Death comes for you in the dark, and it comes for you in the blinding light of space horror survival game The Callisto Protocol. It drops from the ceiling, slinks from vents, and runs – arms flailing – screaming, evolving before your eyes. It wears its ruptured humanity like a pustulous skin.

That video game death in space – especially when accompanied by multitudinous monstrosities, blood-drenched gruesome action, and diegetic design – can’t help but recall the definitive horror survival classic Dead Space isn’t a concern for the team behind The Callisto Protocol.

Developers Striking Distance – many of whom worked on the Dead Space franchise – seem to embrace that influence, redefining their earlier notions to deliver something genuinely unique.

It’s all powered in part by years of experience working together as a team, despite having just formed Striking Distance in 2019.

“It’s like old times,” said Striking Distance founder and CEO Glen Schofield. “A lot of the team has been with me since Visceral at EA - we went to Sledgehammer together, and now we’re at Striking Distance.  I’ve worked with our Chief Development Officer Steve Papoutsis for more than 20 years.  Same with our Chief Creative Officer Chris Stone. We just know each other so well that we just have a shorthand and way of working together that lets us be super creative and work really quickly.  We’re all such fans of sci-fi and horror, it’s a passion project for all of us.”
Initially, the studio was formed as a part of Krafton, the company behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, to expand the fiction of that battle royale universe. But soon the game had grown to become something worthy of standing in its own universe.

The Callisto Protocol opens as partners Jacob Lee and Max are shuttling freight between Europa and one of its moons in the year 2320. The ship crashes on Callisto and Jacob is taken into custody by the Black Iron Prison and incarcerated. He awakes to find the prison being overrun by infected and increasingly alien inmates. It’s up to the player to work his way through the prison and find a way off the planet.

The early story and world you’re dropped into quickly breathe life into this new universe created by Striking Distance. Schofield said he came up with the general story for the game and then worked with writer Chris Stone on expanding the narrative to create something that felt real.

“As a gamer and sci-fi fan, I’m a huge fan of world building and I throw myself into all the little details, so I understand how important the details are,” Schofield said. “I really looked to our creative director Scott Whitney (who I also worked with on the original Dead Space) to fill in the gaps. I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer, so I’m grateful to have a team that can help me take my ideas and make them better.”

That world building and narrative is steeped in horror, thanks in large part to the design of the corrupted prisoners and guards you come across. Schofield had a very specific inspiration for the monsters of The Callisto Protocol.

“Nothing is more terrifying to me than a deranged, totally unhinged person,” he said. “Spiders, snakes, sharks, none of that stuff bothers me. But a crazy person has this air of intelligence about them, where you never quite know what they’re capable of.  That’s why all our monsters still have a strong sense of humanity in them.  I want players to see the pain in the creatures.  Even some of the things you might not expect have very human qualities. There are these four-legged creatures you encounter – we call them rushers – but their heads are four human faces smashed together. 

“That thing just creeps me out so bad.”
Those creatures become particularly frightening when dropped into the shadows, and it turns out, the light of the game’s gritty level design.

“It’s hard to overstate how important lighting is in a horror game, “Schofield said. “It’s right up there with audio. It’s basically a feature in the game. We used a lot of techniques to not just set the mood, but help players understand where they’re going, and what’s happening in the world.  One of the coolest things we did was use a technique we called ‘cruel glare.’ In most games, light makes people feel safe. They want to walk into the light. We try and make it the opposite, where we have a really harsh overbright light that’s almost blinding and signals a threat, not a sanctuary. You’re not safe in the light and you’re not safe in the dark. We love playing with player’s expectations like that.”

Another surprise is how deftly the game’s combat evolves as you play.

Early on in the game, players are walked through the basics of melee combat, something that quickly becomes the core way of taking down the increasingly mutated prisoners you come across. The combat, which relies heavily on dodging side to side, feels a bit like boxing. As the game progresses it layers in a number of new mechanics that make use of things like a gun, and gravity-control glove, to give combat a much deeper tactical feel. 

Schofield said that combat design is the result of the team working to push the horror game genre forward.

“I love survival horror games, but the combat has gotten kind of stale,” he said. “You know, you’ve got a knife and two bullets. That’s just not my style as a director. We wanted to make every encounter feel terrifying, like even a single enemy could kill you if you’re not paying attention. But we still wanted to give players some cool tools to work with. The other thing we wanted to do was put players up close and personal with the monsters. These things are terrifying, and we want players to feel tense all the time. By mixing up shooting, melee, and the gravity gun, we want players to think about the encounters like little puzzles.”

Of course, if you’re not as handy with the combat as you need to be, things quickly take a turn for the worst. Your eyes are gouged out, your head crushed, your face split in half. Jacob’s death scenes often make failure, if not fun, then at least memorable.

It turns out that a lot of that credit goes to Chris Stone, who was the animation director on Dead Space and created all of Isaac’s deaths in that game.

“It’s just a ton of fun to think of shocking ways for Jacob to die,” Schofield said. “Some of those brainstorm meetings were something else, let me tell you. The idea was to make the game fun and unexpected, even when players ‘fail’ or die in the game. There’s a couple in there that I’m still not sure exactly how we came up with them, they’re so over-the-top.”

Schofield actually has a long history of mining the reality of wars, disease, and atrocity to find gory realism to project into his games. Back when he worked on Dead Space and Call of Duty, he would often find himself meticulously researching through stomach-churning pictures. But it seems that approach has changed a bit with The Callisto Protocol, he said.

“When we look at stuff like gore, we’re not going for anything that’s hyperrealistic or anything, it’s more about making sure it’s immersive,” Schofield said. “Things should respond the way players expect them to. So if you chop off a monster’s arm, blood should splatter everywhere and chunks should fly. In fact, we actually looked more at movies and other stylized forms of gore because they represent more of an exaggerated reality that you’d expect in entertainment. We did put an incredible amount of work into that gore engine, though. We spent almost two years on it. I’m glad we did, too.  It really adds to the brutality of the game.”

To be sure, the brutality of The Callisto Protocol isn’t just about the myriad ways Jacob dies. Players can completely decimate enemies, to surprising results. But it doesn’t feel like gore for gore’s sake, instead it furthers the plot or transforms the action.

The Callisto Protocol plays like a game not just deeply influenced by Deep Space, but also by cinematic horror, and that’s likely not an accident.

“Horror and science fiction are my passions,” Schofield said. “I’ve seen every horror movie you can possibly imagine. I seek them out from all around the world. Some of them are incredible and have left a mark on me. Movies like Martyrs, for example … man, that stayed with me for weeks. And some of them are just god awful. I’m not going to name them, of course, but they’re still fun to watch, and I still learn something from each of them. After 10 years making Call of Duty, I was just itching to get back to my love of this genre.”

And it’s a genre that Schofield is excited to see blossoming in recent years.

“I love horror games, so I can’t wait to see what everyone else is working on,” he said. “I know it seems like all of a sudden there are a lot of these games out there, but for me, I’ve been working on this game for the past three years – since before COVID, even. I’ve been so focused on making the game that I can’t wait to get back to playing some games again!”