The Callisto Protocol Review: A Dead Space Clone That’s Dead Inside

There’s an all-too-brief stretch at the beginning of The Callisto Protocol where the game shows promise. It starts off with a slow, eerie walk through a city street strewn with dead bodies, victims of a biological attack that the news attributes to terrorist Dani Nakamura (Karen Fukuhara). The game then zooms out to show us two smugglers, including our “hero” Jacob (Josh Duhamel), watching the news broadcast on their last galactic run before retirement.

Dani Nakamura’s terrorist group leads an assault on Jacob’s ship, resulting in a violent, harrowing crash on one of Jupiter’s moons, the titular Callisto. Dani and Jacob are both captured by the planet’s security force and sent directly to Black Iron Prison without even a hint of due process, and they’re not there a day when a massive riot breaks out, and many of the prisoners start mutating into fleshy, tentacled abominations. Right up to that point, and not a moment after, The Callisto Protocol is unnerving, mysterious, and utterly compelling.

Once Jacob breaks out of his cell and gets into his first combat encounter, the game conceptually falls off a cliff. There are the seeds of something new and intriguing in these early encounters, with combat feeling like a strange hybrid of Resident Evil’s over-the-shoulder shooter gameplay and, oddly enough, close-quarters combat that seemingly takes its cues from Punch-Out. It’s not an unwelcome experiment and, especially later on, it’s possible to chain together weaponry, dodges, and melee strikes into an approximation of a fighting-game combo. But by then it’s clear that none of the additional weapons, the gravity/stasis accessories, or environmental hazards are varied or interesting enough to keep that experiment fresh for the entire campaign.

That small measure of ambition would be commendable in a game that gave it any backup in the form of an enticing narrative, expansive and eye-catching environments, well-crafted characters, or quality jolts of horror. It would be much too easy to say that Callisto Protocol fails at all those things and just leave it at that, but the game’s sin is far worse in that, aside from the combat, nothing else about it even fails in a particularly interesting way.

The story in particular never even tries to reckon with the inherent horror of its premise. Zombie prisoners may have been enough to carry a game back when The Suffering was a thing, but in a time where The Last of Us exists—and its recent remaster reminds us of how far ahead of the narrative curve it still is—Callisto Protocol not mining the idea of experiments on prisoners, the death of due process, and corporations taking the reins of human evolution is an spectacularly missed opportunity. The Suffering, for all its mid-2000s foibles, is at least a game with a personality. Jacob, by comparison, finally becomes a man with complexity in the last two or so hours and, by then, the game has little to no chance to play off of it whatsoever, a few seemingly begrudging attempts at haunting him with spectral hallucinations aside.

This isn’t the product of talentless people—though the apparent fact that they were overworked would explain a lot—as there’s so much obvious attention to even the small visual details here, particularly on the several grisly ways Jacob can die. And yet, it’s an attention to detail that doesn’t hold a candle to some of more recent visions of extraterrestrial space horror. Walking into a room with hanging, disemboweled torsos should be the stuff of nightmares, but even with The Callisto Protocol’s copious, awkwardly presented audio logs giving that room some small measure of creepy context, by then the game has been pounding the same gore-laden note that the moment has about the same impact as the wallpaper in the prison’s bathrooms.

The game’s dedication to graphical fidelity feels like a blinder to thinking outside the box in every other regard. It can’t help but feel like intensive overcompensation for inconsistent, tension-less stealth, one-note combat, level design that doesn’t reward exploration, generically fleshy enemies, upgrades that don’t reward experimentation, and ineffective jump scares, from enemies that get cheap hits in on Jacob every single time, regardless of how well-prepared the player is. Much has been made of the fact that this was meant as the heir apparent to beloved survival horror series Dead Space, a game that, 12 years later, can still induce goosebumps just from its terrifying attract sequence. By contrast, if not for its graphics, The Callisto Protocol feels like a relic from 1998, undone creatively even by the decaying likes of Shadow Man.

This game was reviewed with code provided by fortyseven communications.