 One of my early videos was one I made for the 10th anniversary of Dead Space. To this day, Dead Space remains one of the best video games ever made and a pretty unique experience. It's not quite a survival horror game and it's not quite an action game. It has a bunch of puzzles and exploration despite having a very small and linear map. Its graphics still stand up today because the lighting and art design were done so well that the game is basically timeless. In that video, I said how much it bothered me that EA wouldn't just release a remake of the original game with modern textures and lighting, but this year we got the announcement of the upcoming remake. With the Dead Space remake right around the corner and coming from a new studio made up of developers from the original Dead Space, Callisto Protocol was always going to be compared to a classic game. Well after playing the game twice, first on Normal and then on Easy, I think I can comfortably say that Callisto Protocol could have been an amazing game. But a veritable mountain of small annoyances and odd design choices as well as a narrative that leaves the player wanting more means the game simply isn't all that good. Let's talk about what went wrong with the Callisto Protocol after the logo. Good pacing is hard. Listen, let me say right up front that this essay is going to lean heavily on the comparison with the first Dead Space game. I understand there are some people who will insist this is unfair because they're different games, but I love the belief that it's only through comparison that we can properly critique a work of art. And it's quite obvious that the Callisto Protocol is greatly influenced by Dead Space. I mean, you stop on enemies to get the loot out of them, there's just a ton of stuff, it's very clearly a modern version of Dead Space. So let's start with one of the game's greatest strengths that also ends up being simultaneously one of its big weaknesses. The Callisto Protocol's map and visual design and how it interacts with the way the game feels paced and its world building. It is important to make clear that the Callisto Protocol is an extremely impressive looking game. I play it on the PS5 instead of PC only because I felt like playing in my bedroom and that seemed to be a good decision as there were all sorts of like PC performance problems. But even on the performance mode on PS5, the game looks quite good. Lighting is excellent, textures are superb. The materials on Jacob's prison jumpsuit and especially his late game armor is truly excellent. When it comes to just the graphical technology on offer, the Callisto Protocol looks like a game from a big established AAA studio. It's obvious that a tremendous amount of effort went into pure graphical fidelity, asset design, and animation work. But everything in life comes with a cost and while the Callisto Protocol's graphics are as good as anything else out there, the art design and level structure aren't as impressive as the pure pixel count on offer in a screenshot. Let's start with that art design. The Callisto Protocol is extremely reminiscent of Dead Space in its basic art design. It's in the far future but you're in a prison so everything is designed to be drably utilitarian. Dead Space did this as well as any game you will ever play. The Ishimura is obviously inspired by the Nostromo from the first Alien film in that it's a far future that reminds us of our own world more than like a utopian future. Modern day caterpillar construction equipment is insanely advanced but because it's all industrial heavy machinery, it is not gleaming and new. It's beat up. It's made for task. In Dead Space, the entire ship is a character. The levels are filled with posters or signs that not only constantly remind you that you're on a huge mining ship, but also serve to explain the world to you. The game is one of the excellent examples of early environmental storytelling in games. Every room and hallway in Dead Space feels like a real place that served a real function and it did that despite the massive technological constraints of the time it was developed. The Callisto protocol should presumably have much more freedom to make it's levels even more convincing, but it fails. Not because the memory or the GPUs of the time can't handle the detail, but rather because the art design put more concern into making each level look scary and high fidelity and destroyed than it did into making each level look like an actual place that people lived and worked. Dead Space is pretty light on dialogue, but manages to pack a bunch of narrative into the game through short audio logs and especially that environmental detail. The textures in Ishimura are reused over and over, but each area still manages to feel like a distinct level and each area feels like a real, functional, utilitarian space. The posters in workspaces, the private items in the living areas, the different kinds of work areas. This makes the player feel like they're on a journey moving through a real ship. It's this sense of forward movement that makes Dead Space