Summer Game Fest 2022 has seen a lot of news and announcements already, but one of the more newsworthy aspects of the season is how much the lid has been lifted on Striking Distance and Krafton’s upcoming horror game The Callisto Protocol, which is set to launch this December on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X & S.
The Callisto Protocol made waves during its initial announcement, not just for the fact that it was originally supposed to be set in the same world as PUBG (those plans have since been scrapped). The main reason why this sci-fi horror game gained traction with fans before any other horror game was because of Striking Distance’s CEO: Glen Schofield. His main gaming credit before The Callisto Protocol? Dead Space.
Now that we’ve seen more of The Callisto Protocol thanks to Summer Game Fest, those Dead Space comparisons are perhaps more apt than ever. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that The Callisto Protocol was Dead Space. From the sci-fi horror setting, the camera work, the way the protagonist sits in frame to how the enemies are mutated humans looking to tear chunks out of you, TCP looks very much like it’s cut from the same cloth as Dead Space.
With the remake of Dead Space set to launch in 2023, you’d think that would be a bad thing for The Callisto Protocol, but if anything, it’s actually made me more excited for the game than I was before. Part of that is due to the fact that I’m a notoriously horror adverse person at the best of times, but Dead Space is one of the few that I can easily stomach (aside from that eye surgery scene in Dead Space 2, I hate that bit with every fibre of my being). Seeing how much The Callisto Protocol is cut from the same cloth gives me hope I’ll be able to survive this game too, even if the gore seems way more ridiculous.
More than anything though, as much as I’m excited about the prospect of Dead Space returning, it’s stuck in a weird limbo right now with regards to my excitement. Are EA and Motive Studios going to keep true to the spirit and story of the original, or will this Dead Space remake take the series in a new direction? If it’s sticking with the same story, will we see remakes of Dead Space 2 and 3? Will the series finally see a conclusion after the reveal that several moons are indeed haunted?
These aspects of the remake are currently up in the air, making it hard to get hyped. The Dead Space series has been dead for a while now, and there’s no indication there’ll be a future for the franchise beyond the remake. Meanwhile, The Callisto Protocol is doing all the things that Dead Space that got fans invested in the game, only with a new splash of paint and some key upgrades, like an overhauled melee system.
Is The Callisto Protocol going to be the most original game ever made? Probably not, but there’s every indication that it’s going to be one of the best games of the year when it launches this December. The fact it just happens to be incredibly similar to an already successful horror game is the icing on the cake for me.
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