Rob: Sci-fi space horror is a can’t miss genre for me. Ever since System Shock 2, I have gone out of my way to try and get hold of every single variation on the basic theme of, “Humanity, in its hubris, has taken to the stars. Its sins have followed it there, and now a mighty space installation and its brave and ambitious crew have either been slain or reduced to monstrous parodies of themselves.” So imagine my dismay when I realized, about an hour into Callisto Protocol, that I was not having an ounce of fun.For one thing, it’s often the opening stages of games like this that showcase them at their best. The setting is new and novel, so the early action is filled with tiny revelations about what is really going and what type of sci-fi universe forms the backdrop of the game’s action. Think about Prey’s incredible set of feints and reveals before you’re really turned loose aboard Talos I, or the history of Sevastopol that is sketched out in the earliest sequences of Alien: Isolation. It struck me as a very bad sign that, after more than an hour with Callisto Protocol, I really couldn’t latch onto anything exciting or mysterious. I was in a space prison that didn’t even feel much like a prison, just a lot of hallways LEGO’d together into a series of meandering loops, fighting creatures that were certainly ugly but not really scary. Occasionally the warden would get on the PA system to basically say, “Sorry about all this, I just think monsters are cool.”
But there’s something about Callisto Protocol that rarely clicks on that level. I do think a huge part of it is owed to the game’s (so far) bland and repetitive setting, as there’s nothing to convince me we’re on some super cool futuristic space prison beyond knowing that’s a fact, and the monsters, maybe because they’re forced to be built around the game’s dodge-focused melee combat, come across as little more than zombies with pus bubbles.“I really couldn’t latch onto anything exciting or mysterious. I was in a space prison that didn’t even feel much like a prison, just a lot of hallways LEGO’d together into a series of meandering loops, fighting creatures that were certainly ugly but not really scary. Occasionally the warden would get on the PA system to basically say, ‘Sorry about all this, I just think monsters are cool.’”
It kinda starts with your character. Of the two space freight pilots you meet at the start, it’s the guy with a family and distinctive motivations and doubts who gets killed in the opening. Jake, your character, is just a guy chasing a paycheck with really no apparent relationships or context to speak of. You’re immediately tossed into a prison that you never see operate as a prison, but it doesn’t have the identity of an Arkham that makes the Arkham Aslylum work. Who are the prisoners here? What’s life like here? No idea, doesn’t matter, everything is broken and everyone is dead inside of five minutes. There’s a woman you were imprisoned with, a resistant leader of some sort that we meet in the intro cinematic for the game. Who is she? What is her organization fighting against? No idea, and I don’t mean that the game has dropped hints and implications that we’re meant to weave into some kind of backstory. I mean that we know nothing about the conflict she is a part of, or how it relates to the people who run this prison. She is a stock character alongside “prison guard” “warden” and “space trucker.”That’s workable if the combat feels incredible and the world is fun to explore, and vice versa if the characters and setting are fascinating then you can forgive bad mechanics and level design. But Callisto Protocol’s doesn’t really offer much in any category, and there are a lot of places where I can say that what it offers is actively off-putting. To be honest, if this were not a current-gen game with a Dead Space lineage, I don’t think I’d still be here giving it chances.'“‘Callisto Protocol’ already sounds like a VHS you’d find at the back of the video store in the 80s, and while frequently that’s frankly an n appealing pitch, it can feel a bit more that Asylum company, the one who puts out movies like Transmorphers and Top Gunner, where you’re reminded of the other games in this specific sub-genre that you liked more. That sounds meaner than I intended it to sound, btw.”