Ending explained!?

[Snark]

Heya, just completed this game, glad I did tbh, now I can indulge in some other games. I played the first one all the way up to the boss battle and then found it stupidly, frustratingly, hard so quit before fully completing it. Anyway, I completed this one by bumping the difficulty all the way down from "Zealot" to "casual" for the final battle.

These two games were way too frustratingly hard (a dozen monsters to fight at a time, low health and ammo, etc) for me but I enjoyed the atmosphere. at least.

My main question is in regards to the ending.

But the English girl that saves you in the shuttle and then presumably dies, it shows Isaac alone and the passenger seat empty then it the next scene it shows her sat in the passenger's seat I was like "wtf"!?

Was it implied that she become the "new" Nicole or what!?

[advanced pallet user]

she never died? rewatch the ending again

[Penis Lord]

You are misunderstood between Nicole and Ellie. Nicole is Isaac's ex girlfriend and she has been dead since Dead Space 1, the "Nicole" we saw and encountered in Dead Space 2 is just illusion in Isaac's mind that caused by Marker.

The girl Isaac met along the way and helped him in the end is Ellie, she's a real human being. Not illusion :D.

[hawaii's finest]

at the very ending of ds1 when he was in the ship like in ds2 he was ambushed by the pilot or something like that, so at the end of ds2 he thought the same thing was gonna happen again so he wanted to make sure it was real.