Callisto Protocol Review
need to know
what is it? A third-person survival horror game made by Dead Space veterans.
Expect to pay: $59.99 / £49.99
release date: December 2, 2022
Developer: strike distance
Publisher: crafton
multiplayer game? Do not
Association: Official Website(opens in a new tab)
Callisto Protocol begins like all good prison movies: with an unbearably doomy mood. Worker pilot Jacob Lee crash-lands on Callisto’s dead moon after his cargo ship is boarded by a notorious terrorist group. There are other people who died bizarrely and tragically in the crash, and we’ve had ample opportunity to study this unfortunate event. Next, Lee is arrested, and it’s clear that he’s spent the rest of his life in the Moon’s Black Iron Prison to look forward to. But almost immediately, the prison descends into some sort of mysterious disaster that turns its inhabitants into deranged mutants.
These events effectively cascade within the first half hour, and what better way to set the tone for a relentlessly bloody survival horror game than with disaster, injustice, and the sudden invasion of some walking piss buckets? The Callisto Protocol doesn’t subtly put us in situations of extreme fear. Somewhat counterintuitively, for those of us players of absolutely obnoxious horror games, the scares are surprisingly comfortable. The stakes are clear: Lee is bogged down in Josh Duhamel’s action-hero stoicism and has to get out. Maybe we can learn something about that terrorist organization. Inevitably, some side plots creep in and we meet some characters who keep us company. But Callisto Protocol wasted no time cementing the horrors of its background. Now we just need to walk in a straight line for 15 hours and kill all the way.
(Image credit: Amazing Distance)
I’m not kidding when I say Callisto Protocol is a comforting video game, despite being on the far end of the same axis as Dragon Quest. Familiarity is comfort, and the Callisto Protocol is a consistent big-budget ride. Indie horror scenes mask intense psychological discomfort (see Visage, Signalis) and are also the natural home of grindhouse schlock (see Murder House, and countless bizarre PS1 throwbacks). The big-budget horror game, most prominently in the Dead Space sense in the Resident Evil sense, is about roaming moody corridors and taking a regular shit.
hallway horror
Boy, does the Callisto protocol have creepy corridors? Opening hours cover all the usual categories: valve-squirting claustrophobic cabins, entrance halls, maintenance bays, aged steel, echo vents, flickering holographic terminals, subterranean crawlspaces filled with pus slime growths. Midday and later, there’s a lot of that too, though some areas do sprawl a bit, and by the end of the game, there are some surprising deviations from the “grim dark corridors” format. Is this Dead Space 4? Or Dead Space 3, as many believe it should be? Both are about the same.
These environments are the most obvious source of the weird comfort I mentioned, since playing Callisto Protocol in its opening hours feels very similar to playing Dead Space. There’s the same raw, episodic UI, the same hulking, over-the-shoulder controls of a strong man, and the same freedom to stomp dead bodies into pools of chewing pudding. The Callisto Protocol is directed by Glen Schofield, who helmed the first Dead Space, and he has recreated the game’s perfect balance of being “powerful but very fragile”.
Boy, does this moon colony have an astonishing number of wall-mounted spikes.
I wouldn’t blame Schofield for going back to the formula. I’ve grown to like the way Lee has the turning circles of a kid’s toy tractor, and no matter how weak an enemy looks, you’ll never be able to successfully stun them in melee, forcing you to use a somewhat clumsy left-right dodge system. Why doesn’t Lee go into full-fur beast mode like his enemies? Why does he move with the bulky grace of a slow-motion televised fast bowler? Why did he keep putting away his baton, and why was he so slow to get it back? Because this is a horror video game, and there’s no better reason to do it.
(Image credit: Amazing Distance)
Callisto Protocol features rhythmic hand-to-hand combat, but over the course of the 15 hours I played with the controller, I never felt like I could effectively time that ostensibly simple evasion system. Maybe I’m just bad at it, but in spur-of-the-moment situations — especially when dealing with more than one enemy — I often resort to panic shots. When it comes to really big sticks, though, it’s satisfyingly vicious, especially when broken up by a shotgun at close range.
gravity crush
Lee has a glowing green bar on the back of his head to indicate his health, and a blue bar to indicate if his “GRP” is overheating. GRP is Callisto Protocol’s answer to Control’s levitation or Half-Life 2’s gravity gun, and it’s a lot of fun. In a game full of spongy baddies, this weapon lets you pick up most of them and throw them off platforms into cracks or, more commonly, into nails in walls. Boy, does this moon colony have an astonishing number of wall-mounted spikes. Alternatively, you can pick up nearby dynamite and throw them at your enemies, which isn’t as much fun, but more sensible, since picking up objects uses less energy than floating mutants.