such a well-paced game. Each area feels unique, even though they're using such a limited number of assets. But in the Callisto protocol, the Black Iron Prison, which is an awesome reference to an amazing work by Philip K. Dick, by the way, but anyway, it doesn't feel like a real place. There are only a handful of areas that actually feel like they served utilitarian purpose. There's a laundromat. There's the sewer part. There's a very small medical bay section. And at the end, there's the ruins of an old settlement. But for the vast majority of the game, you're moving through nondescript rooms of pipes, like 80% of the game. When you're in the prison itself, it feels less like you're in a real prison and far more like a video game level. There are no pictures in the cells, no belongings, no posters. This is not what jails and prisons are like in real life, I know. People live in jails and they look like places that people live. But okay, let's say that this is a particularly terrible prison where nobody is allowed to have a toothbrush or deodorant or instant noodles or pictures of your family. That does not solve the game's problem of not feeling like a real place. Why does a prison have a bunch of shops where you can buy ammunition and weapons? On the Ischimera, this made a little sense because you're on a ship of workers, but it makes almost no sense in a prison. Then there's the spinning blades and spike walls. I have worked in several industrial facilities and in my experience, there are very few spike walls or exposed spinning meat grinders of death perfect for flinging bodies into. Are these things fun for gameplay? Yeah, they are. It is extremely fun to fling a bunch of monsters into a meat grinder or line up four corpses on a conveniently located spike wall. And that comes at the cost of narrative cohesion. Surely, we could come up with an equally fun way to do that that doesn't include literal walls of dangerous spikes all over a place where thousands of people live and work, right? There's a lot of little things like this that all start to add up to make the prison feel very fake. And when you stack that up to dead space, which is renowned for feeling surprisingly real, it takes a toll. We can't leave this section about the design of the world itself without mentioning the mind-blowing amount of shimmying through gaps and vents and ducking under pipes that you do in the Callisto protocol. I assume, like in most games, that this is often hiding loading screens, but if that's the case, something has gone terribly wrong. There are entire sections of the game where you will shimmy through a gap, walk five feet past non-descript pipes, dunk out our pipes for a while, walk five more feet, climb a ladder, walk five more feet, and then spend 10 seconds crawling through a vent. An insane amount of Callisto protocol is spent crawling through vents or shimmying between walls. Now, Dead Space had this too. The doors would take a few seconds to open or you take elevators up and down. But generally, when you came out of an elevator, you had a good long area to explore. There's one thing to do this in God of War, or The Last of Us, where you will shimmy through a gap and enter an area that has a bunch of stuff to do. But here you'll shimmy through a gap to load a single hallway that ends with a vent which opens onto a single hallway that ends with another gap to shimmy. How can this be? It absolutely crushes the pace of the game. I wish I had the energy to go back with a stopwatch because I honestly believe you spend as much time shimmying, ducking, and crawling as you do fighting and exploring. And again, this hurts not only the pace and the gameplay, but also the world building itself. Who designed this prison that is chock full of places for prisoners to hide? Why is this building built with dozens of walls that are pressed so closely together you need to squeeze through? I want you to honestly think through your whole life and ponder it if you've ever seen a structure that was built with one foot gap between the walls just big enough for a person to hide in or climb through. But the prison in the Callisto Protocol seems to have been designed by an architect who was building for Slender Man. Never have I played a game where this was so egregious. And because the game loves to split its hallways and have one critical path and one loot path, you'll consistently find yourself having to shimmy through a wall twice, once to go get the stuff and once to go back to get where you're going. This is the difference between excellent world building and level design and bad world building and level design. If this was a tech issue, they needed to figure out a better solution. Even if that meant less pixels to load, because as it stands now, the game is extremely frustrating in this regard. Reinventing the Wheel So, where to start with the Callisto Protocol's combat design? At the start of my first playthrough, I truly hated it. But by the end of my second playthrough, I became pretty ambivalent about it. It's not as bad as I had originally