Quick Look: The Callisto Protocol

Man, I was really hoping this would be good, but everything I’ve seen has turned me off of it. Even if they fix the performance issues, it looks so incredibly uninspired. Too bad there aren’t 17 other Dead Space-like games coming up…

What a missed opportunity. This game will be dead once the Dead Space remake comes out, which is looking pretty good. But, yeah, the combat seems very tedious and the controlling of the character looks bad. And I'm also in the camp of it being inexcusable when you can't listen to audio logs and play the game at the same time. There are many games, both good and bad, that let you do this years ago.

There is a very good quote from Red Hooks' Chris Bourassa:

A horrible monster isn't scary unless it represents a horrifying idea. The monster only works as an ambassador of a bigger conceptual terror - tip of the iceberg. Make sure there's more beneath the surface.

To me, Callisto's "fear design" suffers exactly from that. It doesn't have a scary idea behind its monsters, situations and locations. Callisto focuses on very surface level / utter ugliness instead of underlying tension. Jumpscare can be learned to identify and tolerate, but tension work always and works universally.

Player is never at risk (mentally and progress-wise) really:

• Checkpoints are bad, but game offers a free-form saving anyway. DS (and Alien Isolation for that matter) had in-level save stations that often felt like "oh god, let me save now so i dont loose the progress, oh shit i hear something". There is none of that feeling here.
• Enemies visually are just zombies with blisters. Necromorphs were a true perversion of the human body, which made them terryfying to encounter, but here you have just zombies that just slap you hard with bare hands.
• Max difficulty still offers a plenty of items that you can sell. Ammo is not always relevant because you can simply slam monsters with a stick.
• Being constantly face-to-face with monsters removes any tension of an enemy approaching you, which is the majority of encounters in DS. You are practically never at risk in close combat.
• Progression is all inside that 3D printer thing for credits. And it is just weapons, game doesn't allow you to improve you survivability. It just gives you an armor at some point of the story that increases you health pool once. So you don't have to worry about not upgrading your health or prioritizing health over damage, because it doesn't matter, just keep hitting the monster.
• You can enable auto-dodge in accessibility settings.

As for the other things:

• There is no agency, you are just a dude. Jacob has no shtick, no unique trait, no special skill and he is not visually distinct. Cool armor from the keyart is just a skin with no function, and you get it quite late in the game.
• You are forced to find a keycode by butchering the body of some dead prison guard or find a working fuse to power up the locked door. Those are the most common objectives in the game.
• Good acting, facial animation and voice-over are somewhat wasted on an essentially empty script, because they never say anything remotely interesting or substantial beyond just "we need to get out of here". Techno-babble from DS is vastly superior.
• Lack of interesting tools. Plasma cutter and power saw and other engineering tools in DS vs. couple of versions of pistols, shotgun and an automatic rifle.
• Weird health economy. They clearly didnt want you to insta-heal yourself in battle, so they've made a long healing animation, but at the same time almost every enemy has a health gel to insta-heal you after combat.
• Game lacks a lot of sci-fi that made DS to stand out - no big unique set pieces, no puzzles, no small sci-fi mechanics like open space zones or magboots or oxygen management, no unique encounters like that worm necromorph that would pull your leg and drag you across the hallway.

Scariest thing this game has is camera work, because combat system gives me a whiplash and a headache.

This is a good prototype of a game that went overbudget. Sequel most likely fix it, but as a first game it stumbles too often on things it should know about.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

I'm honestly really enjoying this game the more I play, I don't necessarily think it's "better" than Deadspace was but I think it's stands on its own merits still. My main ctisism is difficulty spikes but now that I'm later in the game I'm finding the combat mechanics pretty engaging. And though I do find it frustrating sometimes a lot of the time I'm now actually enjoying that things feel threatening and encounters are pretty frantic.

I fought "two head" last night and I thought it was a pretty awesome boss fight, genuinely pretty challenging but really fun and intense. Visually this game is also absolutely amazing.and the sound design absolutely top notch. Especially the music and atmosphere.

Been having a great time with it so far. It's not w/out its issues, but they're largely forgivable imo. If you're the kind of person who is going to hyperfocus on them, then steer clear. But, if you liked Dead Space (before EA fucked it up royally), and are looking for something adjacent that scratches that itch before the remake releases, this is great for that.

Sound design and graphics (technical) are very strong here. Writing suffers a bit, but I've certainly played more surface-level-feeling games (Order 1886, I see you lurkin over there). The acting and facial motion cap are well executed, even if the script falls a bit flat at times. The melee combat is the real differentiator here. Weighty, animation-priority-heavy smacks with an intuitive dodge system set the stage for fun and satisfying, easy to execute, combos on enemies. Snap-to-target reticles appearing during combos rewards some bold forays into melee range instead of standing back and dumping rounds into enemies (which is still an option at times).

All in all, a good foundation for something better down the line. Feel like some of the design philosophies didn't make the jump with Schofield, but I'm sure they're getting plenty of constructive criticism on this entry. Happy w/ my purchase, and I hear there's some story dlc coming over the summer (supposedly), which I'll likely check out.

