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[REDACTED] is The Callisto Protocol’s colorful roguelike cousin
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Laura Kate Dale
At Gamescom, I sat down with Ben Walker, Creative Director at Striking Distance Studios, to find out a little more about [REDACTED] ahead of its October 31 release. Roguelikes are typically structured around repeated journeys through a looping scenario. Given that genre convention, my first question for Walker was about how they applied that structure to a story where only one escape pod exists.
“Our fiction behind that is you play a different guard every time you die. We'll generate a new name for you, and the idea is that all the guards share their gear and their training inside of the system," said Walker.
“[After a successful run], it starts following another guard's attempt. They share all the gear and the skills, because that's core to roguelikes, right? You need to build up over time. And so that's kind-of how it sits in our world. One guard escaped—okay, great, now here's another guard's attempt at doing the same thing."
One of the more interesting aspects of [REDACTED]’s reveal trailer was the inclusion of voiceover, with a decidedly “teen gangster movie” energy to the performances. Walker explained where the inspiration for that tone came from.
"We worked a lot with our writers to come up with these quirky characters. We wanted to be a punk rock, fast-paced game, you know? That's just something that we've always liked, and so that tone fit that theme," said Walker.
“All of our eight rivals and our…what we call The Watcher—they're all fully voiced. Our guard does not speak though because there are so many different guards and so we didn't put a voice to them."
A fascinating mechanic seen in the trailer is that, upon death, players will leave behind a corpse which they can fight on their next run. The corpse will apparently be fully kitted up with all the gear you picked up during that prior run, should you choose to battle your past self.
“Fighting them is totally optional," said Walker. "You'll go into the same room where you died on your last run. You'll see [the corpse] on the ground—but first you'll have to complete the combat in that room. Once combat's over, you'll get your room reward, and then that last corpse will be sitting there. You have to walk up and hit a button to activate the fight."
And then you're fighting…yourself. All of the choices you made in your previous run might come back to haunt you.
“There are a couple skills that don't actually move over, just because the AI is not great at them, and we do some tuning so that it's fair to the player, since players generally do a lot more damage than NPCs in games," said Walker. "That being said, he'll still use the same tactics that you had, so it's hard."
“If you don't want to take that risk, if you're having a good run and don't want to roll the dice, you don't have to. That being said, it's very beneficial if you can take it out."
When The Callisto Protocol released in 2022, players praised its forward-thinking accessibility settings, such as High Contrast Mode visuals to help improve visibility for partially sighted players. [REDACTED]’s options are similarly thoughtful.
“We do have High Contrast Modes, and we also have a kind of press-and-hold setting for people with dexterity issues," said Walker. "We also have a feature called ‘Player to Rival Attacks’ where you kind-of punch in a code, so we have an option for helping with that too, making that into a single button press."
The choice to name the game [REDACTED] instead of capitalizing on The Callisto Protocol's name recognition was a move (at least in part) to reduce direct comparisons between the two titles.
“When we first started working on this project—it's just a small group of people trying to survive in [Black Iron Prison] together, and that led to us narratively asking 'Well, what would happen if we weren't really saving the world, right? What if you were a guard, you're on shift, and all of a sudden zombies attack? You just want to leave," said Walker.
“We had the world [of The Callisto Protocol] and [REDACTED] does take place in Black Iron Prison, but it was just such a tonal shift that we wanted to make it its own thing and not try to tie back—because it's a pretty big jump from The Callisto Protocol to what we have in [REDACTED]."
“It's standalone and vice versa. The Callisto Protocol players shouldn't feel like they have to play [REDACTED] to add onto that story. They're both separate and complete."
[REDACTED] releases on the Epic Games Store on October 31.