The Callisto Protocol showed some gameplay to the public for the first time at Gamescom this year, with about three minutes of footage highlighting a bit of combat, a bit of stealth, and a slip-n-slide finish that ends with a bit of a crunch. Behind closed doors at the show, however, we saw a much longer version – albeit with the same stomach-churning finale – and had time to speak with the game’s director and studio head Glen Schofield.
Things begin with a jump – a scare as you open a door that then leads into a bit of one-on-one combat with one of The Callisto Protocol’s more standard enemies. The twist here is that enemies in The Callisto Protocol can mutate. After you engage them in combat some tentacles will start spurting out of their torso. Shooting or otherwise battering them in the tentacles will put them down faster, the mutation acting as a kind of weak spot, but miss your fairly short window and those enemies will evolve, gruesomely, into much more resilient, aggressive opposition. Dodging becomes important – there was a lot of ducking, diving, dipping and dodging in this demo – while you club away at them with a kind of riot baton in melee, although if more than one mutated enemy starts coming at you, you’ll struggle.
“I think our combat is much more complex than we’ve made before,” Schofield says, as opposed to how things were with the likes of Dead Space, this game’s spiritual predecessor and the series Schofield created. “Especially with a sort of survival horror game – you’ve got a bunch of different weapons. I’ve always believed that survival horror doesn’t mean you would just have one bullet, right? Survival horror, I [think] means: I’ve got a clip, but I still can’t take them all out.”
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