I think I can appreciate that this game tried to do something different with the combat, but I just can't get over how strangely paced the combat animations swing and move with the camera? It borderline makes me feel a bit nauseated - I get it's trying to really give off the sense of style it is going for, but it just isn't working for me.

I almost wished it wasn't trying to be Punch-Out or something either, or I wish it just didn't try to move so quickly? I just can't put my finger on it.

@shtung: This is a really good summary of the gameplay, technical, and aesthetic aspects of the game. Thanks for taking the time to write all this!

@shtung: I think you nailed it on the head. Copying and pasting this from the comment I made on the Youtube video, but when they were talking about how it was missing something it jogged my mind. In the video about the historical society from Silent Hill 2, Derek from Stop Skeletons From Fighting talks a lot about how effective horror needs the subversion of your expectations and tonal contrast. It doesn't seem like there's very much of either of those in this game.

I think that's why the jump scares aren't scary, and the monsters aren't scary. The only time I was honestly shocked in the video was when his head went in the pod thingie and then came back out. I was surprised that they went that far with the gore, which is cool, but it doesn't crate an effective horror atmosphere when this game is exactly what you expect it to be.

Loving this game so far, 5 chapters in.

Great QL, Jess! This is probably the biggest disappointment of the year for me. It doesn't start out that great, and outside of a couple of sections, only gets worse as it goes on. What a bummer!

Yeah, it's a pretty big disappointment. It's a shame, because I love the idea of a survival horror game where the combat is heavily melee based. It would be an interesting change of pace and could really add to the tension and horror if done right.

I think other posters nailed it by saying the monsters don't represent anything. Like, the Thing is a living embodiment of human distrust and paranoia. The zombies in this game represent . . . something?

To that, I'd also add that writers need to learn that gross design and jump scares /= horror. Good horror comes from tension, which means sometimes it's way more effective if you pull your punches once in a while. That's why Alien: Isolation works - the alien isn't always around, which keeps you guessing as a player. That hissing noise could be the alien. Or it could just be a steam vent on the fritz. In Callisto Protocol, the noise is always the monster. That box? Monster behind it. That closet? Monster in it. Knee deep water? Multiple monsters.

Honestly, I found the game way more frightening in the first few minutes before any monsters showed up. Crash landing only to be wrongfully imprisoned with no explanation, having a bunch of shit surgically implanted in you and facing the rest of your life trapped on an airless rock? That's terrifying. Kind of wish they'd found a way to base the game around that instead.

Some people dumped all over The Medium for not being the spiritual successor to Silent Hill they were hoping for. But I've played through that game, and I believe that game does a much better job honoring that series than Callisto Protocol does with the Dead Space series. At least with The Medium, you had an interesting concept of exploring a physical and spiritual world at the same time. With both worlds being fully rendered. And the story actually gets interesting after halfway though the game when another important character is introduced. Unlike this game which seems to be pretty empty in terms of plot. Both games aren't that scary, so there is that. But The Medium does a better job with building tension, but its predictable tension.

Good quick look. The point where they get to the punch out comparison for the combat actually made me slightly more interested, but nothing else grabbed me.

Love Jess' perspective on Game Design and she's amazing in every Quick Look, she just pointed out so many things that I first did not notice but in the back of my head were bothering me.

I'm just here to thank Jeff for singing Shake Hands with Danger.

Consensus on this game seems to be that it's kind of a miss, which bums me out a little. The environments themselves being kinda empty and boring doesn't help matters - I couldn't help but think about how much of a sense of place the Ishimura has. People clearly lived there, and you can see how it started going bad and then got apocalyptic. The prison stuff is... I mean it's just cells. Prisons are boring, but even like, Arkham Asylum builds a prison and you can see staff rooms and facilities that make it clear people did more than like, scream and die. I have seen a grand total of two environments in this game, which is "blood soaked corridor" and "blood soaked sewer," neither of which are particularly compelling.

This looks like a great Game Pass game... Even then, though.

I don't know what to say, other than you're bad at this game.

I guess I'd be too.

But, I knew it wasn't for me.

I've been enjoying this game the more time I've spent with it. The combat and the dodge took a while for me to get used to. It's not Dead Space, but man is it hard to not compare everything about it to Dead Space. I haven't finished this one yet, but I don't get the sense of a larger world or plot like I did with Dead Space. Callisto seems like it could have used more time as I'd be very excited to see what its team could do with a sequel.

On a tech note for this Quick look - not sure how y'all record these these days, but sometimes they look especially low bitrate like this one. Just a wild idea since I know 1080p on youtube doesn't allow for super high bitrate videos but it is possible to export at a higher bitrate at 2560x1440 even if the native resolution of the capture is 1080p. The time to process 1440p in premiere and youtube is pretty negligible and the higher bitrate shelf youtube allows for 1440p is quite noticeable!. But don't take my word for it, maybe it's worth an experiment to see for yourself if you get the time.