The Callisto Protocol

The Callisto Protocol succeeds because it deeply understands players’ expectations of horror.

What we expect is Dead Space. Not from Visceral Games but from Striking Distance Studios, the developer behind The Callisto Protocol and comprised of former Dead Space talent.

As player deeply fond of Dead Space, I went into The Callisto Protocol with the highest expectations. Striking Distance Studios no doubt understands the burden that myself and countless other have placed on it.

Perhaps that’s why The Callisto Protocol both is and isn’t the expected.

About halfway through the game, protagonist Jacob Lee is stranded on the icy tundra of Callisto, the “Dead Moon” of Jupiter. Lightning arcs across the blackened sky, marking the snow with flashes of dread. Corpses of monstrous beings are frozen in place, mid-lunge or stuck screaming at prey long since gone.

“I know what’s coming,” I thought to myself and swung Jacob’s electrified baton at the infected icicle. It shattered to pieces, a couple tufts of blood spurt for effect. I didn’t want these mutated things thawing to life and taking me by surprise. Plus they might drop credits or ammo.

Continuing my demolition, my nerves began to cool. The initial dread of a chilly onslaught was beginning to subside and I was ready to accept that a new threat would come in a different form. I moved into a hollowed-out shower area, shattered another stationary foe and moved in to strike another.

It burst to life. At the moment I least expected, no less. The moment when I felt least threatened. Jolting out of my seat I was rattled, giving the monstrosity enough time to grab me and get in a few hits before I beat it down.

The Callisto Protocol hopes that you’ve played games like it before, it almost expects it. But it also doesn’t want to be like any of those games that came before it.

Horror, like humor, is completely subjective. What one finds terrifying, another might find boring. A scare that makes you jump out of your seat may leave another screaming or on the verge of tears. Developers have wrestled with the concept of horror video games for decades and the results have been truly remarkable, splintering into varying genres.

For The Callisto Protocol, Striking Distance Studios appears to be on a mission to test the player in as many imaginable ways as possible. And it does this by shifting the focus of its horror, dread, tension, fear, anxiety, and unease as much as possible over the course of its 12-14 hours.

What scares you? Does that value shift when moving from a passive to active experience? Is a game more likely to unsettle because the player is in control of their destiny? Game developers, like movie directors, can place any number of jump scares or tension building ambient music in their work.

The Callisto Protocol is actually a fairly simple game for the most part. It is a taut, well-designed meditation on horror with little fat on the bone. I had my issues with it, certainly. But you begin to examine the game like performing an autopsy, seeing how the pieces interconnected and made each other work.

As Jacob Lee, players crash-land near Black Iron Prison on Callisto and are unceremoniously incarcerated, only to wake up with the penitentiary in the midst of chaos. Grotesque humanoids roam the structure, signifying a dark secret buried somewhere.

Like James escaping Silent Hill, like Leon fleeing Raccoon City, like Isaac jettisoning the Ishimura, Jacob wants to be free from Black Iron and Callisto. Another game where things go terribly wrong in a place and the protagonist is thrown every which way to escape.

However, this isn’t Prison Break meets Dead Space. Plans do go awry. Easy and safe passage usually crumbles into a bottomless pit. But we’ve played this game before, right?

Despite The Callisto Protocol taking place 300 years into the future, the world envisioned here is a practical one. Ships are capable of taking us to the stars and humans are now born on other planets and moons that have been colonized. The facilities of Black Iron Prison are operated by bulky machinery and patrolled by clunky robots.

This is a future where progress is made more by industry rather than science. And it is the reason why The Callisto Protocol gives an aura of a thriller in space rather than pure science fiction horror.

As Jacob and the player continue through Black Iron Prison, the absence of light is palpable. Not because the electricity is failing but because this prison is a void. The cell block Jacob wakes in is nestled in a dark pit with few actual sources of light visible, despite fires breaking out everywhere. The surfaces of this prison are smothered in black steel and players can frequently see how entire pieces of the structure butt into the grey rock of Callisto.

Whether it is the medical wing, waste disposal, or solitary confinement, Black Iron embellishes its namesake. Regardless of the holographic, automated messages from the Warden, this is not a place where people can make the best of themselves.

