What are you afraid of? Body horror? Claustrophobic? Thoughts of things being pushed past your eyes? Jump scares? Mediocre level design? Callisto Protocol Own it all, good and bad. Striking Distance Studios’ first game insists on pushing you over the edge and making you sweat, overbearing; Carnival Horror House tries to be a top escape room, Michael Bay tries to be John Carpenter. Sure, it can do everything Dead Space does – but once the ground is broken, does it need to be broken again?
Of course, there are differences. The Callisto protocol is prettier. The characters are more fleshed out, and there’s Hollywood talent in the space suits. Production value upgrade. At first, fighting is better. But the Callisto Protocol tries to do too much. It’s trying to be a thriller, it’s trying to be a psychological horror, it’s trying to be a sci-fi space opera about conspiracy and religious fanaticism. It lacks the stripped-down focus of film or video game inspiration, and often resembles a rickety corpse that loves to jump on you when you think you’re enjoying a moment of safety.
The developers at fledgling Striking Distance Studios talk up the game’s “Fear Engineering” during development – a lofty, PR-driven spiel about how the game reads your actions and emotions as you play , and reacts with brutal accuracy to scare you. In practice, this means that favoring melee attacks will cause enemies to counter you more. Like your pistol means they will come at you. Using your pseudokinetic GRP devices means keeping them away from the spikes on the wall. What a state-of-the-art AI, it feels like a superfluous enemy thrown at you in a Destiny raid. That’s just a little harder to kill.
For the first few hours, the game opens in slow fashion; a blooming corpse flower, full of stench and menace. it’s great. It’s slow, like the developers have attached a meat hook to your chest and pulled you through sewers, hospital wards, and prison cells. Like a whistle tour of Silent Hill, Resi and Amnesia all rolled into one, coaxing you onward when you hate yourself enjoying horror, promising something new at the end of the tunnel… which, disappointingly, never accomplish.
Along the way, you are being tested. As your tactics develop and your inventory swells, you take on more enemies – creatures that evolve with you, watch you from the vents and learn about your movements and motivations. After all, the whole game is about evolution: the evolution of humanity, the evolution of horror, the evolution of Glenn Schofield from Call of Duty protagonist to horror director. Except none of them really come off, do they? Humans will never evolve because these horrible mutations block evolution. Horror never really gets noble because it’s so obsessed with paying for what came before. Schofield, it seems, is trying to get out of Call of Duty.
The Sledgehammer Games imprint is everywhere; the spindly corridors, the scripted encounters, the illusion of choice. The labyrinthine path through the domed greenhouse makes you believe you’re playing the game your way, but in reality you’re just moving predictably through the flowchart before the next sequence, where you’re sliding down a floodgate or fleeing another explosion s things. It works for Dead Space because of the nature of its world, the realization of Ishimura, and the insidious threats of the markers—the Callisto protocol has none of that. Just a spreadsheet of horror references, an unlimited buffet of creepy animations of death, and a spoon to feed you.
Combat is played as prescribed. I love the intense, forehead-to-forehead melee in the Callisto Accords, but I can see why a lot of people don’t; the over-reliance on timing, which makes you dodge and swoop and react the same way, can only be achieved by Partly relieved by the satisfaction of blowing a mutant’s head off with a pistol for a second. GRP — which perfectly implements the physics in a playful and over-the-shoulder game like this — feels emasculated and limp even at its strongest. When you first pick it up, you think of Half Life’s gravity guns and the horrors of Ravenholm — and the game’s entire logging complex probably wants you to feel that way, too. But by reminding you of some of the best horror moves in the game, Callisto Protocol just reminds you how weak it is by comparison. And don’t get me started on the forced, instant kill stealth parts that kill all momentum and take away any tension that might just start bubbling.
That’s not to say there isn’t a good game in this Frankenstein’s viscous flesh, though. It just doesn’t feel like it’s what Striking Distance wants to be. This isn’t the next step in horror games, or an evolution of Dead Space, or a proposal that’s different from anything you’ve seen before–it’s quite the opposite. A hybrid that’s less than the sum of its parts, its main focus becomes overwrought and frustrating when you’re halfway through its brief runtime. Sadly, the scariest thing about the Callisto protocol is that all that potential was wasted on a tiny moon orbiting Jupiter.