(Image credit: Crafton)
Adding a “delete enemy” button to a survival horror game was disorienting at first, but Callisto Protocol gradually made up for it. After receiving the GRP, I forgot about it for a while. I continued to hit the bad guys with my baton. Finding myself overwhelmed by one particular encounter, I turned to the GRP, yes: simply picking up these bastards and throwing them to their death proved to be the more convenient approach. This method of fighting worked once I learned to step into every combat situation, being vigilant for environmental hazards to turn into weapons.
I don’t find Callisto Protocol’s over-the-top approach to gore terribly funny or shocking – just gross, really – but thankfully it doesn’t rely on blood and guts at the expense of an entirely grim atmosphere.
GRP energy is limited, but like Callisto’s ammo stockpiles for five ranged weapons (all standard fare, with hard upgrade paths), I never found myself desperate for resources on medium difficulty. I actually turned to selling ammo and occasional health to improve my abilities at regular 3D printer workstations. Once I realized how useful GRP was, I focused on it, though I ended up feeling like I should invest more in conventional weapons as well, since GRP was basically useless in some of the more painful late game fights. You won’t go through all the upgrade paths in one playthrough, though, so it’s worth investing in your preferred method of dying early on.
(Image credit: Amazing Distance)
ridiculous pieces
Performance
I’m used to having to decide between ray tracing or an extra 40 frames per second, and usually I go with fps. The same is true in the Callisto Accords. Using the 3080, it ran at under 60fps with ray tracing on, then jumped to about 100fps when I turned it off. Setting FSR 2.0 to performance mode gave me an extra 3.5fps, and no other setting tweaks made a noticeable difference. There are definitely some stutters, especially when loading new areas, or taking and putting back camera controls on either side of cutscenes and certain pre-recorded animations, which Callisto Protocol is full of. Faces do look good, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a video game character sweat so believably.
Mutants can be split one by one, more as a matter of tactical precision than to keep the carnage fresh, and your GRPs can become so powerful that simply throwing them – even pointed Spikes – also make these limbs disappear and fly. I didn’t find any of the warty, vascular, saliva-rich bad guys particularly scary, simply because I’ve played a lot of horror games with these enemies, with the exception of a few nasty predators. What’s threatening isn’t the presence of these scarier mutants, but the way they move about in their environment. There’s also the lingering threat that if you don’t shoot emerging tentacles from mutants, they’ll turn into something even scarier.
The checkpoints are large enough that, aside from a few tricky areas, I rarely found myself repeating encounters until later in the game, when the difficulty ramped up dramatically. I occasionally get annoyed with checkpoint placements: I’ll often spend five minutes at a workstation selling loot and upgrading weapons, only to die shortly after and need to trade again.
I died a lot in the second half, but at least one new death scene was disgusting. These naturally recur, and some of them persist into the mid to late game, but there are a lot of them, and most of them are pretty gross. I don’t find Callisto Protocol’s over-the-top approach to gore terribly funny or shocking – just gross, really – but thankfully it doesn’t rely on blood and guts at the expense of an entirely grim atmosphere. It does a great job. But again, in a comforting, familiar way.
(Image credit: Amazing Distance)
This is a roller coaster video game. It’s full of movie video game clichés. Yes, you’ll be traveling through a crumbling structure that will start to collapse as you move through it. Yes, you need to find three breakers in three dangerous locations to start the generator. Yes, you’ll need to spend a certain amount of time in the claustrophobic space when the bad guys attack you. Naturally, there’s more going on than the narrative synopsis provided above suggests. In many ways, The Callisto Protocol feels like a new, albeit qualified, studio, singing to the crowd: “We can make games that we know you really, really want.” And we, the crowd—at least we Most of them — will sing back: “Yes, you can, keep going.”
A big part of me wants a blockbuster horror game to go a little off course, the way a lot of people want Hideo Kojima to do with Silent Hill. But it’s hard to fault Callisto Protocol’s peg — or GRPing on a row of wall-mounted pegs — for what it proposes: a gripping linear sci-fi survival horror that spins a deepening dystopian yarn around dozens of stressful encounters . In other words, for the masochists in large numbers among us: comfort food for weirdos, or Wario Dragon Quest.
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