What scares you? Body horror? Claustrophobia? The idea of things being pushed through your eyes? Jump scares? Mediocre level design? The Callisto Protocol has it all, for better and for worse. Insistent on pushing you over the edge and making you sweat, Striking Distance Studios’ first game is overbearing; a carnival horror house trying to be a top-of-the-line escape room, Michael Bay trying to be John Carpenter. It does everything Dead Space did, sure – but once the ground is already broken, does it need breaking again?
There are differences, of course. The Callisto Protocol is prettier. The characters are more fleshed out, and there’s Hollywood talent in the space suits, too. The production values are upgraded. The combat, at first, is better. But The Callisto Protocol is trying to be too many things. 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 zealotry. It lacks the lean focus of its cinematic or video game inspirations, and often comes off like one of the shambling, shaking corpses it loves to spring on you when you think you’re enjoying a moment of safety, instead.
The developers at the fledgling Striking Distance Studios went off about the game’s ‘fear engineering’ during development – a lofty, PR-driven spiel about how the game can read your actions and emotions as you play and respond with brutal accuracy to terrify you. In practice, this means that favouring melee attacks will make enemies counter you more. Favouring your pistol will mean they lurch at you. Using your pseudo-telekinetic GRP device means they stay away from spikes on the walls. What was meant to be bleeding-edge AI feels like the superfluous enemies thrown at you in a Destiny raid. That are just a bit harder to kill.
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