thought, but it is certainly not very good either. There are a few reasons why it kind of falls flat, including the control scheme, enemy design, and again, the pacing. Let's start with that control scheme, because it's the one thing that the Callisto Protocol does in a truly unique way. Many years ago, the Lord looked down upon video games and said, It is boring to only avoid damage by jumping or moving out of the way. Let there be another way. And so he looked upon the video game controller and he said unto it, Let there be eye frames when dodging. And Moses said unto the Lord, O Lord most high, how shall we bind the dodge unto thy controller? And the Lord said, It shall be B, or sometimes A, or very rarely shall thy bind dodge to a trigger. And so it was done. Do you know why nobody but the Callisto Protocol maps dodge to the left stick? It's because that stick already does something. It moves the character. This one decision is what makes the Callisto Protocol strangely hard when you first start playing and then crazy simple after the absurd mapping finally clicks. The Callisto Protocol has this very odd system where once you're in combat, Jacob is synced up and locked to facing the enemy. Once that happens, the left stick no longer turns the player, but instead makes Jacob strafe. As the enemy attacks, you hold the stick to dodge, then flick it the other way to dodge again and then back the other way to dodge one last time. This makes for very slick looking animations in combat. It sure as hell looked awesome in trailers, but it's so weird and unintuitive that you will find yourself repeatedly failing at the start of the game. In fact, the game needs to tutorialize that there's no timing involved here at all. You don't need to do it early or late, you just hold the stick left, flick it back right and flick it back left and Jacob dodges for you. This makes the combat very easy whenever there's only one enemy in front of you and pointlessly frustrating if an enemy happens to get behind you because you cannot turn around and face the other enemy, the stick no longer does that and the dodge only works if you're facing an enemy directly and you can only dodge one enemy at a time. This unintuitive system combines with enemies doing ridiculous damage to mean that early on you will die a few times. You can be hit like twice before you're dead and unlike dead space, healing is not possible while in combat. The game leans pretty heavily on this melee combat early on when you don't have the gravity gun or shotgun yet and it is strangely difficult to get a hang of, but once you've got it, the combat becomes quite absurdly simple. There's a perfect dodge if you actually try and time it, but there's like no reason to bother, there's just no reason to even bother doing it. Once you have a bunch of guns, the combat gets a little less annoying, but it's never very good because a ton of other choices make it needlessly sluggish, which means the game can never design enemies that are interesting to fight. The Callisto protocol is so damn obsessed with making all the animations look perfectly lifelike that the combat can never be engaging. In Dead Space, you heal very quickly by pressing the X button. This means that the game can throw a bunch of enemies at you at once and can create a ton of interesting encounters with all different kinds of enemies. But in the Callisto protocol, in order to heal, Jacob has to slowly kneel down, pull out the injector, slowly bring it up to his neck, and then slowly inject the entire thing into himself. It looks quite authentic, but you simply cannot do this in combat. Once you're destroying everything that even looks at you aside from the occasional odd difficulty spike, this doesn't matter anymore and you'll just throw all the injectors on the floor. But this also means, again, the game cannot push the combat any place interesting because you simply do not have the tools to deal with interesting difficulty like you do in Dead Space where you have the stasis thing and the telekinesis thing and like five different guns that all work better or worse on particular enemies. The weapon system here is another great example of the game trading realistic and impressive looking animations that are amazing in a trailer for interesting and exciting gameplay. Survival horror has a long history of making the controls a little bit slower than an action game so that the tension is ratcheted up. But the Callisto protocol takes these two painful extremes. For the first half of the game, you can switch between your two short guns. This is what that looks like. From the harder difficulty where ammo is fairly scarce, you sometimes need to switch between weapons but it is so needlessly clunky that it is frustrating. If you happen to press a button in the middle of this long ass animation, it will cancel and leave you with the empty gun. The only reason that this isn't constantly killing you is because the Callisto protocol almost never throws more than two or three enemies at you at once. And because it is so committed to these