There's been a lot of buzz around The Callisto Project since it was revealed last week, and it's not hard to see why. The co-creator of Dead Space Glen Schofield working on a brand-new sci-fi horror game? That's cause for celebration. It might not be the Dead Space 4 we've been dreaming of, but the new game's reveal trailer teases the next best thing.
In a recent Q&A session held on Discord on behalf of developer Striking Distance, Schofield and chief development officer Steve Papoutsis - who also worked on Dead Space back in the day - promised that The Callisto Project is being designed to be "the most terrifying game of all time."
"We did it with Dead Space, and we'll do it again," Schofield said.
The Callisto Protocol, much like Dead Space, leans into the suffocating nature of isolation, and the horror that inherently comes with being stuck so far away from home, all alone. To that end, the majority of the game takes place in the Black Iron Prison on Callisto, one of Jupiter's major moons, a location that was specifically chosen to make players feel cut off.
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"Prison is a really scary place, and a prison on Jupiter's dead moon is terrifying," Schofield explained. "Can't think of anything more desolate and isolated than that."
He also added that this is why The Callisto Protocol will remain an entirely single-player experience. "There's a story that we want to tell, and the best way we could tell it was being a single-player game," he said. "Sometimes when you get into co-op, you don't follow directions and you're not following the story as well, and not only that, we wanted this to be-we wanted you to be alone. That's what makes this really scary."
"It's about believability and relatability. So even though we're a science fiction game set in the future, we still need to keep it grounded in a way that feels plausible-it's like something that could possibly happen," Papoutsis added. "When you start playing on those connections, the connection to the characters, the connection to the world, the environment, the setting, the theme, the story, then when we do try to scare you, or create a very gruesome scene, or a tension-filled section, it just hits harder."
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The Callisto Protocol isn't expectec until 2022, but Striking Distance will have more to share in the coming months. We can't wait.
Topics: News, The Callisto Protocol, Dead Space