Strangely, after a biological phage mutant, whose limbs fell off as easily as shoveling a pudding, reached into my mouth and ripped my jaw out of my face for the fifth time, it came to me: Oh, this is a transport game.
Callisto . protocol takes place on a moon run by tentacles with loose limbs, but Dead space the so-called spiritual heir to game designer Glen Schofield would rather walk you by the hand through the wet, visually impressive maze than let you binge slay those enemies. Killing is never really a problem, getting to the next place where you can escape is what matters. It’s better dead aground than Dead space.
Was the cargo pilot Jacob—who I thought really looked like soap opera star Josh Duhamel before I realized it to be soap opera star Josh Duhamel is recreated in sweaty, heroic detail—you need all the help you can to escape the Black Iron Prison on Jupiter’s moon Callisto. You don’t know why you were thrown into one of its harsh cells in the first place, why something called a CORE device was tucked into your neck, synchronized with your thoughts and health, at There are monsters everywhere or whether you should trust your fellow inmates Elias (Zeke Alton) or Dani (Karen Fukuhara) who later rammed your ship and brought you into this.
But when they tell you to meet them at the tram, or take a scary high ladder underground, or activate this or that control panel, you listen and start running. What else will you do? You’re stuck, there’s blood everywhere, do you have a better idea?
Not really. You do what Elias and Dani tell you, their voices echoing through the DualSense controller (or your CORE device) while the prison creaks and crumbles. Impressively detailed sound design—Black Iron fills with ambient groans, metal shards clash and clang, while your zombie or phage-turned enemies emit bass notes, clicks, screams and gurgles all around you.
I do not think Callisto is a particularly scary horror game—I first saw Jacob’s neck twist and crack like knuckles, then it was an inconvenience when I realized this death scene repeated over and over again. and unmissable—but its layered sound kept me on a low level of anxiety. Like waiting for a text, or looking at the sun and realizing you can’t see, for a moment, after you look away.
More hits or misses but still often admirable is arrive there, which the game cares about most—fighting the phage is only a temporary distraction. Your Black Iron escape plan sends you flying down sewers, trudging through blizzards, and through dim corridors covered with organic matter, flesh shells, winding tendrils, and slime. It takes you everywhere, before the beautiful moonscape and the desktop screen lit up and soaring through space. Pristine white walls. Sticky floors. The vents were stained with blood and the pink flesh glistened. It makes you want to see more. And on PS5, Callisto can provide every detail with high gloss, solid without any problem. Or, close to zero—sometimes my gun mysteriously disappears before reappearing.
Callisto protocol also play at the pace of this journey, often forcing Jacob to quietly crawl through tight cave walls or around blind phages or plunge his massive body into a spacewalk. heavy sprint. Facing lots of different textures at so many different speeds feels great with haptic feedback—even grabbing ammo boxes or the in-game currency, Callisto Credits, triggering the thrills, unique throb. Callisto like physical cinema in this way, slow and steady, which might require some re-adjustment of expectations if you’re hoping for the live horror genre.
But as varied and masterful as getting there often takes on a physical look and feel, I eventually tire of hearing my fellow travelers tell me I’m about to get close only to fall over a path. collapsed, or eventually reached Callisto’s icy surface only to be immediately directed back inside. by the Herculean zombies. At these points, the game feels purposeless and I have no sense of the progress I’ve made. My frustration only increased when I was stuck in a room full of unrelenting zombies.
The zombies might be the most fun part of Callistotheir journey, which isn’t ideal, as they are Jacob’s motivation to get out and perhaps your motivation to be curious and find out where they come from. As I learned by dying many, many, many times—lots of times, about halfway through the game, I turned on the easiest setting, but somehow still let some enemies kill you with two lazy hits lazy—zombies come from everywhere.
I love Dark soulswell-known benchmark for hard games, but unlike FromSoftware boss battles, you can’t “learn” how to pass Callisto . protocolbecause they seem to spawn randomly and out of nowhere. “Are they invisible now?!” I scream at my PS5, before or after I scream, “I hate this damn game!!!”
Biophages will suddenly appear from rattling vents or from an empty room. They would look like they were frozen, wrapped in ice, then suddenly very alive, warm and full of murderous intent. They come in different shapes: normal decomposition, armor decay, bullet decay and vomiting, writhing at you with blisters as big as snowballs, eruptions on your back, coming towards you looks like an evil salamander that mutates and then turns invisible (?!).
You are provided with an arsenal of weapons to deal with them, mainly hot stun batons for close combat, handguns and brain-explosive riot guns, and gravity-restricted projector sleeves (GRPs). ) bends gravity to keep enemies in the air until you hurl them against a wall of spikes, or spinning propellers, or fall off a ledge.
In the early stages of the game, only the baton and its characteristics hit strongly feel like they’re actually doing anything useful—enemies absorb your default bullets like you’re throwing marbles at the pyre, which also makes it impossible to manage the horde properly effective. But as you progress, you can find blueprints for additional weapons like assault rifles and skunks, and use Callisto Credits to buy upgrades from Reforge locations throughout. game, what interests me is that it doesn’t allow you to buy more than one thing at a time. Before each boss fight, I spend five minutes individually purchasing ten cartridges.
Callisto waste your time in petty, unnecessary ways like that. The audio logs you collect from corpses throughout the game will help you unravel the secrets of the story, but they don’t play automatically—you have to enter your menus manually, select them, and in the menu. If you exit, they will stop playing.
But the most annoying waste of time that has made me, at the worst times, consider throwing my PS5 controller into the muddy depths of the Gowanus Channel, is CallistoThe dodge mechanism sometimes fails.
When you face any enemy, you must avoid their attacks by holding your left stick in the opposite direction of their rotation, or down if you are blocking it. The game tells you that there’s no time window, just finish it, but I dodged a lot of times and got another long, unmissable death animation—Jacob’s skull was squashed and turned into an ocean of blood, Jacob’s eyes gouged out with a fat zombie’s thumb, Jacob’s nose dipped from all the fat zombie blows to the face—to know that couldn’t be true.
CallistoYour double-headed bosses are the worst at fumbling with your dodge mechanic. Just the thought of hitting them with a stun baton instead of being far away and shooting them will result in you being impaled right in the chest. Make sure you also spend five minutes collecting ammo or health replenishment from Reforge. Found resources are limited and manually saving the game will start from your last check point, so if you start the fight with low health and an unloaded gun, go for it. Consider your fate sealed.
But for all these momentary annoyances, I finished the game on a high note. “There is always a price to pay,” a villain repeats throughout Callisto . protocol, reminds Jacob that making weak, fallible people great takes sacrifice. And in pursuit of video game greatness, I love what I see, so much so that I’m willing to pay the price for a faulty dodge mechanic. But as far as actual prices go, I don’t think anyone should buy a $60 game, completely stop, but especially not the one that currently seems like run wild on PC and won’t get PlayStation’s New Game Plus until a free update on February 7, 2023. But.
I consider Callisto . protocol one of the most ambitious games I’ve played this year, possibly even the most intriguing next to Elen’s ring (although I think Elen’s ring is an alliance of its own—I don’t know if anything can approach its depth and sophistication for a long time). Its thoughtful attention to environment, sound and touch, in my opinion, is exactly what the next-gen game should be: an experiment with the senses and with the story. The game also has its problems, which cannot be ignored. But at least it feels human.