beautiful yet annoying as fuck animations, the game can't throw more than two or three enemies at you. The game is balanced not around what would be a fun combat encounter but rather what encounters will work with its excessive dedication to animation realism. This is the exact opposite of what a game should do. When the choice is a realistic animation or an animation that allows for fun, fluid and interesting gameplay, developers should ALWAYS choose the latter ALWAYS. This whole situation gets even worse near the end of the game when you finally have access to long guns. Once you have two long guns and three or four short guns, you can switch between these two relatively painlessly. It's still needlessly slow and cumbersome but at least works. But every couple of hours the game will throw an arena or boss fight at you that requires you to cycle through all of your guns as you drain each of ammo. And like everything else about the controls, switching between weapons is needlessly slow and clunky. Again man, games have figured out a ton of different ways to switch weapons. From weapon wheels that slow time a bit, to weapon wheels that don't slow time, to just simply using one button, often Y, to cycle through all of your weapons. But the Callisto protocol has its weapon switching mapped to the D-pad. So to switch from your long gun to your short gun, you push right on the D-pad and vice versa. That is annoying and clunky, but the real disaster is once you need to switch between your list of short guns and your list of long guns. To do this, you push right on the D-pad, then up or down on the D-pad to select the gun you want, then press A, and only then will Jacob slowly disassemble and reassemble the gun. If you press something else at any time during this, it will cancel and return to the empty gun in your hand. The only time this matters is the few boss fights or difficulty spike waves, but because it's mapped so oddly, you have to run away with a left stick while you bring your right hand over the top and cycle through stuff on the D-pad before bringing it back over to press A. Here is a simulation of how that looks. It's just a mess and insane that this was settled on as a decent solution. They could not figure out a better mapping solution than this? I happen to know for a fact that they could, because it's been done better by literally every single game ever from 1990 until December 4th of 2022. So I already mentioned that because the controls game is so slow and clunky that the enemy design itself is forced to suffer. You cannot push the player when you're forcing them to use a crab claw to switch weapons. Nowhere is this more evident than in the two-head boss that you fight not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times. In each fight, every attack is a one-hit kill, even at full health. So the entire fight boils down to run away, shoot him until he gets close, dodge, dodge, hit, hit, hit, then repeat. That and exactly and only that is literally the entire fight all four times. Run away, shoot him as he walks towards you, dodge left, dodge right, melee, melee, melee, then repeat. The only reason this even qualifies as a boss fight is because the boss kills you in one hit. So basically you have to run, shoot, dodge, dodge, hit, hit, five or six times perfectly without being hit yourself. If your hand cramps from doing the claw, or you get stuck on a box, or the dodge strangely fails as it sometimes does for no discernible reason, well then you just have to do the whole thing over again. This boss fight is the perfect example of how the gameplay fails. It is boring and formulaic and leaves precisely zero freedom or improvisation for the player. The enemy has one attack. He walks to you and he swings at you twice before you hit him three times. And the reason the enemies and bosses are so boring and formulaic and always attack exactly the same every single time is because the entire control scheme allows for nothing else. Once they decided that making the dodge look slick as fuck was more important than interesting gameplay, enemies can no longer be interesting. Once they decided it was more important to have these admittedly quite amazing animations than it was to fluid an interesting gameplay, the entire enemy and boss roster has to be designed not around what will feel good to play, but what will look good. Never has a game looked so much better in a trailer than it felt in your hands. This is a game that was designed to make a trailer look good before it was designed to be fun. Story? Dead Space is one of the best games ever made because its art design and graphics were amazing. Its level design was excellent. Its enemy design was excellent and its combat was well above average for the time. And on top of all that, Dead Space had a pretty good story that was made even better by having a world that felt real and interesting. Dead Space's story was paced so well because there were several things going on at once. As you move around the Ishimura, you're learning about the world of Dead Space including what