Many horror games reward players who try to brave their terrors multiple times on different difficulty modes. Each entry in the Dead Space franchise, for instance, features a new, even harder challenge that is unlocked whenever someone completes the game on Hard mode. The Dead Space remake is no different.
Like the original Dead Space, the remake includes several difficulty levels: Story, Easy, Medium, Hard, and Impossible. Most of those settings are unlocked at the start of the game, with “Impossible” being the sole exception. In order to unlock the Dead Space remake’s version of Impossible mode, you need to beat the game on Hard mode. As you probably guessed based on the name, that ain’t easy. Isaac Clarke is much more fragile in Hard mode, and enemies can take a lot more punishment. Still, if you make it out of this difficulty mode alive, you will earn the chance to play the “Impossible” mode. If you thought Hard mode was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Before starting Impossible mode, the game gives players a warning. The damage Isaac and the Necromorphs both give and receive is still set to Hard mode levels, but the main difference is the game disables autosave and players have only one save slot. More importantly, gamers only get one shot at Impossible mode.
If they die, the save file’s difficulty resets to Hard mode. The only way to “continue” on Impossible mode is by restarting the game from the beginning and learning from your mistakes. That or you can save scum your way to victory by quickly pausing and exiting the game before you die, then reloading your save file, which should still be set to Impossible if you did it fast enough. Some sites (such as Powerpyx) also recommend save scumming with cloud saves, which can overwrite your save files and revert them to Impossible mode. Just make sure Auto-sync is disabled first. Otherwise, the death will overwrite the cloud file, which obviously defeats the purpose.
