One of the main things that circled the initial launch of Striking Distance Studios and KRAFTON’s newest horror title The Callisto Protocol was just how rough it launched on PC. My initial start of the game was just as rough as you may have heard others complain about online, but after the Day 1 patch they sent out, this game played so much closer to what I expected from it.

That said, this horror game was developed to flow in such a clean way that it felt like I was playing through a cinematic horror experience. They even label the difficulties as different levels of experiences. With cutscenes flowing with what you are actively doing and groups of enemies on screen numerous times, having the game play without stuttering or jumping is a must. Now that I had the chance to experience this game without the issues it had at first, it’s time to dive into how well they did developing it.

Story

Step into the shoes of Jacob, a goods transit worker that is doing a job that he believes would be his last one before he can give up the position. While he wasn’t wrong, things did not go as planned. After a strange group boards his ship, causing it to crash on the moon called Callisto, he is taken to the on-surface Black Iron Prison along with the remaining onboarders.

Regardless of his pleas that there has been a mistake, his onboarding process begins and he is tagged, checked, and prepped to be a prisoner here. Without a moment to rest or gather an idea of where he is, he awakes from the onboarding process in his cell to the entire Black Iron Prison falling to shambles and under attack!

Now, with no other option than to escape this madhouse for both his survival and his freedom, he begins to trek through the prison to begin his action-filled journey to escape. Along the way, he will make friends with those who can help him, learn how things used to run in the prison, try to discover what happened to cause the outbreak, and even understand a bit more about himself.

Gameplay

To get this out of the way, this game can be compared to Dead Space in so many different ways! The way cutscenes flow into the gameplay, how some of the enemies do their jump scares, your interaction with the environment, how you upgrade your gear, and so much more. The amount of callbacks in this game is almost unreal, honestly. As much as I don’t like comparing games to other titles, the experience from the developer’s time creating the Dead Space series heavily leaked its way over to this new title.

Starting out with nothing, the first weapon you get is a shiv from a fellow prisoner. From there, you will slowly gain new weapons such as the security baton, hand cannon, and more. After the hand cannon, you will have to find schematics to unlock new guns and then have the created in the same machine that you use to upgrade your current weapons. When you are working on upgrading your different weapons, you will have to use Callisto Credits that you find to pay for them and each weapon has its own tree of upgrades available. You do have to get initial upgrades before you can get the higher tier ones, as with most upgrade trees, but only for the weapon you want to focus on upgrading.

There is no stock system, so once you have a weapon made it will always be on you. The game has a neat futuristic gun design where you have a single handle that you change the gun modification on top of it to change your guns out. Luckily, different guns don’t really take up space in your inventory, but once you have a gun you will start finding ammo for it. I never came across ammo for a gun I didn’t have and I held off on making a gun to instead upgrade what I already had.

Speaking of finding ammo, you can also find a few different items. Power Converters and Decoders are items that are meant to be sold in the upgrade machine for Callisto Credits, but you can also find a battery to power up your special arm gadget (which has its own upgrade tree as well) and health injectors. Health injectors are found in some boxes, but if you come across a wall-mounted medbox-like item, it will always have a health injector in there for you.

Focusing for a moment on the special arm, this is how you have the classic telekinesis power in this game. You can use this to grab items and enemies, which will pull what you grab towards you - enemies being unable to move in mid-air - and then you can throw them. There are spike walls and grinding gears all of the map, so you can use this power to quickly take out a creature or few. Using your inventory keeps the game active, so recharging the arm with a battery mid-fight is near impossible, which is why you might want to focus on upgrading the arm over a weapon.

