It's a testament to how much I enjoyed the music, environments and various elements of the games writing (story, world building and some the characters) that I even bothered to finish this despite chipping away at it for years.

I just found the act of playing it to be repeatedly off putting. Mainly due to the glut of systems that I feel the game does a poor job of explaining to the player or encouraging the use of. That's not even touching on the idea of a gacha system being tied to such a key element of the game's RPG systems and progression.

There's absolutely a lot of interesting systems at play here, particularly in the combat, but the game goes out of it's way to muddy any chance of those system's actually getting a chance to shine. Which is a shame, because I feel like if the UI easier to navigate and more legible and some of the systems were more cleanly explained with stronger onboarding that explained the value of engaging with them, then this would've been an incredible RPG. As it stands though it just feels like a game crumbling under the weight of it's own gameplay ambitions and ideas.

And yet despite all those frustrations, the narrative and elements of the presentation really compelled me to stick with it and finish. There's a lot of really great work done here that makes the game a lot more unique and memorable than it's predecessor. It's just a shame that it felt like the game didn't want me to actually experience that most of the time.

It's rare to come away from a game and have no idea what the intention behind it was, and yet that's how I came away from The Callisto Protocol.

The desperation with which everything about the game and the information surrounding it wants to remind you of Dead Space indicates that the idea was to create a spiritual successor to that series. Yet the game never gets far enough to do anything to succeed that series or even carve out it's own identity, it's best efforts consist of reminding you of moments that Dead Space did, and at every turn Dead Space did it better.

To make the struggles to find it's own identity even worse, the elements that are more unique to this game, such as the melee system are just poorly implemented. Your first 30 minutes playing this game, is largely how the rest of the 8 hour journey is going to play out. The melee combat is simplistic and incredibly trivial and for some reason the game decided to add guns into the mix that you're constantly drowning in ammo for. At a certain point that game starts to feel unsure in if it even wants to be a melee focused game, or even what type of horror game it is. The pacing and size of most encounters feels more like it wants to be a slightly slower and more methodical horror game, as if smaller scale encounters would lead to more tension and more effective scares. Yet the game also drowns you in so much ammo and throws some absurd set pieces at you that it ends up feeling more like it's pulling from the action side of the Horror genre. Yet it's so confused that it executes neither well and just fails to be satisfying as a horror game or as an action game, it's scares are too predictable to be effective and it's action too simplistic to be engaging.

I will give praise to the sound design and the graphical fidelity, which I can't knock and was frequently impressed by. When the game was using it's audio effectively was the few moments it was actually tense or scary,. Plus, anytime I was just watching the game I was often impressed with the quality of the visuals and the animations.

I can't say I disliked the game. I was certainly baffled by the choices it made and how derivative it felt but it was perfectly acceptable, if extremely forgettable. However, if the best thing a game can offer is consistent reminders of much better games, you just end up wondering why you're not spending your time elsewhere.