The Callisto Protocol | Review | AAA horror is dead, long live indie horror

The AAA horror scene has been long dormant. For a very long time, we haven’t been getting any new horror games except the Resident Evil series. For the last year though, we have been seeing a small movement in the AAA horror industry and with more new IPs and remakes to look forward to next year, The Callisto Protocol was possibly one of the most exciting horror titles that everyone had been waiting for.

It was the original Dead Space director with possibly more people from the original crew. This was it. This was going to be the next big thing. Glen Schofield, the game’s director, talked a bunch of times about how he and the team understood horror, and how they knew how to make an effective, scary horror experience. The game kept getting marketed as a horror title. This was it. The premium AAA horror we have been waiting for was finally on the horizon.

Alas, it was too good to be true.
The Callisto Protocol has been released and after finishing it at the end of my playthrough that roughly took 10 hours, it is safe to say that it is a heartbreaking disappointment.

Dead Space keeps on living in our hearts.

I’m a big fan of the Dead Space series. The original is easily one of the best modern survival horror games and it still holds up surprisingly well. If you go back and play it today, it won’t feel aged at all. Maybe you’ll need to tweak some settings and download some fan patches because of that annoying vsync issue but once you solve that, it’s a damn good time. So being a big fan of the Dead Space series, I had full confidence in Glen Schofield and his newly formed studio, Striking Distance. While the game manages to imitate some of Dead Space’s memorable aspects, it fails on delivering the rest of it and suffers an identity crisis.

The Callisto Protocol begins with the protagonist Jacob Lee and his partner completing one last job at the Black Iron Prison, a facility on the moon of Callisto. They’re basically space truckers, transporters, or smugglers, depending on where you look at it from. Once they finish this job, they’ll be able to return to their homeworld to reap the fruits of their efforts. But of course, things go south pretty fast and Jacob becomes an inmate in this brutal prison. He dons his generic male protagonist buzz cut and wakes up to an outbreak. Not knowing what is happening, he tries to survive with the help of another inmate. The game’s story takes sharp turns in some places, forcing the protagonist to take detours and face the Black Iron Prison’s terrors in its uncharted locations.

The Callisto Protocol is an over-the-shoulder third-person game that looks and plays like Dead Space. It has no HUD on the screen, your health bar is at the back of your neck and your inventory is a hologram that opens right in front of you. While the over-the-shoulder perspective usually provides us with a more broad view of the area, in Callisto it’s rather too close and makes the game a bit more claustrophobic. In a horror game context this should count as a blessing but since this is a game with a heavy emphasis on melee combat, this extremely close-up version of the classic view does more harm than good.

A horror brawler? Sure, I’ll take it.

Yes, melee combat. Probably the one thing you’re going to do most in this game. Before the game was out, if you told me that this game was going to be a beat-em-up, I wouldn’t have believed you. Because it sounds so out of place, right? Well, Callisto is exactly that. It’s a horror brawler. A beat-em-up. It’s a game where you just go and beat the living shit out of almost every enemy. Even if you get more firearms in your arsenal, melee combat will still be your go-to combat method. It could be a hit or miss because it also has its problems. While smashing the brains of mutated prisoners looks and sounds really good, it takes away the scariness factor of the game right out of the gate. It’s also very methodical and boring. Sure, you’re gonna enjoy beating zombies in the first hour of the game but when you realize that’s the only thing you’re gonna be doing until the end, it sorta loses that fun factor. There is nearly no enemy variety with only maybe 5 different enemy types and most of them can be beaten in the same way, with the same animations and the same mechanics.

With its melee combat, the game also gives us a dodge mechanic. It’s a bit tricky to use at first because it’s pretty unusual, but you get used to it quickly and get the hang of it. But again, this also becomes very mundane and turns into a thing you just mindlessly do until the end. It almost turns into a rhythm game. The enemy swings their arms, you dodge, you hit, they swing back, you dodge, you hit, and so on and so forth. No variety at all. They don’t use weapons, they don’t use the environment, they just swing their arms at you. Some enemy types can throw projectiles at you but they are spread very far in between.

While the melee combat surely takes the stage in most of the encounters, you still have a surprisingly good amount of weapons to choose from. The game begins with this sort of 3D-printed hand cannon and later on in the game you find new schematics just like the ones in Dead Space and use these on buy stations around the facility to craft new weapons. This crafting system and the modifications to the weapons are done in a pretty satisfying way, rewarding you for exploration and giving you a chance to change your play style a bit.

Unfortunately so, the weapon swap is extremely slow. While it’s supposed to be a quick weapon swap, you have to go through a list of weapons, choose one, change your weapon to that type, reload, and then you are ready to shoot. During combat or boss fights, this just becomes unbearable and frustrating. If the game would simply stop or slow down during these selection menus, it would improve the combat a lot. Same with healing. When you want to heal yourself, Jacob crouches down and goes into this long animation lock where he has to heal himself manually. It takes a long time and makes it practically impossible to do this during combat. Sure, these things make combat challenging to a degree but it’s also important to know when to stop before it becomes frustrating instead. And in Callisto, every combat situation where you have to fight against more than one enemy is frustrating. Jacob just locks at the enemy he’s currently fighting and the claustrophobic camera angle only makes things worse. Overall, these all just merge together and create a frustratingly mundane combat experience.

Aside from your guns and melee combat, you also get the stasis ability from Dead Space but instead of slowing time and carrying objects, you are only able to do the latter this time. You can pick up objects to throw at enemies or even better, you can pick up enemies to throw them at various hazards or even at one another. I wish it had more uses such as environmental puzzles or anything else really but unfortunately, the game has no puzzles at all. Nothing. Zero.

