ship.

You wear a special suit that monitors your health and stasis energy on the back, while the front has a projector that shows video, items and logs as well as plays music. This makes the game a third-person shooter as well as a survival horror, so the camera is behind the player, this gives you better view of the surroundings, the only draw-back is weapon accuracy is slightly worse than on an FPS, but it is helped by laser sights on weapons.

There is already Downloadable Content for the PS3 version, starting with new armour suits, these increase armour and inventory slots. Weapons are customizable, you collect nodes that can be grafted to weapons and other gadgets on a work bench, found dotted about the ship and they can do anything from damage, energy and capacity.