Introduction

The Callisto Protocol is partly a survival horror video game, and partly an interactive story. It’s the future, mankind has colonized the Solar System, and mega-corporations own or control swathes of it. The UJC (United Jupiter Corporation) exploits resources in the satellite system of Jupiter, and one of its moons, Callisto, is a prison world. You play as interplanetary freighter pilot Jacob Lee, a freelancing transporter running cargo for the UJC. One such run has him transport unmarked cargo between Europa and Callisto, but something goes wrong, the freighter and its volatile cargo crash-lands, and you wake up to find that the UJC Prison authorities that rescued you from the wreckage have imprisoned you without trial or charges. You quickly realize that this is no ordinary prison, and that a mysterious extraterrestrial disease is turning the inmates into all shapes and sizes of horror. As you battle your way out of this hell-hole, you uncover the secret behind what the UJC is really up to on Callisto.

The Callisto Protocol is presented very similarly to Dead Space—a third-person action combat adventure. Not all of it is shooting, some of it involves complex melee combat to dodge attacks and strike at critical spots of the enemies. An implant tracks the character’s health, and replenishes it syringe-style. The game was developed by Striking Distance, a studio affiliated with the PUBG Corporation. The game leverages Unreal Engine 4, and as you’ll see in the following page, looks really next-gen—the studio appears to have spared no expense with high-resolution assets, characters modeled after real-life actors, using nearly every feature served up by UE 4. The game takes advantage of DirectX 12 and ray tracing, and rewards faster hardware with some of the best visuals available on the PC platform today.