The Callisto Protocol‘s claustrophobic spaces choke the player with a lingering sense of something being wrong, even before the outbreak. This, more than the underlying mystery and Jacob’s drive to escape, is the game’s driving force.

When players walk into a space, they should never assume what is about to transpire. Will the relentless force of this infection cease for a few rooms or will it continue? Will that abandoned walkway collapse or merely incessantly creak?

It is the undertaking of Striking Distance Studios to constantly keep players guessing to the arithmetic of the game. Vents and windows are on the floors, ceilings, and walls, indicating spaces enemies can burst out of. Yet they often shamble in the open as a player enters. Pustules on the ground can eject a fanged tentacle that slowly drags in Jacob, causing players to slowly glance around corners before they move in.

There is a constant dance of tension in The Callisto Protocol that captures what truly makes horror great. A moment of levity should be seen as a gift but not always one that is earned. I can’t count the times I would safely traverse multiple pathways, expecting a dramatic flourish of combat or a hidden scare, only to continue on with no danger in sight.

And this is the brilliance of The Callisto Protocol‘s fear factor, one learned from decades of predecessors. You don’t have to constantly throw scares at the player or the viewer to elicit terror or dread. It’s a quality so many PG-13 movies lack these days with their quick movements timed with audio stings. The Vvitch, one of my favorite horror movies of the last decade, freaked me out with its bizarre, unsettling awareness. I know something is scary to me if I laugh after that feeling of relief hits. I laughed frequently during The Callisto Protocol.

Yes, a monstrosity with two heads welded together is, in itself, scary. But what if it isn’t as scary as seeing it framed in a darkened doorway, unable to distinguish what exactly it is? That fear of the unknown is just as powerful as the known. The Callisto Protocol relishes in the unknown, that unlikely moment when a scare will or won’t happen. You know it’s coming, you just don’t know when.

The boogeymen that haunt the halls of Black Iron Prison are heralded by what is some of the best audio and lighting work in a game. Striking Distance Studios has mastered sources of light and sound and how they can heighten fear or simply be a part of it.

A flickering floodlight cascading illumination down a hallway paints the viewable space in light and dark, black and white. What can’t be seen in the dark might suddenly be seen when the light flashes. Fog will obscure everything but the closest objects, making a simple mist an obstacle for progression.

Play The Callisto Protocol with headphones, it will truly transform the experience. In the waste processing section of Black Iron Prison, I stood still listening to the squelches and groans of the ambient noise, sounding like monsters in their own right. Music often lingers a bit too long for comfort, not giving players permission to get a grasp on the mood.

Ambiance is one of Striking Distance Studios’ favorite tools, using it to tighten every possible corner of The Callisto Protocol. There is a harmony in how these elements play into the dissonance of fear. The unexpected is how the game strikes a universal chord of ensuring that most players are at least going to jump in their seat a few times or dread an encounter they know will eventually come.

The game’s graphical beauty was something I came to appreciate from the onset. The Callisto Protocol is a grim game that doesn’t force itself to have bright moments of color just to change up the palette. Mute greys, sickly greens, cold blacks, bloody reds, and fleshy beiges are the primary colors used. In fact, Jacob’s bright orange prison jumpsuit is the most consistently vivid element in the game.

For the entirety of my playthrough I chose resolution mode to extract the most definition out of the game. Reflections came alive, the sweat of faces looked slick, and Black Iron Prison became a lot colder. This is a beautiful game and the engine powering it shows strength. That being said, in my pre-release build, I ran into one section with severe, potentially single-digit framerate drops. Despite a few patches, I had three instances of the game crashing in this section, as if it was pulling in resources it simply could not handle.

Over the course of the game, there were a few noticeable dips but none as severe as the one I described. This problem also amplified one of my biggest issues with The Callisto Protocol: the checkpoint system.

In the game, players can manually save but it seems to serve no purpose. A player can reach one checkpoint, explore, collect items, kill enemies, and then manually save right before a checkpoint. If they die before that checkpoint, the game doesn’t pick back up with all those enemies dead and items collected, it starts right back at that initial checkpoint.

An argument can be made that this heightens the tension of The Callisto Protocol and prohibits players from save scumming too hard. But I found the checkpoints to be frustrating when I would take an optional side path, die, and then have to do it all over again. When it came to the section where the game crashed, a half-hour segment turned into an hour-plus slog.

