From the haunted Earthly locations in Resident Evil and Silent Hill to the dark corridors of Sevastopol Station in 2014’s Alien: Isolation, I love survival horror games. So when I saw the trailer for The Callisto Protocol a year ago, my heart skipped a beat. A survival horror game from Glenn Schofield (the brains behind Dead Space), set in prison where you’re one of the inmates? Count me in!
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Then the gameplay trailer dropped and I did not know I could scream as loud as I did when I watched it, but most of that energy went towards seeing Schofield on stage at Summer Game Fest back to doing his own thing, in the genre he helped redefine with Dead Space. When Sledgehammer Games was acquired by Activision in 2009, the developer was tasked with working on its parent company’s Call of Duty franchise, which sounded like a woeful misuse of Schofield’s horror talents.
Schofield left his position from Sledgehammer in 2017 after working on Call of Duty: WWII. He founded Striking Distance Studios, and is the company’s current CEO. From what has been revealed so far The Callisto Protocol is my most anticipated game of 2022, partly because it looks like a big budget new horror IP, which isn’t something we see enough of. It was wonderful seeing Schofield thanking the people who have been helping him put this ambitious game together.
In The Callisto Protocol, you play Jacob, a prisoner confined to the cold, harsh, and terrifying confines of Black Iron Prison located on Jupiter’s second largest moon, Callisto. Judging by the gameplay and trailers, it appears that the prison’s warden and the company responsible for the prison, the United Jupiter Company, has been doing experiments on the prisoners, causing them to change into hideously mutated and deadly monsters. My best guess is that your mission, outside of survival, is to escape the prison and get revenge on the warden. What we do know is that there is a really cool weapon called The Grip, which can be used to rip enemies apart and throw them into objects like fans and other flesh-shredding appliances.
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Also, as expected – and true to the Dead Space design philosophy – there will be no heads-up display. Your health appears to be shown on the back of your neck, and ammo is clearly shown on the back of the gun, changing colors as ammo reaches certain levels of depletion. Gunshots sound like little blasts of cosmic energy, and the melee combat looks very gritty.
I can’t wait to explore the prison’s darkened hallways and navigate my way through its medical bays, canteens, ship docks and other moody areas. Plus, it looks like there might be other types of enemies than the ones who are, for lack of a better term, mutated. When you rewatch the cinematic reveal trailer from 2021, you see mech guards that look ready to go toe-to-toe with anyone or anything. Having to fight off these guys, as well as mutants, and possibly fellow prisoners, has me already planning my exit strategy from Black Iron.
One thing is certain: there will be blood and lots of it. Seeing Jacob get half of his head ripped off in the “Schofield Cut” extended trailer then get ground up in the gears and turbines of the power station made my gore-loving heart flutter, and I had to fan myself from both excitement and the hot Los Angeles heat.
A horror survival game is just as good as its kills and this game looks sure to have plenty of them. Danger appears to lurk and spin in every corner. If the inmates and guards do not get you, the prison will, and all of the possibilities sound painful.
I have not been this excited about any Resident Evil game – including the remakes. In fact, I have not been so amped for a game like this since, well since the original Dead Space.
