To compare this to Dead Space is a cruel joke - while the ambition is there in its influences, The Callisto Protocol achieves nothing that comes even close to the vicious horror of the Dead Space series (well, most of them).
For one, playing it often feels less like a survival horror and more like a walking sim with the occasional moment of repetitive action. There's nothing wrong with being a walking sim, but one would expect the game to then have better writing and level design. But the quality of both is perhaps best exemplified in an early scene:
You take an elevator down to solitary confinement in error, and the guy in your ear whispers with fear "be careful, that's where they keep the worst of them". Well, first of all it's just offensive to all the people that have ever been put in solitary confinement, which in reality is an inhumane method of punishment that can easily be abused and used as a power play. There's nothing inherently more terrible about the people in solitary confinement than there is elsewhere in the prison, and the quick jump to uninformed prejudices betrays a lack of sophistication on the part of the writer.
But perhaps the most disappointing thing game-wise is that there's actually nothing in solitary to justify the other man's fear. In reality, it's perhaps 10 minutes of nondescript corridors, a few doors you open painfully slowly (that, to be fair, manage to be a bit scary, exactly once), and a few encounters that are either laughably theatrical or trivial.
Once you get to the other side of the level that was described as the scariest thing around, you should feel a release of pressure that had been building up through its dreadful passages; instead I laughed thinking "that was it?"
The endless corridors punctuated by the occasional action encounter describing the first part of the game (and, frankly, most of it) was enough to sap any goodwill that had been built up by the simple joy of entering a space horror setting. What's the point of even talking about the underwritten characters and the uninteresting villain figure or the simple action loop that quickly grows numbingly repetitive and the melee combat that keeps undermining the seriousness of the setting with its clunky silliness (it truly is so kind of all the enemies to wait around for a but while you clobber them on the head after every attack).
It could be a better game with less meaningless corridors (e.g. if the feeling of dread was real when walking through them), no annoying enemies (e.g. constant quick-time tapping annoyances that inevitably drain some of your life), better checkpointing (again with the one-hit-deaths after an annoyingly long crawling sequence and whatnot; do they not play their own games?), bigger inventory earlier, less telegraphed scares (it quickly stops being scary when you know the scare is just a cutscene happening in front of you), and more enjoyable weapons (the melee is okay, for a while, even if it gets a bit repetitive, but the worst failure when comparing it to Dead Space is the lacklustre shooting with the run-of-the-mill guns). Oh and some writing that would actually make us care about the characters.
But it's possible there never was much hope for the game because the central gameplay loop itself works against the dread - when killing enemies is all about timing your dodges and hits around their well-telegraphed attacks, there's not much tension, especially when even in groups they wait in line. Every time the fear of the unknown grasped me when entering a new area, it was wiped away as soon as I met the first enemy - I know you, I thought, or I'll know you soon enough, and you are not scary. It started working against it - the few times I did feel scared, I just reminded myself how unscary this game is, and lo and behold, so it was.
The action in DS was sudden, desperate and nail-biting, but in Callisto it is, for the most part, a silly dance, and there are few silly dance numbers in the world that terrify one's soul.
Why then did I still persevere?
Cause I'm a sucker, a sucker, for space horror with weighty movement and action. It might not be that much fun to fight in Callisto, but it sure feels good hitting a monster in the face with your baton and then shooting them as well, just to be sure, the bullet ripping out your weapon like thunder. And the fighting does get more involved later on (and there was one corridor fight that felt legitimately great and I might remember years from now). And I've played so many mediocre shooters like this that it's actually a bit nostalgic going through the dumb story in the boots of Video Game Protagonist Man #334. And it really does look gorgeous (I especially loved walking through the scrapyards covered in snow with a blizzard blowing at your faces and the tall sparsely lighted buildings towering above you in the distant dark).
But it really is a game made up of poor decisions, from its basic gameplay to its enemy, encounter and level design, all working in tandem to undermine any chance of an effective horror atmosphere. The action can be fun and involving, but its silliness and predictability just further undermine the rest of the game; and that's long before you get to a long sequence with enemies who work on hearing alone, it's just that they have very, very bad hearing, so you can be loudly stomping their buddies to bits and pieces right behind them, just to then turn around and sneak kill them next. It's ludicrous and kinda not scary at all, y’know.
And yet. And yet. When I wasn't playing it, I kept thinking of wanting to play it. It doesn't make the game good, but it does up the rating a bit. Or just shows what a tool I am.
Tool enough to even finish it - but not a step more because the game, in a desperate attempt to really prove what a failure it is, ends on a cliffhanger meant to promote the story DLC - the actual end of the game, cut off to parcel out at 1/5th of the full game’s price. What a disgrace. But really - it's the most appropriate ending for a game built on disappointment upon disappointment.