the society is like, what the government is like, what this unitology religion is. There is also the story of Isaac looking for his girlfriend. There's the story of what exactly is going on in the ship. There's the story of the marker. There's the tension between Kendra and Hammond and not knowing if Hammond is actually on your side. There's the story of Dr. Kynes and more. There are multiple other characters that show up throughout the game. Even though there are very few cutscenes, the game gives you a constant drip of information. Its audio and text logs are short and simple, but most of them move the story forward or explain the world in more depth. There are of course a few that are just little vignettes, but most of them serve an actual narrative purpose. When you combine that story with the occasional puzzle sections and the combat and exploration, the game is consistently engaging you with something new or interesting. It is not just walking, shimming through pipes and shooting. The Callisto protocol has very good voice acting, but the story itself is almost non-existent for the vast majority of the game. It's so bare bones that the first 10 hours can be described as follows. Guy is on a ship, ship crasses, he is put in a prison for some reason, he meets another guy for 5 or 10 seconds, he walks through a prison killing stuff. That is the entire story for the first 80% of the game. By the end of the game, the Callisto protocol has in fact begun to kind of try and tell a story, but it is paced so badly that it's one of the most meager stories I've ever seen in a narrative driven game. All of Duty games have significantly more substantial stories than the Callisto protocol does by a lot. Resident Evil has significantly more depth to its story and that is really saying something. How does the Callisto protocol story fail so badly when its production values and voice acting is so uniformly excellent? There are two main reasons. While the game has a plot that is perfectly serviceable, the background narrative in world building almost does not exist. The game has a pitifully small number of audio logs and almost zero text logs. And of that pitiful number, maybe four are relevant to actual world building or plot. That's not an exaggeration, seriously maybe four. And all of the rest of them basically boil down to a guy saying, oh no, I can hear them coming. No. No. Actually, multiple logs actually end with, no, don't believe me, watch. The only narratively relevant logs are from the cartoonishly evil Warden and the ambiguously evil Doctor. And even those do precisely nothing to tell you anything more than you already know. You know that there are monsters. Compare this to the logs from Dead Space of the crew of the Ishimura or the officers. Which actually slowly reveals exactly what happened, who is responsible, who betrayed who, and you can walk around while listening to them. The logs in this game are the very bare minimum. They do nothing other than check a box. The plot of Dead Space worked so well because most of what Isaac is doing is fixing the ship to prevent everyone dying. While he's doing that, he's also trying to find Nicole or at least figure out what happened to her. Because all this happens, you learn that the marker causes hallucination and madness which lends the whole game a psychological horror vibe that gives everything some more weight and intrigue. In the Callisto protocol, Jacob isn't actually doing anything. He isn't trying to figure out anything, he's just trying to run away. He shows an almost amazing lack of curiosity about what the hell is happening. In fact, he manages to deal with the death of everyone and the appearance of flesh-eating monsters surprisingly well. He merely just seems mildly annoyed most of the time. Because the main character seems to have absolutely nothing to do with what's going on, there are no personal stakes involved. The entire game I was thinking, surely we're going to find out that Jacob is actually infected or that he's some super special descendant of someone who's immune. And maybe in a sequel, that will happen. But in this game, nothing happens and you learn nothing at all. The warden released monsters because he wants to make better humans for some reason. I guess monster humans. Jacob's entire relation to this fiasco is that he happens to literally be the delivery boy who brought the box to the outbreak. The game tries to make this like he has some deep personal responsibility. But as far as I can tell, his responsibility is that he didn't do a better job properly screening his cargo. At the end it tries to make Jacob sacrifice his life for the sin of not really caring what he delivered, I guess. It's pretty terrible. The characters in the Callisto Protocol do nothing and we learn nothing about them. The criminal who helps Jacob at the beginning seems like he could have been an interesting character, but the game makes precisely zero effort to tell you anything about him. What did he do? Who knows? Where is he from? Who knows? Does he have family? The girl, Danny, isn't