In space, no one can treat your horrific body protrusions.
If Resident Evil is the old school king of horror back to take it's crown, then Callisto is the nephew born of Horror's illegitimate affair with sci-fi, because everything I see of this game makes me fall in love with the horror genre all over again. Not since Dead Space 2 have I found myself drawn to something so unabashedly fuelled by gluttonous body horror carnage, and maybe I'll be able to approach it this time without being scared into an actual heart attack. Yes, I think I'm better off now. More grown and experienced. I'd never let a franchise shake me to my utmost- oh wait, didn't I get shook silly when playing Outlast a couple of years back? Yeah, I guess there's absolutely no hope for me then, and this allure I find from Callisto is my darkest psyche trying to clue me into to my latent masochistic tendencies. (Wait, I 100% Blasphemous, I guess those tendencies aren't entirely latent, are they...)
And of course I'm going to be drawing Dead Space comparisons when this game is being created by one of the co-creators of that EA space-horror franchise. Compare this game's offerings with whatever it is EA is cooking up in the labs for that Dead Space remake and I'll take the new story and setting anyday of the week, Dead Space is a little played out by this point. (Unless they want to tell a Dead Space story in a completely different environment. That might work.) And that's because whilst I love Dead Space and think it's one of the best action games every made, that just so happens to also be a horror; there's only so much you can do with one universe. We need to change things up, throw out the old, rocket in the new; revivify and resurrect. Callisto looks just fine and sharp enough to be that total shot in the arm that I'm looking for to remind me why I loved being torn to shreds by horrific body horror monstrosities all those years ago.
Now apparently, and this is a shocker to me; The Callisto Protocol actually started life as an expanded universe game for the PUBG brand. Which is just... what? So apparently PUBG has a universe with lore and something, and the developers who made Callisto, Striking Distance Studios, were created to try and create subsidiary games to broaden the horzions of the Battlegrounds. Which means that for a decent chunk of time the PUBG guys were completely kosher with SDS running off and making a sci-fi horror game until- I guess maybe Brendon Greene stuck his head around the door and went "Huh, I guess this isn't really anything like PUBG, is it? You know what, make it standalone." At that point why even bother? Just stick a terminal in the game about how a couple hundred years ago some nutters used to host death tournaments on earth and call it a day, universe expanded.
But even if this studio failed to hit their intended mark with their founding principals, I'm glad the project itself isn't being scrapped because right now this game looks fire. Running off the PS5 and looking glorious for it, we can see all the hallmarks of what makes a game like this great. Dark corridors with intense sparking fixtures, tight claustrophobic camera work that sticks just close enough to bring the viewer into each gross scene and, of course, horrific abominations of the natural order that look like silly-putty humans melted in a microwave and shoved through a blender. (Why the hell did that make me google what happens to digits stuck in a blender? What is wrong with me?) Oh, and there's some normal looking zombies thrown in there too for the balance of the universe, I guess? I don't know, they seem kind of out-of-place next to all the imaginative horror monsters here, like the Possessed in DOOM; they look utterly purposeless. (Oh, unless they're supposed to be the first stage in the post-death life cycle as they get turned into true body horror demons!)
For me one of the coolest things about seeing this game right now is seeing a sci-fi horror game that is AAA quality, so clearly of the Dead Space stock, and evolved from the baseline of a copyright-free Alien. Now don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Alien and the aesthetic grunge of truckers in space that movie created bought a vivid reality to sci-fi that has rippled in the hearts of numerous sci-fi projects. But my god did old Dead Space cling to the design principals of Alien like a clutch. The Ishimura was expressly designed to feel like the Nostromo, Titan station had elements of LV-426 in some of it's location design until that game just ended up going right back to the Ishimura. And when the franchise finally moved on in 3, you could feel a lack of artistic direction which made some of the visuals outside of set piece moments forgettable. They needed a break to take the lessons they learnt from that game and create something all of their own and I'm seeing it right now with The Callisto's world.
What I must give them a hard time for, and I'm going to do this to every horror game until some gets the memo; it's giving us another forgettable protagonist. It's not like they don't know their main character is under designed, if they have trouble figuring out they can just stick him in a crowded room, turn the lights off for a couple minutes than switch them on and try to find him. Seriously, this guy has less distinguishing features than bloody Isaac Clarke out of his suits, and I only remember what Clarke looks like because he was sporting that atrocious hair model which looks like a mushy mix between black and grey hair. Is it that hard to give us a horror game character who isn't just 'Square jawed action man in jumpsuit'? Can't you just give him a big nose or something? Just a big old honker right between the eyes. That'll give us something to remember him by.
Also, I'm not quite feeling these monsters as much as I was the Necromoprhs; they don't quite look twisted enough to look truly alien. Which is probably an artistic choice. The Necromorphs were so brutalised that it's very easy to look at them and not even really see the root of the body underneath it until you actually get to watch the transformation happen in front of you, which in turn allows the brain to separate the human form from the Necromorph body. By keeping enough of a recognisable human shape in their design, perhaps the team are trying to draw the eye to the horrific transformation that they've undergone so the gross fascination stays with us for longer. It's really a matter of taste and what we prefer at that point. Oh, and how we want to be brutally murdered. I'm happy to see this game is keeping up the Dead Space tradition of brutal death animations; now if they get anything to match the squeamish-provoking intensity of the eye-gouging scene from DS2 they'll have truly made a worthy successor.
The Callisto Protocol looks great. A return to form for a horror market that has begun to lose it's edge with endless fluffy toy games, joining the greats like modern Resident Evil and... wow these really are the only two modern horror games going in the AAA market right now, huh? You'd really think there'd be some sort of cosmic horror franchise or something, but nope. (Apparently 'Call of Cthulhu' was pretty mediocre) But I have been burnt by a horror game that looks promising before, what with The Medium being a boring slog, so I'm going to reserve kicking and screaming no matter how much the primitive ape in me wants to. I'm happy that one of my favourite horror games ever is getting some sort of revival at least. (Aside from the Remake. Seriously the original looks and plays fine, why do we need a remake?)
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