The Callisto Protocol isn’t Dead Space, but if you squint a little, you might be tricked into thinking it is. It’s certainly a spiritual successor, coming from some of the key people behind that fantastic survival action horror series, but this game also has its own identity and story to tell.
Set on Jupiter’s moon Callisto within a prison colony called Black Iron, an alien invasion of some sort is underway, transforming many of the guards and prisoners into mutated, undead-like monstrosities. Jacob Lee is one of the few survivors, just trying to get out with his life.
For our hands on time, we were dropped a few hours into the game, Jacob facing the dual terror of this alien invasion and having to work his way through what I can only assume was a lot of poop water and a sanitation plant. The water slide through a flooded poop water tunnel is sure to give germaphobes nightmares for decades.
Even so, the game looks fantastic. There’s exactly the right kind of oppressive darkness, diffused lighting and particle effects, murky poop water and the kinds of barely explicable futuristic industry that you’d expect. It’s the kind of realistic feeling, grimy sci-fi setting that we first really saw in 1979’s Alien, but with all the signs of a gruesome fight for survival that didn’t exactly go too well for the humans. There’s bodies, there’s grisly smears of blood, there’s stereotypical messages written on walls in someone’s own ichor.
Every corridor you walk down, every room you enter, every pipe-laden crawlspace is filled with the potential that horrors might jump out at you. This isn’t a game that relies on jump scares, though – in fact, the main jump we had was when emerging from a crawlspace and a fellow inmate’s hologram appeared right in front of Jacob. The terror is in the survival elements, the keenly felt lack of resources, the knowledge that a room is filled with health and ammo to prepare you for something up ahead.
One thing that really helps to broaden this place, to make it feel real, was that, while there is a linear path to follow, Striking Distance has also created some quite expansive feeling side paths to explore. Coming up to what felt like a big door to a major story moment (which it was), the corridor continued to wrap around the room, passing through an airlock to an area significant enough that I wasn’t sure if this was the side-path anymore, before eventually reaching a dead end. Elsewhere, there was a fairly substantial loop of corridors and rooms to work through, before heading back to the main goal at the time.. It just enough to give the impression that the space is larger than it might actually be.
Jacob isn’t a soldier, but it feels like he’s at least been hardened by his time in prison (if he wasn’t already there for violent crimes). While there will be things like shotguns later on, at this point he had a trusty hand cannon and a stun baton with which to battle the oncoming enemies. There’s a punchiness to the gun, and given the way that enemies will still come at you even once you’re blown their heads off, you’ll want to target limbs to slow their approach. They can be blown off, similar to Dead Space, but that’s not really the core of the combat here.
No, The Callisto Protocol will see you getting much closer and personal with the enemies in melee combat. The key here is to learn how to dodge and block just with timed sideway and backward movements from the left analogue stick – it takes a little getting used to, but keeps your right fingers and thumbs free for the follow up attacks. Battering the enemies enough can reveal weak spots that, if you’re quick enough to react, can let you whip out that pistol again for a skill shot.
You’ll also need that pistol to shoot at the tentacles – as advised by the aforementioned bloody wall message – to prevent the monsters becoming even more monstrous and challenging.
The combat can be quite tricky, given the staying power of the enemies you face – there were also some quadrupedal wall-crawlers that can make themselves invisible, requiring more observational skills to beat – but you’ve got another ability in the form of the GRP. This is a telekinetic gadget that lets you grab onto objects and launch them, and while that’s a bit like the Kinesis module from Dead Space, but this time it can be used on enemies as well. You can quickly grab and throw them at a spiky wall, fling them into and stagger one another, and more. It took me a while to get to grips with, if you’ll excuse the pun, and how to combine it with my other limited resources, but it also helped overcome certain situations where it was battering myself up against particular encounter and repeatedly dying.
Going back to the original Tomb Raider games (and probably before), there’s been something strangely cathartic about watching your player character die as punishment for your failure. Horror games have taken that to increasingly gory and gruesome extremes, and I’m sure there’s some hardworking animators and designers at Striking Distance that take great pleasure in coming up with new ways to depict your demise. The Callisto Protocol will have you cleft in twain by gigantic turbine blades, the infected and aliens that attack you will snap necks, they will reach into your mouth and, instead of ripping off your jaw (which makes more sense to me) will tear off the top half of your head instead.
The Callisto Protocol is absolutely a game that horror fans and Dead Space fans in particular should have on their wishlists for December. Yes, it’s following in some familiar feeling footsteps, leaning into certain horror game tropes along the way, but from what we’ve played, it’s coming together really well and deserves its place within the resurgent survival horror genre.