While I’m not certain that the checkpoint issue will be the same for everyone or if it’s a bug, I have no doubt that my pre-release experience will not be like those who are playing the patched version of The Callisto Protocol. These issues deserve to be mentioned and did impact a part of my experience but it didn’t alter my perception of what the game is.

Dispatching the infected in The Callisto Protocol is a strong departure from what players have come to expect from more recent action horror games. The game surprisingly relies on close quarters combat, forcing Jacob and the player to get close to do the most damage.

Enemies rush at the player and swipe with deadly force. Holding the left stick causes Jacob to dart to the side, dodging any potential damage. If the enemy continues their attack, moving the stick in the opposite direction allows Jacob to dodge again. Players are meant to time melee attacks to bash infected until they no longer get up again. Arms must be stripped from the body and the swiftness and forcefulness of melee is quite satisfying.

On PlayStation 5, pressing the R2 button has a touch of resistance to amplify the weight and heft of an attack. Players can upgrade the baton to do a heavy attack that does more damage and can hit multiple enemies, though it takes a beat to charge. A helpful upgrade causes a blocked melee strike to instantly break off the arm of a foe. Pressing back instead of dodging causes Jacob to take reduced damage and players can upgrade this block to emit a damaging pulse.

Guns are introduced shortly into the game that having varying degrees of effectiveness because of how combat works. After a melee combo, an icon appears over an enemy that allows to immediately snap to that foe and blast them for higher damage.

The intimacy of combat was often thrilling, meaning that if a player wasn’t engaging in one-on-one, the situation would get hairy. Rounding out Jacob’s arsenal is the GRP ability that can pull in monsters and objects, allowing Jacob to toss them around like ragdolls. Littered around Black Iron Prison are mechanical fans, wall spikes, gears, and cliffs than enemies can be tossed over for instant kills. The GRP can be used in a variety of ways and I often relied on it as a crutch in more intense fights.

Players can upgrade weapons and the GRP to be more effective, using credits from dropped enemies or sold items. Playing on medium difficulty, I found fights to be appropriately tense and frequently challenging, though I probably was able to sell a lot more health packs than a person playing on hard would be able to do.

As the game continues, enemies that take enough damage will have tentacles burst out of their body, indicating they will mutate into a new form that deals more damage and has more health–while regrowing any lost limbs. By shooting these tentacles fast, that terrible situation goes away. But when multiple enemies shoot out tentacles, the drama escalates.

The back and forth game of puzzling out encounters in The Callisto Protocol was an engaging past time because Striking Distance Studios attempts to make each of these encounters moderately unique. Expect to fight in tight, enclosed spaces. It boosts the actual horror of dealing with these fearful beasts and forces the player to be quick on their feet. Additionally, based on how a player prefers to play, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage of melee, gun, or GRP combat. But keep in mind, if you focus on guns, enemies do not go down easily.

Unfortunately, over the course of The Callisto Protocol, enemies barely stretch past creepy, bipedal humanoids. I was surprised that the variety just wasn’t what I expected it to be in terms of basic grunts and boss encounters. In fact, it might be the biggest flaw of the game because so many of its other elements shine.

As the game progresses, an enemy that mutates never becomes more than a bipedal monstrosity made of pustules and tumors. Where are the arm tentacles? The spinal cords that turn into whips? Corpses that dissolve in damaging acid pools? Here is one of the places I wished Dead Space was copied more.

When new enemies are introduced, it often alters the way the environments and combat play out. Though the game still shocked, scared, and startled me until the end, it was not because some new gruesome threat emerged. I’m not sure what the idea was behind keeping everything so fleshy and human-like but based on the universe The Callisto Protocol places itself in, there were a lot more interesting avenues Striking Distance Studios could have mined from.

The Callisto Protocol is an enthralling horror experience when all its best elements combine. Few games have captured the sheer atmospheric dread and terror that The Callisto Protocol communicates just through sound and atmosphere. With an ambiance that seeks to get under the skin, the game constantly shifts gears, never showing its hand to the player. A few technical hiccups and lack of enemy variety will leave the player hungry for those few scares that could have been. But The Callisto Protocol is a must for horror fans yearning for a new IP that may eventually grow into a new, deadly universe.