‘The Callisto Protocol’ Interview: How To Cook Up A Delectable Horror Dessert
The Callisto Protocol is another survival horror set in space, yet the slimy and shocking level of gore is reminiscent of a Dead Space spiritual successor. Indeed, a large number of staff at Striking Distance Studios worked on the original, bringing forward those lessons learned as well as forging a spine-chilling and spine-cracking new horror from the latest technology.
At gamescom 2022, we got the chance to chat to Striking Distance Studios’ chief technology officer Mark James about how the game puts you through your paces, psychologically and physically.
Take a look at the newest gory gameplay in the biodome on the Black Iron Prison!
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A lot of the appeal is that attention to detail and these punishing death scenes that are very like those of Dead Space. I was also thinking, if you're technically very adept, you might not necessarily see a lot of these death scenes, and I was wondering how would you make the most out of the game balancing skill and savoring that gore?
I mean, the general enemy combat is still quite gory. We have dismemberment, we have mutations, and you can use environmental hazards against the enemies. Throwing them into woodchipper, throwing them into the fans, throw them off of the side of high falls, all those types of things I can still utilise.
I'd also say you're gonna die in our game, you're gonna die in our game a lot. What you saw in the demo is one of our major designers who's very good at playing the game - in that terrarium, I die three, four times just trying to get through the same area. It really is a difficult game.
And when you die, we wanted to give you what we call the “murder desserts.” They’re a reward for you dying. This is something that Dead Space did as well, but we will double down on it. Some of our death scenes are quite amazing. We'll try not to give too many of them away, because people have been surprised by them - you saw there was another one we showed earlier where Jacob's head had been bitten off. So yeah, they're also almost a collectible in this, in that sense. I think we actually have an achievement around the number of deaths you collect so some people will want to die every way.
We've got again, lots of other achievements - we're working the way through with things like baton-only kills, we’ve got virus kills. That’s really hard to do so we’re going to give you a reward for that. And we want to push you to explore the prison and just not the linear path. You can even open up a cell and find all the notes of the previous prisoners which is really gonna be important for you to understand the prison, and you can understand the virus a bit more by doing more of this exploration.
I remember seeing in that woodchipper area that someone's head had gotten shot off, and then they still had their, like, mouth. And I was like, “Nah, enough of that.”
What you saw in that area was the virus that came out of the decapitated head. Every enemy will have the tentacles come out, and those come out of different places, depending on the enemy type. If you're quick enough, you can hit those tentacles and you can kill them with one shot. So this choice promotes accuracy within combat. But if you're not, then they go into this mutated state and they become faster and harder and stronger to actually kill.
If you can't dispatch them quickly, you’ll want to push them away using the grip [the gravity gun shown off during Opening Night Live] and then give you more time to react. So there is this dance-like combination of the three: the grip, the standard ballistics, and the stun baton, and using them all at the same time or switching in between the two or three.
We talked about intelligent opponents, and that doesn't mean, like, they're just super intelligent AI. We’re talking about the way they act and the way you approach them in combat. So hitting constantly with the stun baton: eventually [the enemy] just goes bang, puts its arm up and throws the baton away. I can't use the baton on this guy anymore. He's too strong for me.
We want people to experiment in that way and experiment through dying. That's a very survival horror thing to do and it makes for a great education rather than changing up your combat. We don't want you to play the whole game just shooting. That wouldn't be survival horror.
Coming back to the woodchipper. After you clear the area, the sprinklers start to shower blood. There was this, like, macabre but funny moment - is there much humour in this vein in the game?
There's a little bit of humour in the fact this woodchipper exists without any safety controls on it - there's no railings around the woodchipper. There’s this huge, dangerous object that exists in the prison, and you're like, why would that exist? Well, it's kind of fun.
There's a lot more playfulness in some of these areas, but also got a real grounding. The area that was in is actually a biodome. And in the middle of nowhere in the Jovian system, on a dead moon, you don't get too many people turning up with cargo every day. You have to be self-sufficient.
Callisto is actually one of the weird places in the Solar System that could actually support life because it is an ice moon. If you can find a way to melt the ice, you can get water, and anywhere you can get water… we've researched where this [setting] should be.
These things are so gross too. Are there any, like really strange sources of inspiration?
It's actually not a pleasant thing to talk about but we had to do research. Everything in our game is believable. You can get a hell of a lot of information on medical texts that apply to some of these diseases or looking at general infections and seeing how they behave within the human body. There’s police reports, accident reports, there's lots of stuff, there are lots of references that are never good to look at - things that I close my eyes, and I never want to see again. But we wanted the realism to come through. And that was important in every aspect - we've 3D printed our environments and we use this design method that constructs walls as if they were the minimum structs and the minimum tensile strength to be constructible.
When you see any one of the biophage [the technical term for the enemies], they’ve still got a face, there still is inherently a human movement. We want you to not just think that you're working through them. These were once your fellow prisoners, guards, people that you share the cell with. They're infected madness, and they're still human.
I was going to ask a little bit more about the horror engineering, and how you go to specific fears, such as being out of control, or gore, or claustrophobia. How do you balance that all the way through to ensure that the player is surprised?
One of the best examples is that we have a system where our enemies can actually use areas behind the walls to move through and jump. We didn’t want the enemies to always attack you, because every time you see an enemy, you would get into that expectation or muscle memory of attacking. Occasionally, we’ll have a biophage that’ll drop into a grate in the floor or in the wall, and disappear. That’s scarier than the actual biophages you're attacking.
We take a lot from movie tropes in horror and we inject those into the game as well. One of them is called the black cat - if you watch a horror movie, you'll see something, often a cat, that will knock something off a side, and someone will jump, “Oh, my God, that's a cat.” And that will have the same noise as the actual attack, right? So you become mellow. Then when the actual attack happens, the audio happens too.
In audio, there's a lot of, like, scuttling, above you, or you'll hear a door close at the end of a corridor - who closed it? We're constantly thinking of the spaces where you'll be travelling and in some space, we’ll want you to go back to those spaces. And something's happened there, but you didn't affect it as a player. That is quite unique in a game. Because, normally, everything you do affects the world and nothing moves without you.
But we want this thing to feel still alive while you're not there. So you'll go back to a corridor, and there'll be a grate on the floor this time, and you look up to the ceiling and see a hole. And you don't know what was there before you, but you know something has pushed that grate back.
Or you go back to the corridor and there'll be a kill halfway down the corridor - that kill wasn't there the first time. So we want that constant unease, we want every step you're taking to feel new, even the same corridor feels like a different corridor. The biophage is changing the environment around you… it's more like that kind of evil where you feel vulnerable all the time. If you're looking down through that door, there could be something there.
Yeah. One time in the latest Resident Evil, I got scared by the shadow of a bannister. It was horrendous.
Exactly. We had someone in our QA department - who’s in the game all the time - we put in a new [mechanic] because it's unpredictable about where the biophage is going to come out. And so they've gone through this section, and they're expecting the biophage to react to them. And they worked their way around and it actually came up behind them. We've got this thing, where they pull the shoulder and pull you back before they attack you. And so the enemy pulled the shoulder and they screamed. If you can make someone from QA scream, we've done our job well. These are the guys that play the game every day.
The Callisto Protocol comes to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and PC on Steam and Epic in late Q4 2022.
Topics: The Callisto Protocol, Dead Space, Xbox, PlayStation