When EA told us they had another Dead Space game to show us — a Live Arcade title due this fall — our thoughts instantly went to familiar places. “Must be a scaled-down version of the shooter,Â… like a platformer,” we thought. “Or a space-combat game where you’re blowing up ships full of necromorphs.”

Not even close. Dead Space: Ignition, it turns out, is a unique hybrid of motion comic and puzzle game. If you’ve never seen a motion comic, picture a series of comic-book panels with static backdrops but a few moving elements — an eye winking, an arm raising, a panel flashing — supported by voice-overs and music.

In this case, the motion-comic portion of the game tells the overarching story: you’re Franco Delille, an engineer on The Sprawl (the space station where Dead Space 2 takes place), and it’s immediately before the events of Dead Space 2. In the brief intro scene we watched, Franco is chatting with Sarah Andarsyn, a fellow engineer he’s secretly dating. A minute later, he’s called to a cargo bay to help hack open a broken door — one of many sequences where Ignition shifts from motion comic to puzzle game.

In these scenarios, you’ll play one of three mini-games to hack a door, gain access to a machine, and more. Hardware Crack, which reminded us a bit of Resident Evil 5’s sunbeam puzzle, has you rotating reflectors on a chessboard-like grid — aligning lasers to complete circuits and give you access to the device in question. System Override, meanwhile, is a variation on tower-defense games where you’re on the offensive, releasing four different viruses on a hex-like board to overwhelm defending systems. And in the simplest-looking game, Trace Route, you use the left thumbstick to guide an electrical signal in a sidescrolling race against competing signals; power-ups and a shifting environment increase the challenge. We’re not sure how Ignition’s story will explain the presence of a second player, but all three mini-games will allow a buddy to jump in and compete with you in the task at hand.

We’ll have a better sense of the mini-games’ potential once we actually play them, but from what we saw, we’re intrigued. Making the player a full-on engineer/hacker — as opposed to Dead Space protagonist Isaac, an action hero who solves a few puzzles between massacres — seems both creative and consistent with the universe.

Moreover, Ignition throws two very big bones to fans. One is the fact that four of the doors you can open in Ignition will then unlock in Dead Space 2 when you wander The Sprawl, giving Isaac access to unique items he wouldn’t otherwise have. Better yet is that this Arcade game will definitely be Mature-rated — not for its puzzle elements, but for the motion-comic content. Because Ignition’s positioned as a prequel to Dead Space 2 — showing you how The Sprawl became overrun by necromorphs in the first place — gory sights and sounds should fill the screen. The game will even have branching paths and four possible endings. Will one of them involve Franco and Sarah surviving (to explain a Dead Space 2 appearance, even)? We’ll see…