The Callisto Protocol

The times certainly were apt for a spiritual successor to Dead Space: EA had pretty much abandoned the into-a-dead-end-written series -- and horror games don't bring in the big bucks, anyway. The field was -- or at least had seemed to be -- open wide, but in the end Striking Distance Studios had to hurry to get The Callisto Protocol out in time: in-2021-announced Dead Space remake threatened to steal their thunder.

Callisto managed to beat the remake by two months (thanks to the latter being delayed by that much?), coming out at the start of December 2022, but the looming deadline might have caused some extraneous technical issues to make it into the initial release. Playing the game now in 2024, I didn't encounter any bugs or performance issues. Instead, The Callisto Protocol's shortcomings lie elsewhere.

We have Dead Space at home

At the helm of Striking Distance was (and still is?) Glen Schofield who is credited as the creator of Dead Space. Interestingly enough, The Callisto Protocol resembles quite a lot of the original pitch for that game: titled then as Rancid Moon and described as Escape from New York in space. I have to say that I like way more what Dead Space pivoted to: an engineer with cool suit and a variety of tools coming to fix a huge spacecraft is considerably more interesting than some dude in orange jumpsuit trying to escape from a barren prison moon.

The Callisto Protocol was also said to be set in the same universe as the publisher Krafton's PUBG: Battlegrounds but that detail got dropped off before release. To me that always had felt merely as synergistic advertisement for PUBG, never meant to become anything concrete, although there are apparently some details in Callisto that suggests a connection was meant to have been there.

In The Callisto Protocol, you play as Jacob Lee who, with his partner, is hauling cargo between the Solar System's colonies. A terrorist group manages to board his ship and Jacob has to crash land it onto the titular Jovian moon. There Jacob is thrown into Black Iron Prison and your attempt to escape begins.

Like Dead Space, The Callisto Protocol has a diegetic HUD: health is on Jacob's neck, ammunition is shown on the guns, and inventory opens up as a holographic display as well. The last one is surprisingly useable without taking hand off your mouse unlike in Dead Space (even the remake). Gameplay too is of the clear successor theme: visceral, close-up third person shooting. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Callisto's arsenal is a lot more basic than Dead Space's and that melee combat is in big focus.

Dead Space with a stun baton

When an enemy swings at you, you can dodge left or right and it's almost like a quick-time event with how the camera locks to the animation. If the enemy continues swinging, you then have to dodge to the other direction lest you get hit. With some tougher enemies, you may have to repeat it even a third or fourth time until it's finally your turn to swing. The easiness of the dodge action and I suppose its constrained feel got criticized but I didn't personally mind it as long as I didn't have to be doing it constantly. But it does feel messy if there is more than one enemy in melee range and the camera snaps to another target in the middle of your dodge chain.

At the start of the game, your melee weapon changes quickly but soon enough you're stuck with a not-that-exciting stun baton for good. As guns you get a pistol and a shotgun, then another pistol and another shotgun, and finally an assault rifle -- really basic stuff compared to Dead Space's variety. You also have kinesis to throw stuff around but there is no stasis to slow things down.

Stealth gameplay is also a thing. It was kind of disappointing how the initially intimidating jailer bots are effortless to destroy (at least on Normal difficulty) once you have a gun and no longer need to sneak around them. Then there is a type of biological enemy that is blind. The sections with them go on for surprisingly long -- at least when played sneakily.

I suppose you could go in guns blazing but I found that to be considerably more difficult when I got spotted by one enemy coming from a wall, right onto me. Crouching around and using a takedown on each and every one of them is safer, easier, and doesn't spend any in-game resources. The stealth takedown makes barely any noise: as long as you're not right next to anything else, they won't notice a thing.

I reckon Striking Distance wanted more survival horror than what Dead Space offers, considering the stealth, the melee, and the extremely limited inventory space: I had to play inventory triage through the whole thing -- even after the slots got doubled.

It's okay

I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with The Callisto Protocol; it just doesn't excel at anything Dead Space already didn't. Its story has no surprises and offered nothing I hadn't seen before. One thing that could have lifted the experience are iconic scenes: there was nothing particularly memorable. It's almost sad when you get on the drill or whatever it is, and it's clear that it's just a lukewarm rerun of the one in Dead Space 2: no back and forth between Isaac and Ellie in this one.

After having already played the Dead Space remake, Callisto's linearity did feel lame. And how the way often closes behind you, disallowing backtracking to an optional area you might have missed. I was pretty good at figuring out the game-progressing routes, although it did take some serious effort in some cases. But as a result, I never got locked out of anything I wanted to explore.

Running on Unreal Engine 4, The Callisto Protocol looks as good as the Dead Space remake on Frostbite (though I can't say how they compare with settings maxed) but comes with lower system minimum requirements. The copious vent-crawling and gap-shimmying loading screens might be partially to thank for that. They do get repetitive and are yet another feature that brings the Dead Space remake to mind: how that game only has a single instance of gap-squeezing -- as if to say how great it is not to have them everywhere.

Callisto has <2% of Earth's mass

My suspension of disbelief was tried by a couple of details. Artificial gravity is obviously a thing in the game's setting considering the prologue and Jacob moving about the ship as if he was on Earth or something. However, it seems unlikely that they would use the technology on Callisto. Maybe where people are situated but outside that would never be a thing -- and how would that even work. People used to 1 g should have such easy time moving in Callisto's 0.126 g but in the game they do not.

The other thing that seemed suspect is Callisto's sky: the size of Jupiter seems exaggerated -- though that could be just me. And the other stellar objects, presumably other Jovian moons, also seem unreasonably large, though I suppose they could be very visible when they happen to be close to Callisto on their orbits. One of them (in the screenshot) appears to be lit from a different angle too, which is odd.

Nothing human-made in real life has ever landed on Callisto so there's no actual image how the Jupiter would look from there; we have only calculated size and artists' depictions. In this image taken by Cassini, Jupiter does appear massive compared to Callisto (like it is) but it still doesn't show how the view would be from the moon.