Callisto Protocol Catch All

Out of the plethora of ’horror on a space station/ship’ games that were recently revealed I’m, by far, the most excited for Callisto Protocol or, to put it another way, it looks the most terrifying and has the strongest immediate appeal for me. Fort Solus has potential, especially with the stellar voice actors who are involved (and I suspect they haven’t shown us the true game yet. The way it was described by Troy and Roger sounded very interesting.) I’m also hoping the Dead Space Remake is good, speaking as someone who bounced off the original.

Aaaaaaaanyway, here is a Callisto Protocol thread! Whoo!!

Reveal:

The second trailer:

Glen Schofield interview:

This game just looks like a straight up Dead Space clone, and I am here for it 100%. I wish it hadn't taken us this long to bring back the AAA space survival horror games, but I'm glad they are finally coming.

Yeah, I missed out on or didn’t click with, previous ‘horror in space’ games so I’m down for a few now. Likely they won’t all be winners but one great game will be enough. They all show promise.

Callisto Protocol seems like the ideal continuation of the Dead Space concept. Not beholden to the rest of the series but able to learn the lessons and take the best elements from it.

There’s been lots of positive buzz after the hands on previews. It feels like it could be a bit too intense at time.

This game might be too much for me. I’m not sure.

I’m fine with violence in movies, games and shows. I don’t revel in violence for violences sake. I’m never there just to see awful things happening to people but over the top violence can be a very powerful part of a horror experience. It can be used very effectively to stop you feeling safe and to heighten tension and threat to characters. I watch horror movies to feel fear and tension on behalf of characters and to desperately root for them as they try to avoid some terrible fate. Knowing that they might not succeed and knowing what might happen to that person if they fail.

There was a lot of negativity around the cut scenes showing Lara’s violent deaths in the latest Tomb Raider games. I never wanted to see or experience those scenes but knowing they were there and that Lara could be die in a horribly painful way if I didn’t get a particular jump or climb right raised the stakes in sequence and made it imperative that I succeed in those moments.

On the other hand even I’m feeling that some of the violence on display might be too much. I have been known to get queasy before. It happened to me when I saw The Evil Dead in the cinema after the ban on the film was lifted in the UK. I’m starting to get those same feelings from some sequences in The Callisto Protocol.

Looking forward to reading the reviews once this drops tomorrow.

Tagging thread. Big Dead Space fan here, but I don't have time to play this at launch. Hope it is good!

*Cracks knuckles*

Creepy, infested space stations have been my gaming specialty since 1994.

Callisto Protocol commits the cardinal sin of this type of game: you can only listen to audio logs in the menu and they will stop playing if you close it.

It SEEMS like this game is a bit more melee-focused than Dead Space, it took around two hours before I found a pistol and even then the game tooltips implied that the pistol is meant to augment your melee attacks rather than offer an alternative to them. I hope I’m wrong and ranged combat becomes more important because the melee system suuuuuuuuucks.

I’m not feeling the game at the moment. It’s probably a wrong impression but it feels very one note to me. I have enough games I desperately want to get to that I can easily delay looking at getting this game until the end of 2023.

I've read that the combat is brutally unforgiving, even at default difficulty - to the point the game isn't fun. Anyone have an opinion so far?

SallyNasty wrote:

I've read that the combat is brutally unforgiving, even at default difficulty - to the point the game isn't fun. Anyone have an opinion so far?

Combat is fast and you can only dodge left, dodge right, or block enemy attacks, but only one of those three actions will mitigate most attacks and you only have a fraction of a second to determine which one the enemy is telegraphing, choose the wrong one and you’ll get hit, and you can only take 4 or 5 hits at full health.
There’s also a lot of “cheap” damage, the worst offender are these little facehugger aliens that randomly jump out of chests/lockers/dead bodies. Health and ammo are so scarce that you HAVE to search everything you come across, and way to frequently instead of loot it’s unavoidable damage.
I don’t dislike the game, but parts of it are extremely frustrating for seemingly stupid reasons.

Thanks Rukh - that tracks with what I have read from a reviewer who wanted to love the game but hated the punishing combat. I'll wait on a patch.

I was planning on picking this up today, but the reviews have convinced me to wait. I was expecting it to score much higher than it has.

I'm not at all bothered by complaints about it not doing much new, but it sounds like they dropped the ball on stuff that had already been figured out by Dead Space and other survival horror titles. I'll probably just wait for it to hit Game Pass in 6-8 months and pick up the Dead Space remake next month instead.

Well i guess I'll be playing this as my good buddy just sent me a copy. Lol.

The digital foundry review was fascinating! I will probably play this on PS5 in quality mode regardless of if they fix the PC version because of the haptic feedback. Who knows when I'll get to it...

I have been quite enjoying this. I am playing on easy and the combat isn't awesome, but the game is very pretty and enjoyable so far. I think i am at about the halfway point, so not an overly long game.

I've been enjoying this quite a bit too. It's extremely "Dead Space 4," like it could easily be a story in the same universe, all they'd need to do is add references to Unitology. The character moves almost exactly the same, the camera is in the same location, the monsters are kind of similar (at least in the first few hours), he's even got the health bar on his body.

