THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL

Walk down gaming’s moodiest corridors.

$89.95 | PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X | callisto.sds.com

Working man pilot Jacob Lee has crash landed on the dead moon of Callisto, after his cargo ship is boarded by a notorious terrorist group. First, he discovers his colleague has died a gruesome death during the crash. Next, Lee is arrested, and he has a long life spent in the moon’s Black Iron prison to look forward to. But then the prison falls afoul of some mysterious disaster that turns its inhabitants into crazed mutants.

The stakes are clear: Lee is in deep shit and must dig himself out of it. The Callisto Protocol wastes no time cementing the terror of its setting. Now we just need to walk through corridors for 15 hours and butcher our way through it.

The GRP is The Callisto Protocol’s answer to Control’s levitate, or Half-Life 2’s gravity gun, and it’s great fun. In a game full of spongey baddies, this weapon lets you pick most of them up and toss them off platforms and into chasms, or more regularly, into wall-mounted spikes.

I didn’t find any of the baddies especially scary, if only because I’ve played a lot of horror games with enemies just like these, but there are a few loathsome predators that were the exception. It’s not the appearance of these more fearsome mutants that’s threatening, but how they move around the environments. There’s also the ever-lingering threat that if you don’t shoot the emerging tentacles off a mutant they’ll morph into something more formidable.

The Callisto Protocol is riddled with cinematic videogame cliches. Yes, you’ll navigate a crumbling structure that will start to collapse as you cross it. Yes, you’ll need to power on a generator by finding breakers that are located in different locations. The Callisto Protocol feels like a new, albeit wellqualified studio, singing to the crowd, “We can make these kinds of games that you really, really want.” And we, the crowd – most of us anyway – will sing back, “Yes, you can, keep on going.”

"The Callisto

Protocol is riddled with cinematic videogame cliches."

Gory and grim in equal measure, The Callisto Protocol doesn’t mess with the survival horror formula.

Shaun Prescott

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