The Callisto Protocol really, really wants you to die

The gruesome details we’ve been getting on the many ways you can die in The Callisto Protocol is becoming somewhat unsettling, which is great for horror game aficionados. Striking Distance’s upcoming survival horror game has been favorably compared with Dead Space, but appears to be expanding on survival horror mechanics with its own take on “intelligent enemies.”

We’ve previously covered how the mutants in The Callisto Protocol get stronger if you fail to kill them fast enough, but there’s more to them than that. In an interview with PC Gamer, CTO Mark James states:

"Things track you in our game, the grunts sometimes find a way. They don't always attack you, they'll move into a grate and you'll hear them around you and they'll pop up in another grate somewhere else: there's a better attack spot for them. So they're looking for spaces in which they can actually make the jump happen, rather than just attacking straightaway."

Mutants being able to use vents to hide and ambush you does wonders in upping the terror factor, but there’s even more to it. James goes on to say that these mutants were formerly prisoners, not zombies or aliens. They can learn to block with their arms if you hit them often enough with your baton, particularly to defend body parts where the virus is mutating. “That was one of the things we really focused on early on was the idea of intelligent opponents and adaptable opponents," he says.

The truth is that the developers want you to die in-game—a lot. In another interview with IGN Japan, James states that there is an achievement for seeing all the deaths in The Callisto Protocol. “We want you to see death not as a punishment but as a time to learn about what you did wrong, and a little bit of tongue-in-cheek entertainment about how you die,” he says. So these deaths will include not just getting killed by mutants or robots, but also environmental ones, like walking into a rotating fan or dying in the vacuum of space. You will have to be creative to find all these deaths, though, as the developers haven’t stated exactly how many ways there are to die in-game.

The Callisto Protocol releases on December 2, 2022. You can check out a The Callisto Protocol PS5 key cheap with our comparator.