The Virtual 100 – Game 3

Callisto Protocol got a lot of hate, and I’m not sure why. Was it an amazing game? Not really. But I went into this game expecting a train wreck, according to all that I had read on the interwebs. I really was expecting to hate this game, and that ended up not being the case at all.

In fact, I’d say Callisto Protocol was quite good. It wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot, and I will admit that it did start to drag on after a while. The combat could get repetitive, and at times it could basically be described as a walking simulator. All of these things I’ve read online and all of them are valid complaints.

But that’s not to say that the package as a whole was bad. In fact, I’d say it was better than the original Dead Space, which was created by the same director. Dead Space gets a lot of love, but I hated it back when it came out. It was repetitive. It was contrived. It was very predictable and formulaic. So it’s interesting that the game got heaps of praise when Callisto Protocol got hate for literally doing the same thing.

I guess it was just the sign of the time. Dead Space, even with all my complaints, was still unlike anything we had seen in 2008. It came at a time when Resident Evil was drifting away from horror and toward campy action. It filled a void. It also didn’t hurt that it looked damn good and the atmosphere was off the charts.
Callisto Protocol is trying desperately to recapture that magic. But the gaming landscape has changed so much since 2008.

Now, I will interject here and add that as of the writing of this entry, I do in fact have the Dead Space remake in my backlog as well, but I have not played it yet, nor have I even started it. So I can’t comment just yet on how it compares, though from the internet’s reaction it apparently fared much better than Callisto. Will I play that one next? I don’t think so. I think if I were to go straight into Dead Space I will be doing so with a bit of fatigue, as Callisto Protocol did wear me thin by the time I was done.

So I think I will take a little time to recharge my survival horror batteries. And then I will probably dive into Alan Wake II. I dunno. I don’t really have a plan here so we’ll just see how the chips fall.

Anyways, back to the point.

Something I can’t fault Callisto Protocol for are the graphics. This is a damn good looking game. I played it on Playstation 5, which from my understanding was the better version. Not sure if they ever cleared up the performance issues on Xbox, but it is what it is. I played on Fidelity mode, and the cap at 30 frames per second really wasn’t an issue here. Jacob moves so freakin’ slow that I don’t think the extra smoothness would’ve really made a difference. The game is dark and moody and appropriately atmospheric. Sometimes it’s a little too dark, as the game seems afraid to turn the lights on. Because of this I do kinda feel like the darkness became second nature after a little while, and it wasn’t as unsettling as it probably should’ve been. I wasn’t afraid to go down that dark hallway, because they were all dark hallways.

This also leads to something that I had a problem with, and it was an issue in the original Dead Space as well, and that’s the fact that there is no reprieve from the oppressive darkness and death. There is no downtime. I get it, it’s a survival horror game and the situation is dire, and that’s the whole point. But I as a player kinda need that moment to take a breath.

Resident Evil, for example, had save rooms. These save rooms not only served as a “safe place” from the zombies and monsters. These rooms were usually clean and undisturbed. You knew that there would never be any danger in them, and there was that music. If you’re a Resident Evil fan from back in the day, you’re hearing that music in your head right now. It was calm and soothing. It let you know you could relax for a moment, take a breath, set the controller down and dry your palms. It was also a good place to stop, if you needed to.

Callisto Protocol, like Dead Space before it, doesn’t have this break in the gameplay. And to make matters worse, Callisto works off of a checkpoint system. So there is no “ok, I’ve saved my game, I can take a break.” When you save your game through the menu, it will tell you how long it’s been since your last checkpoint, thus letting you know how much re-treading you’ll have to do if you stop, but it’s no substitute for hitting up that typewriter and calling it a day.

Callisto has you going forward at all times, and a few times you can get hit with a checkpoint at the beginning of a boss battle. And if you’re low on supplies, you best get real good at dodging real quick.

Thankfully, nothing in Callisto is all that difficult. To be fair, I did play the game on “Minimum Security” and at the time I was starting my game and choosing my difficulty, I didn’t really know what that meant. I thought it meant difficulty of lockpicking puzzles or something. Something I didn’t really feel like messing with. But I guess it’s the number of Security Bots are roaming around? I don’t really know. But as far as the combat, I played it on normal difficulty, and while I had my share of deaths, nothing was terribly difficult. And to be honest, I appreciate that. I miss playing games that were of a medium challenge. It seems everything these days wants to be a Souls-like, and while I like those games, I’m woefully bad at them.

The older I get as a gamer, not only the slower my reaction times are, but I have less patience for bullshit. And, also as an older guy, I’ve been increasingly conscious of my anxiety levels. I’m becoming more and more aware of my cortisol levels, so I tend to avoid things that stress me out in general. I stopped being a superfan of my sports teams, and had to learn to not care as much if they win or lose. I stopped watching movies like Saw, or suspenseful tv shows like Breaking Bad, because they’re designed to make you anxious. I even gave up things like diet sodas and greatly decreased my sugar intake. All things that would basically make me a tense, jittery mess.

So games like Callisto Protocol, which are designed to be tense, I tend to play intermittently. But I sat down and played this game through over a span of about a week, with several play sessions that lasted for a few hours each. Which tells me one of two things; either it wasn’t as tense as it was supposed to be, or I enjoyed my time with it enough to see it through.

I don’t really ever feel like I was stressed out much while playing it. There were a few encounters that had some cheap deaths that probably raised my blood pressure more than it should’ve, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Asterigos, which I was playing concurrently with this, made me much angrier.

One of the things I did appreciate with Callisto is that you are always going forward. It’s a pretty linear affair, even though there are off-shoots and side paths you can take to find some extra loot or weapon schematics. There was very little wandering involved, and I was 100% okay with that. Especially after playing Asterigos. As such I did feel like the game respected my time a little bit more, even though Jacob falls a few too many times.
Seriously, for a while I was thinking of calling it a “Falling Sim” as opposed to a Survival Horror. This dude falls from more platforms and into more holes than any character in recent memory. No matter where I was in the game, if I was within a few yards of reaching my objective, I could almost guarantee Jacob was gonna trip and fall off a ledge or something was going to give out from beneath him, and I was going to have to start off from the bottom all over again. It got to a point where it was akin to a running gag, except it wasn’t funny. Especially toward the end of the game when the last thing you wanted to do was go through yet another “whoops you thought you were done, but NOT YET!” moment.

There’s even a moment toward the end called “Full Circle.” I’m not kidding.

In all though, I think I completed the game in about eight and a half hours, and that was with a lot of poking around and wandering looking for items. So it’s not terribly long, but it does tend to feel like it at times.

I can appreciate the fact that it does have a New Game + feature that allows all of your guns and upgrades to carry over to a new playthrough, and I’ll be honest, if I wasn’t doing this whole backlog thing, I can see myself giving it another go. I didn’t hate my time with Callisto Protocol, though I do wish they would’ve done a little bit more to mix up the gameplay from time to time.

It’s a shame that this game was obviously intended to be the start of a series, but not long ago Glen Schofield, the director and creator of the game, and also that of Dead Space, announced that he was leaving developer Striking Distance Studios. I’m not sure if he retains the rights to the IP or if it belongs to Striking Distance, or the publisher Krafton, or what. The game didn’t exactly set the sales charts on fire, so who knows if they plan to continue it or not. Personally I’d like to see it live on.

Anyways, that’s all I got this time around. That’s another square filled and another ten bucks in the piggy bank. Only 97 more to go! Should be a breeze. Until next time, have a good one. Go play something.