The Callisto Protocol

is extremely brutal, creepy, terrifying and comes from the same team that once reinvented the genre of sci-fi horror with Dead Space. And this work also simply bleeds atmosphere, at every corner we feel alone, danger lurks everywhere, making our blood run cold. Flickering lights powered by emergency generators immediately set the tone at this sinister Black Iron Prison. A prison that seems to be more – guard robots shoot prisoners, experiments are conducted, everywhere you find these operating tables that have no place in a normal penitentiary. They’re not infirmaries, something is happening here. “Do you actually know that Callisto is called the dead moon,” an off-screen voice tells us. Is he controlling the beasts? What’s going on here? “I just want to give you a chance,” he says. “Welcome to your new home.”

Suddenly there is an alarm, many guards appear, are pulled into shafts, and we find only parts of their bodies. As our protagonist Jacob enters a bloody room with an empty stretcher, a hologram flickers on. The signal is slightly distorted, but the events it depicts are clear: a biophage is tearing apart three heavily armored Black Iron Prison Guards securities and carrying off their corpses. There’s another hologram – a prisoner is strapped to a stretcher, surgeons and medical staff surrounding him. He awakens and rips them apart. What the hell? It’s not long before that terrifying creature responsible for the carnage shows up, and Jacob must find a way to defend himself.

He’s a freighter pilot, he’s great in the air, but not a soldier on the ground. So what to do? Think, consider what in the room lends itself as a weapon, improvise, strike. At this moment, the game still makes it easy for us – one of the securities has dropped his high-tech Glock with laser sight, with which Jacob shoots the beast’s limbs off. This, by the way, is very reminiscent of the plasma cutter used by Isaac Clarke in Dead Space. And yes, The Callisto Protocol is extremely brutal, certainly the most brutal game of the year, but what we like is that it’s not just for show, but has tactical advantages.

The first gameplay for The Callisto Protocol:

If we fire at the arm, it bursts off and the biophage can no longer grab Jacob and throw him around or push him against the wall. If we shoot its legs off, it has to crawl, which takes away its opportunity to show off its size – some of the beasts are really big, they can step on us if they still have all their legs. Then the ammunition runs out, the fight gets harder, the fists are unpacked in combination with an energy baton that Jacob has stolen from one of the dead guards. The melee attacks are dynamic and depend, among other things, on Jacob’s positioning and his proximity to objects in the environment. In one truly brutal scene, the protagonist cracks the skull of a biophage before hurling the creature against the nearby wall to deliver the death blow.

Creepy like Dead Space, but with Gravity Gun and really brutal melee combat.

Exciting and so very different from Dead Space, The Callisto Protocol is very physical: we actively combine melee and ranged combat, can land regular combos here. Jump on one of the beasts, for example, and with the right timing a small crosshair appears. If we press the shotgun sight down at that exact moment, it will shatter the mutant’s head. Or we slide under one of the disgusting creatures and shoot its arms off specifically, because the things want to push us against the nearest wall and bite our heads off. This is an incredibly exciting mix of really smart AI and well-placed scripts, for example when the bloodthirsty enemy jumps through a glass window right in front of us like once in FEAR, and there are always situations that make cold sweat run down the back of our necks. Horror atmosphere meets AI innovation and gritty, very tactical, extremely brutally staged action.

The Callisto Protocol actually surprised us in its first gameplay scenes. Because everything is very atmospheric, very creepy and reminds us of Dead Space in some scenes. In others, however, it is also brutal close combat that makes us think of The Last of Us 2, for example. Striking Distance has quite a few exciting ideas in its quiver, which should clearly set it apart from the new Dead Space 4, which is supposed to be released in January 2023. This is currently in development at EA Motive, who were previously responsible for the campaign of Star Wars: Battlefront 2. There’s a kind of Gravity Gun, the GRP tool. Originally designed for guard teams to keep prisoners away or trapped in a kind of stasis during uprisings. With it, according to Game Informer colleagues who have already seen considerably more gameplay, a mutated creature can be grabbed, lifted up and thrown directly into a spinning fan. A bit like in Hollywood, where it’s usually spinning fans that decapitate the antagonist.

The bloodworm lurks in the exhaust vent….

But the mutants are also getting smarter and deadlier – there’s a nasty, long-necked creature called Blood Worm. It shoots out of a pod and clings to Jacob’s neck. These biophage creatures act almost like land mines for the unwary. Guards dangling from the ceiling and riddled with spikes show us what to prepare for, which is sort of like the way Striking Distance introduces a new creature. Its task is not necessarily to kill, it just does a little damage, but to scare us and make us leave the room. “Horror engineering” is a term Glen Schofield likes a lot. He is the head of the studio, the brains behind The Callisto Protocol. The man has delivered in many genres: Horror, he was Creative Director on Dead Space 1. And Action, he was the CEO of Sledgehammer Games, which directed an excellent, extremely explosive campaign starring Kevin Spacey in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

There are a bunch of these beasts that are supposed to create fear in us first and foremost, and they look really, really gross. The goo falls out of the rotten skin of their faces, after all, these aren’t aliens, but former humans that have mutated in stages of varying lengths. One of them the team affectionately calls “Big Mouth.” This humanoid creature with two gaping mouths filled with jagged teeth encircles Jacob’s head, whirling it around, playing with it like a dog before ripping off most of his skull. All that’s left is a bloody, gaping cavity with his tongue still intact, so he can still talk, which makes for an unsettling touch. “Game Over” – seems like the Elden Ring of the sci-fi horror genre is about to happen here….

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