Speaking of the absence of puzzles, I believe this is a good point to get into what is, in my opinion, the worst part of The Callisto Protocol. The linear gameplay. It’s so linear that the game even tries to show you where to go with shiny yellow arrows. Yes, that yellow paint that we know from every new AAA game these days. It also exists in The Callisto Protocol. In a comedic amount. But what’s funny and ironic is, the game is already so linear, the player doesn’t even need these indicators to find out where to go. There is literally only one way you can go. It’s impossible to get lost in its chapters. Sometimes you find these side paths you can take to discover secrets or gather some items but they either somehow put you back on the correct path or they take you to a dead-end, forcing you to go back to the correct path. There is literally no other way. The arrows, the yellow paint, and the writings on the walls telling you what to do with the enemies, these all just comedically merge and tell you how stupid you are. The game doesn’t believe in your ability to follow a singular, straight path. It tells you, you, player, you are stupid. Absolutely abysmal stuff. This was also a nitpick that I had in God of War Ragnarök, with NPCs telling us what to do on every step and I hate to see it in this game too. And whenever you try to complain about issues like these, fans will try to tell you “oh maybe you just don’t like video games” or maybe we just don’t like how they’re made these days, how about that?

Being a linear, cinematic game, you’d also expect The Callisto Protocol to at least tell a good story, right? Something memorable, with interesting characters, a mysterious plotline maybe? To be honest, it’s been just a few hours since I finished the game and I don’t remember anything about its story. Generic characters, dialogues, soul suckingly bland voice recording that game developers still use to this day, they all were just boring. I got bored. The story is not memorable at all. If it was a movie, it would be a streaming-only movie because nobody would publish this in cinemas. It’s that boring.

I guess that’s the word. Boring is probably the best way for me to describe my experience with this game. Disappointment and boredom. In a chapter, there is this stealth mission type of section where Jacob has to crouch and walk slowly without making much noise, and while sure it gives you something different to do, it overstays its welcome and quickly turns into another boring section where you just methodically finish the areas. You crouch, go behind the enemy, stab the enemy, collect items, and go to the next area. The enemies in this area are so dumb, you can just stab them next to each other and they will still refuse to attack you. You stomp the ground, break shit, throw things around, they don’t care as long as you are crouched. It’s all so methodical.

But okay, enough talking about the bad stuff. Let’s talk about the good stuff. The visuals. The art. The music. The Callisto Protocol is probably the best-looking horror game to date. Not only in terms of graphical fidelity, but also in terms of the art design. Every single location in the game has something for you to look at. A pile of corpses, a mangled body, a fleshy wall that is blocking your path, a bloody floor with red lights surrounding it, there is always a setting that tells you a brutal story. The team has done an incredible job designing these environments. Not only in horror games, but in games in general, The Callisto Protocol is a game I won’t so easily forget about when it comes to graphics.

Not only the environments, but the characters also have incredibly detailed models. You can see Jacob sweating bullets in the most stressful situations. Enemies are extremely detailed and the fact that they change shapes the more you hit them, makes it only better. They lose limbs, take massive wounds or simply mutate, changing how they look. Big props to the designers who worked on these models. They did an amazing job.

When it comes to sound design, you have to play The Callisto Protocol with headphones to fully appreciate what it’s trying to do. The atmosphere, the sounds coming from your surroundings, and the little clicking noise in the vents, all come together to create this impressive crescendo of terror. While the game doesn’t have many musical cues, which is normal for a horror game, it uses music and sounds very cleverly in stressful situations. When you finish an enemy with the final blow or throw one of them to a death machine in the environment, you can hear the music cranking up, mixing with other sounds, creating this chaotic moment. I appreciated those moments a lot. If this is not gonna be a horror game, then let it be a chaotic brawler. The sound design makes it a really good brawler. I love it.

But unfortunately, visuals and sounds are the only good things I can say about The Callisto Protocol. The rest of it fails in every way. It is clear that the team tried to imitate Dead Space and copy a bunch of its various aspects. But unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if there isn’t a good foundation. They should’ve simply worked on it a bit more to improve its mechanics along with its performance. Yeah, performance. It’s pretty bad. I have a high-end system that is capable of running everything pretty much on the highest settings but Callisto just suffers from constant stutters and other bad performance issues. Things like these, merged with the dozens of problems I found in the game, beg the question “what could have been if they worked on this game for an extra year?” but alas, that’s not how AAA game development works and there are tight deadlines to fill.

The Callisto Protocol is not a bad game. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a nice horror brawler. But it’s not the game they marketed to us. It’s not horror, it’s not survival horror, it’s not the scariest next thing, it’s just a decent action horror brawler (?). I hope Striking Distance Studios’ next game won’t be horror and they’ll focus purely on making a good action shooter because I can see them making a really good game in that case. But for me, a die-hard horror fan, this is just disappointing. My suggestion would be to get this from a good sale.

I’m not sure if we’ll be able to see AAA horror in its full glory. The remakes for Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 are on the horizon but other than those, there aren’t many to expect. Thankfully the AA titles and the indie scene is hard at work when it comes to horror games. Just recently we’ve seen the release of SIGNALIS, regarded as the best horror game of this year by many people. There are many more. It’s an endless line of horror games, made by people that actually understand horror, made for horror fans. You can see me curating them on @horrorvisuals on Twitter.

As the AAA horror slowly fades away, we will surely be looking to indie developers more. To be fair, we’ve already been doing that for the last 10 to 15 years but now that these AAA trials face massive failures, the indie horror scene is surely to flourish even more.

That’s it. Sorry, this review was on the negative side but I had to talk about my disappointment because this was very important to me.

As always, thank you for reading, and make sure to check out all the other channels you can find me at.