I came for the space horror, I stayed for the pretty graphics and weighty action, and I came away amazed how utterly a game can still fail. A riot.
For one, playing it often feels less like a survival horror and more like a walking sim with the occasional moment of repetitive action. There's nothing wrong with being a walking sim, but one would expect the game to then have better writing and level design. But the quality of both is perhaps best exemplified in an early scene:
You take an elevator down to solitary confinement in error, and the guy in your ear whispers with fear "be careful, that's where they keep the worst of them". Well, first of all it's just offensive to all the people that have ever been put in solitary confinement, which in reality is an inhumane method of punishment that can easily be abused and used as a power play. There's nothing inherently more terrible about the people in solitary confinement than there is elsewhere in the prison, and the quick jump to uninformed prejudices betrays a lack of sophistication on the part of the writer.
But perhaps the most disappointing thing game-wise is that there's actually nothing in solitary to justify the other man's fear. In reality, it's perhaps 10 minutes of nondescript corridors, a few doors you open painfully slowly (that, to be fair, manage to be a bit scary, exactly once), and a few encounters that are either laughably theatrical or trivial.
Once you get to the other side of the level that was described as the scariest thing around, you should feel a release of pressure that had been building up through its dreadful passages; instead I laughed thinking "that was it?"
The endless corridors punctuated by the occasional action encounter describing the first part of the game (and, frankly, most of it) was enough to sap any goodwill that had been built up by the simple joy of entering a space horror setting. What's the point of even talking about the underwritten characters and the uninteresting villain figure or the simple action loop that quickly grows numbingly repetitive and the melee combat that keeps undermining the seriousness of the setting with its clunky silliness (it truly is so kind of all the enemies to wait around for a but while you clobber them on the head after every attack).
It could be a better game with less meaningless corridors (e.g. if the feeling of dread was real when walking through them), no annoying enemies (e.g. constant quick-time tapping annoyances that inevitably drain some of your life), better checkpointing (again with the one-hit-deaths after an annoyingly long crawling sequence and whatnot; do they not play their own games?), bigger inventory earlier, less telegraphed scares (it quickly stops being scary when you know the scare is just a cutscene happening in front of you), and more enjoyable weapons (the melee is okay, for a while, even if it gets a bit repetitive, but the worst failure when comparing it to Dead Space is the lacklustre shooting with the run-of-the-mill guns). Oh and some writing that would actually make us care about the characters.
But it's possible there never was much hope for the game because the central gameplay loop itself works against the dread - when killing enemies is all about timing your dodges and hits around their well-telegraphed attacks, there's not much tension, especially when even in groups they wait in line. Every time the fear of the unknown grasped me when entering a new area, it was wiped away as soon as I met the first enemy - I know you, I thought, or I'll know you soon enough, and you are not scary. It started working against it - the few times I did feel scared, I just reminded myself how unscary this game is, and lo and behold, so it was.
The action in DS was sudden, desperate and nail-biting, but in Callisto it is, for the most part, a silly dance, and there are few silly dance numbers in the world that terrify one's soul.
Why then did I still persevere?
Cause I'm a sucker, a sucker, for space horror with weighty movement and action. It might not be that much fun to fight in Callisto, but it sure feels good hitting a monster in the face with your baton and then shooting them as well, just to be sure, the bullet ripping out your weapon like thunder. And the fighting does get more involved later on (and there was one corridor fight that felt legitimately great and I might remember years from now). And I've played so many mediocre shooters like this that it's actually a bit nostalgic going through the dumb story in the boots of Video Game Protagonist Man #334. And it really does look gorgeous (I especially loved walking through the scrapyards covered in snow with a blizzard blowing at your faces and the tall sparsely lighted buildings towering above you in the distant dark).
But it really is a game made up of poor decisions, from its basic gameplay to its enemy, encounter and level design, all working in tandem to undermine any chance of an effective horror atmosphere. The action can be fun and involving, but its silliness and predictability just further undermine the rest of the game; and that's long before you get to a long sequence with enemies who work on hearing alone, it's just that they have very, very bad hearing, so you can be loudly stomping their buddies to bits and pieces right behind them, just to then turn around and sneak kill them next. It's ludicrous and kinda not scary at all, y’know.
And yet. And yet. When I wasn't playing it, I kept thinking of wanting to play it. It doesn't make the game good, but it does up the rating a bit. Or just shows what a tool I am.
Tool enough to even finish it - but not a step more because the game, in a desperate attempt to really prove what a failure it is, ends on a cliffhanger meant to promote the story DLC - the actual end of the game, cut off to parcel out at 1/5th of the full game’s price. What a disgrace. But really - it's the most appropriate ending for a game built on disappointment upon disappointment.
I came for the space horror, I stayed for the pretty graphics and weighty action, and I came away amazed how utterly a game can still fail. A riot.