a character so much as someone who bad things have happened to. Her entire character is that her sister died in the last outbreak and she was framed for it. The warden and doctor aren't even cliche characters, they're barely characters at all. What is the world of the Callisto Protocol like? Are things going well in the world or badly? Is humanity thriving or spiraling downward? Dead Space makes it very clear that shit is badly fucked on earth and that humanity is in a terrible place. There were a ton of text logs about how robots are now more expensive than people so humans do all the dangerous underpaid work again because the government is corrupt and corporations run everything. I have literally no idea what the world of the Callisto Protocol is like beyond the fact that there's at least one prison in the universe, there's at least one guy named Jacob in the universe and people live on Europa. That's it. That's all I know. With the vast majority of the game you have exactly no idea what is going on before at the very end the game tries to tell its entire story in seriously like the last 15 minutes. And you wait hours and hours for that story and it turns out that the story is there's a secret society who wants to use monsters to make better monster humans. That's it. That's the big reveal. It's dreadful. The big reveal that you've figured out by 10 minutes into the game. It is a story about nothing with characters who do nothing and often say nothing. Worst of all, the game has the nerve to literally not even have an ending. It's a stupid cliffhanger that basically ends up with every single thing you did not mattering. The big villain gets away. The evil guard you killed comes back to life. The prison that was going to blow up suddenly doesn't and you literally end up right back in the prison after the entire game being only about getting out of the prison. So again, by the end, nothing you did mattered. Exactly nothing actually happened and you learned nothing at all beyond what you learned in the first 30 seconds of the game. There are monsters and the warden is a bad guy. 12 hours and the entire game is monsters and a bad guy warden. Wrapping up. So I have a ton of complaints about this game and there are even more. There's just a million little things that the game does wrong. For example, the prison is like torn to shreds. It looks like it's been destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Even though all of this disaster seems to have begun literally hours earlier? Like how did this place physically fall apart in a few hours? This works in dead space because it's been weeks, if not months, since the outbreak. Callisto protocol is full of weird inconsistencies and annoying inconveniences. Why do I need to stand still in the menu to listen to audio logs? Are you serious, man? How did that get through development? How? Why are there no text logs? Why are there no personal objects anywhere? Why does Jacob fall down a hole like five times? Seriously, I guess absurd. Every single time he's about to get where he needs to go, he falls down an elevator shaft or a big ass hole. After the end, when he's walking around Danny, he falls in a hole and gets separated like three straight times in 30 minutes. It's absurd. Why is movement so clunky? Why isn't there a quick turn in a survival horror game? Why is there so little enemy variety? There's just dozens of little things like that on top of the major complaints I've already gone over. And here's the real tragedy. After all that shit, the Callisto protocol is still a decent game. It's definitely not worth 70 bucks, but the core of a good game is in there. The game is beautiful. The voice acting is excellent. The animations are amazing. The textures are as good as you'll ever see. The progression is pretty good. The game feels like a very, very good proof of concept. If it sells well enough, I can honestly see the Callisto protocol 2 being much, much better. The studio that made this game can definitely make a great game. Now that they have the technology figured out, if they spend the next few years making combat that's actually interesting and not just cool looking, and actually like map out a story where stuff happens and the world is explained to the player, they could definitely make a Callisto protocol 2 that lives up to the hype I felt about this game. But what's here now is all gloss and no substance. It's worth playing for like 40 bucks maybe, it's worth your time, but its flaws are so very frustrating, mainly because it's so obvious that it could have been done better. I've rarely played a game that frustrated me so much without actually being totally terrible. The Callisto protocol is fine, I guess, but the things that make it only fine instead of good are so baffling and odd that it's one of the strangest game designs I've played in a while. Alright, either Bayonetta 3 or God of War or Evil West is up next, I haven't decided which one. I'd say that Bayonetta 3, God of War, good, and Evil West, very good. Thanks for coming, I'll see you next time, bye.