I pretty much agree with everyone else on the melee combat. The dodging is annoying and takes a while to get right (more than once I've said "COME ON!" at the screen), but I love how "heavy" everything feels and like when you hit someone, you can almost feel it in your body. After getting the handgun and the GRP after the first couple hours, it gets far better. Again it takes some figuring out to get the combinations right, but once you do it's pretty fun. I'm enjoying picking dudes up with the GRP and tossing them into rotating gears or over a large dropoff, or smashing someone and then quickly firing a few shots. Once I stopped rationing every individual bullet I found it was better too - ammo can be found more often than you think. You definitely can't kill everything all the time with it but with an upgraded gun and GRP that does some damage, the fighting is better.

Nobody does creepy atmosphere like Glen Schofield, and this game has it oozing from every surface. It's exactly what I was looking for and it's great.

I beat the game last night. Overall, I enjoyed it but that enjoyment was greatly lessened by the unfair and unforgiving boss fights(mini-bosses and the end boss) that were complicated by the poor mechanics of the game. Especially the mini-bosses(you'll know when you get to them, as there are 3 of the same type and each one is a pain). Graphics were amazing, atmosphere was consistent and interesting, but the punishingly difficult bosses really weren't fun or interesting. I hope they patch. I played on easy and I can't imagine doing this on hardcore.

Also the inventory management sucked - they need to allow for stacks of health and batteries.

I finished this up last weekend. Talk about this year's feel-good holiday romp! Xbox said I had over 15 hours on the game. I don't know where I sunk so much time in this but if I were to guess it was all the extended sections of having to stealth (i.e. crouch-walk extremely slowly) past enemies.

I have a slightly different take about the combat system and the game's approach to boss fights. It was bizarre how they landed on this particular combat system. It's just weird and unlike anything that's out there on the market now. Yet somehow it ends up working pretty well. It's simple and, dare I say, even elegant. The combat ultimately doesn't ask that much of you. Yes, it works best in 1-on-1 situations but in scenarios where you're outnumbered there's a fair number of tools at your disposal to even the odds. There are a comical amount of spiked racks mounted to the walls littered around this prison colony, in addition to all the open fans and grinding gears just waiting to snag onto someone's coat tails or loose shoelaces. The GRP is indispensable for quickly disposing of enemies into these hazards along with simply throwing them into bottomless pits or tossing volatile objects directly at them. The environment is truly your friend.

The game's upgrade system gives you plenty of rope with which to hang yourself with. I made the mistake of not upgrading the GRP immediately and dump many of my early points into the hand cannon. That was unwise. But I recovered somewhat by bringing the baton up to snuff. There's a critical baton upgrade located on the right side of the tree. I forget the name of it but it essentially nullifies enemy blocks, breaking their arms if they attempt to defend and allowing you to take extra turns in combat. This is SO GOOD. Probably the best baton upgrade aside from the typical damage boosters.

I am usually annoyed by these restrictive and clunky survival-horror inventory systems but the one in Callisto didn't bother me too much. It forced me to make some hard decisions about how much vendor trash to load up on vs. stocking up on GRP batteries or health stims. There were even times when I could be greedy and backtrack to an upgrade station to sell off excess crap before running back to a loot room and fill my pack again. But that would be time-consuming and also present a bit of risk as I could still die before reaching the next checkpoint and lose all that profiteering time upon reload.

Stealth! Stealth kills are a more pre-emptive method for thinning the herd before a big throwdown. There's an early encounter that pits you against 3 biophage zombies and it's extremely easy for new players to get in over their heads here. But the enemies are purposely put into a state where they're not aware of you and going about their patrol routes around the room. Stealth killing even just one of these guys makes the rest of the battle so much easier.

The boss fights are a bit flawed in that they are almost easier versions of regular enemy encounters:

Spoiler:

Neither "two-heads" or the final boss eve attack you in combos. It's always single attacks, so you never have to alternate dodge directions like you normally would. Getting hit by a boss is devastating of course but you can essentially dodge indefinitely and that gives you all the time in the world to reload your guns and continue spitting hot lead in to their faces. One of the two-head fights and the final battle with the Alpha try to spice things up with adds but that just means you pull out the GRP and go to town. Or just shoot them.

The thing that really confused me was how they paced out the weapon unlocks. There's basically no point in chasing the weapon unlocks because you find them so late in the game, after you've already invested in older weapons or the GRP if you know what's good for you. So the game seems to be built around doing NG+ runs but... that feature won't even be available until February. I do feel myself being tempted to start a new save on Hard difficulty but part of me is telling me to wait for that free update that adds NG+.

I played for like three hours the night it came out then wasn’t able to play at all for several days due to my work schedule, then just never came back to it. I might come back to it at some point but ended up uninstalling it last week to make room for something else and didn’t think twice about it.

They pushed an update a little over a week ago to add New Game+. I wouldn't get too excited yet, however, as the balance of the game remains unchanged. So we're going to have to wait until the release of "hardcore mode" in February to actually play a NG+ run and not have it be ridiculously easy.