Now, let’s talk about the combat in this game. You do have your classic firearms combat and the different guns fire different types of bullets, but that isn’t your limitation. Once you fully upgrade a gun, it gets its secondary firing option which will take up more ammo in one shot but it does a much more impactful hit. Other than your firearms, this game does give you the chance to focus a lot on combat. Rather than prompt you when you can dodge or block an attack, just like the rest of the game, melee combat is completely fluid. You will have to see the attack coming and choose to either pull back to block or move either left or right to dodge. You can dodge more than one attack in repetition, but you will need to swap going back and forth between left and right dodging - you can not dodge in the same direction twice in a row. Once you have dodged or blocked an attack, your opening for the attack might be there, but make sure you know your enemy because some of them have more than one attack swing, sometimes they won’t use it, and sometimes they even have a more powerful attack other than the regular claw swipe and/or punch.

When it comes to projectiles coming toward you, you simply need to move out of the way in time. If a small creature, or even a bigger enemy, grabs onto you, then you will need to button mash a specific button (for Xbox controllers, it is Y) and you will stab it with your shiv. It sometimes takes more than one stab and sometimes you might just push the enemy off, but the button interaction is the same when you are grabbed in any way.

Audio and Visuals

As far as the environment, creatures, characters, and general overall aesthetic for this game, they did an outstanding job! Of course, it did seem that they had some issues with optimization given how rough the launch day was for the game, but in the end, once everything is running smoothly and you have the graphics turned up, this game is the definition of beautifully horrific. They even used blood trails to help guide you to climbable areas rather than yellow paint or some other non-immersive style just to maintain the environment. Very well done and the accessibility factors in the options menu truly top it all off.

Same can be said about the voice work, sound effects, and overall sound design. Everything was very immersive, I liked that there were areas that you could find that just sat in complete silence, and then others that had some ambiance to them. The way conversations are held while you are moving in the game and never really just sitting there is a good bonus as well, plus it is fitting given most of the cutscenes in this game flow out of gameplay and back into gameplay without really cutting.

Replayability

Other than going back to beat it on a harder difficulty, find secrets, or try and fully upgrade your equipment for achievements, I don’t see much of a reason to play through the game more than once.

What Could Have Been Better

It almost goes without saying that a game of this magnitude, with all eyes on it and well-backed funding, should not have launched in such a negative state. Sure, it was perfectly fine on the consoles, but why was the PC release so rough? If they only had to do a Day 1 patch to fix it, why not get it in there before release or even delay the game launch by a week to make sure it all runs well? It’s really not excusable at this point.

A lot of the jump scare attempts and even some of the enemy designs were overly influenced by Dead Space, in my opinion. While I get that this game was created by the same people behind that title, it sometimes felt like the scare tactics were simply “old hat” when they happened. Being able to see them coming as I am beyond well-versed in the previous series was a bit of a letdown. I was hoping for a lot of new scare experiences but it seemed there was only a handful of actual new scares.

Separating the inventory honestly didn’t make too much sense to me. Why would I have pockets for key items and no pockets available for random gear to collect? While this seems like a foolish question as a key item can be left behind, the schematics alone show that they know to use different indicators for special items. Do you think I won’t drop a health injector for a key item? Overall, what I am saying is that inventory management should be up to the player and not separated into two very limiting pockets.

Some of the death animations didn’t make sense. It didn’t seem they put certain factors into account for them. For instance, there is a death where you get smashed into a wall and beaten against it before they rip your head off from your jawline. This happened to me by an enemy that I had already removed its arm and so the animation played out with no actual arm making contact with me. Along with factors regarding creatures, pretty much every animation that happens on the stairs or a steep slope is always skewed to where it doesn’t line up quite properly. This lack of factors being considered just seemed a little lazy.

Verdict

The Callisto Protocol is a good space horror game in its own right and definitely has an interesting experience to go with an intriguing story. While I do have a handful of complaints and feel let down by a few different aspects of the game, I still really enjoyed my playthrough of the game and believe it is a title worth playing for any action-horror fan. So, to that, I would recommend this game, even if you decide to wait for a sale rather than buy it outright.

The Callisto Protocol is out now for PC via Steam and Epic Games, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.