One of the surprise highlights of PlayStation’s recent State of Play showcase was The Callisto Protocol, a new horror game from the minds behind the original Dead Space. In the trailer, a humanoid creature is fused with a rock. It detaches itself with force, its skin stretching and snapping like melted cheese, pulling itself from its anchor point like an emergency room patient escaping from monitoring equipment. A hulking robot crushes heads like overripe pumpkins. Bodies and viscera cover the walls and floors. Tormented and demented creatures trundle towards the camera.
There’s something about the way the monsters move that makes them terrifying. It’s a kind of staccato, stop-motion effect. They lumber about, twitching, contorting, and twisting unnaturally as if puppeteered by some unseen force — a stylistic choice inspired by creative director and studio CEO Glen Schofield’s love for Korean horror movies.
It’s harrowing but completely enrapturing – twisted and gorgeous, featuring near-photoreal characters that could have easily gone to sleep in a Rockstar game and slipped into a nightmare.
In Philip K. Dick’s VALIS novels, he talks about the concept of the Black Iron Prison, an all-pervasive system of social control that we’re all unwittingly trapped inside. It’s a bizarre temporal loop, a purgatory of sorts where we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past because the powers in control are eternal. In The Callisto Protocol, you take control of Jacob Lee, an inmate in a maximum-security jail called, you guessed it, Black Iron Prison. It’s located on Jupiter’s second-largest moon, Callisto, which is also known as the ‘Dead Moon’ – a strange monicker considering how devoid of life our own bit of space rock is, but fitting for a sci-fi horror setting.
“Perfect, right?” Schofield says. “It’s also a moon that scientists have said could be colonized someday because it has water. And although it’s cold, 200 degrees below zero, it felt relatable in that way. But it also felt desolate, scary, dangerous. What a great place to put a prison.”
According to Schofield, Black Iron Prison features “the worst of the worst”. For those who want to escape, if the robot sentries and guards armed with serrated stun batons don’t get you, the cold will. Of course, you don’t see much of the prison functioning because things go to hell not long after you pick up the controller. With the protagonist being an inmate himself, he’s probably seen some things, but even killers might balk at alien horrors peeling themselves away from the walls.
“He’s complicated,” Schofield says of the protagonist, giving little away. “We went pretty deep on this story. You’ve got to really pay attention because we’re telling you what happened to create what’s going on. But at the same time, there’s a deeper story about the characters and so there’s a lot of nuance to it.”
One thing that has changed about the story is its connection to the PUBG universe. Originally, the game was planned to have explicit ties to the battle royale game, taking place in the not-too-distant future in the same canon. Those plans have since been scaled back, which is a good call because that eyebrow-raising connection became the focal point of conversations around the game – a game which, judging by the footage we’ve seen so far, deserves to be discussed as its own thing.
“As we’re writing, as we’re designing, we realized it needed to be its own game,” Schofield explains. “It made sense. We love PUBG and we’re still going to have little things in there to tie back to it, but we wanted to make it its own game, its own universe, its own IP, its own story and characters.”
Schofield says publisher Krafton was completely supportive of this change. The company just wants the studio to make the best game it can.
So, how does it play and how similar is it to Dead Space? First off, you can expect a diegetic interface, which is nerd-speak for: don’t expect loads of health bars and ammo counters littering up your screen. You’ll be able to tell how damaged your character is from a light display on their back, and ammo counters will hover over guns as a holographic display. Everything is designed to make you forget you’re playing a game at all.
Then there’s the limb cutting. Dead Space placed you in the gravity boots of an engineer, so the majority of your arsenal was welding tools and industrial cutters, which was lucky considering the alien threats in that game really didn’t like it when you chopped their limbs off. Here you’ll find more conventional weaponry, as well as some high-tech gadgets and a devastating melee weapon. Limb cutting specifically won’t be encouraged, but you’ll be sloughing off the flesh with each shot anyway.
“We have a gore system that we couldn’t have done back then,” Schofield says when asked if there’s anything similar to Dead Space’s limb lopping. “That’s pretty brutal. You take pieces and chunks out, and parts of the head off. It’s much deeper than what we did on Dead Space.”
There’s also another standout mechanic, but Schofield isn’t ready to talk about it just yet.
“I apologize for that,” Schofield says, candidly. I can tell he really wants to. “That’s coming out. But yeah, we’ve got pretty brutal melee combat – it’s in-your-face brutality. Then at the same time, you need to use your weapons. You’ve got to upgrade your weapons, you’ve got to try and find as much ammo as you can. Remember, this is survival horror – there’s not a lot of ammo.
“Then we have another thing called the GRP or ‘grip’, which is like a gravity gun. But the difference is it can pick up the enemies. You can pick them up and you can fling them into giant fans, into lathes, into machinery. We even have walls with spikes on them. You can pick things up in the world and use them.”
Outside of that, there are the enemy types. That robot in the trailer? Apparently, you don’t want to run into that if you can help it. There are also those horror favorites – stalker enemies who haunt you through the course of the game. Then there’s the fodder, which you can fight and fling around with the GRP, and there’s also an enemy that you have to stealth kill, a bit like the clickers in The Last of Us. Combined with the cutscenes, this variety helps the developers pace the game so you don’t feel burned out by repeating the same encounters in different environments.
And there will be different environments. In the trailer, we see the protagonist wearing a spacesuit and braving the Dead Moon’s harsh surface. It also sounds like you’re going to be delving into some kind of experimental underground facility, perhaps built to study the Lovecraftian depths of an alien ocean.
“There’s a lot of inside sections, but the inside parts are very different,” Schofield explains. “Sometimes you do need your helmet in there because you’re sort of in the deep below. I can’t get too deep into it, but there’s not a lot outside, but it’s pretty cool.”
While there are still plenty of unanswered questions, The Callisto Protocol is exciting stuff. It looks and sounds impressive, and it’s arriving towards the end of the year, smack bang in the middle of a survival horror renaissance. Created in the middle of a pandemic while simultaneously building a new studio and recruiting the talent, it’s impressive to turn around a project like this at all, never mind in the space of a few years. Schofield says it’s all down to the team, who he praises throughout our conversation.
“They’ve taken quality to the next level,” he says. “Man, when Jacob breathes inside his helmet, you see the breath appear on the helmet and then go away, it’s amazing. The 3D audio – you put headphones on with this game, it’s gonna blow you away. The graphics alone are insane. We’re gonna pull you into the world more, the characters are gonna pull you in more. I’m proud of having just been able to get things done like we have through this pandemic.”
The Callisto Protocol launches on December 2 for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
