While there is no shortage of upcoming horror or even space-horror video games, The Callisto Protocol could absolutely be considered a front-runner. The game is designed to raise pulses with horrifying mutated human monsters while including elements of stealth and combat. It’s no wonder then that including striking detail would be a goal for the developer team as well. In a recent interview with TechRadar, the chief technical officer of Striking Distance Studios, Mark James, enthusiastically described the amount of detail that has gone into creating the characters.
James is definitely proud of this game. In the interview, he claimed:
Our characters are the most realistic characters you’ll see in a game. So much so, that when we first showed our game, everybody thought it was pre-rendered.
With so many cinematic trailers for new releases, it’s easy to assume that the really pretty footage is a video rather than the real-time action in gameplay. But James is letting us know that The Callisto Protocol really is that detailed even while you play it. The team used a full scan of the actors, including Josh Duhamel who plays the MC Jacob Lee. They even used “ray-traced reflections for the eyeballs,” so that you can see the surroundings reflected in the characters’ eyes!
The process of creating this effect was a labor of love. James said that they rotated lights around each of the actors used for modeling the characters and carefully modeled the light reflections. Then, the main rendering technician, Jorge Jiminez, would take a printed picture of the model and the character and ask people which was which. This was how he found his blind spots in order to create a scarily accurate picture. If it is hard to tell which is the character and which is the model, then he has done his job.
James went on to mention a crucial element of realism in horror: we look at faces. It’s well documented that we automatically seek out faces in our environment because we rely on reading them. We look for cues of what level of danger we may be in by reading faces. By focusing on connecting the player to the characters, the level of fear the player will experience will be much higher than if they felt removed from the game. That’s why the reflecting optics is so cool. It creates a loop of fear.
Other details they wanted to focus on were making the body horror as realistic as they could. They wanted to be clear that the monsters are mutated humans, not just some nightmares wandering over into the waking world. The monsters needed to maintain some features of humanity in order to keep the desired level of connection, so many of them still have faces with pieces of their former humanity melded with horrifying mutations.
From what we’ve seen so far, it looks like this game will be scary as hell. Join Jacob Lee as he tries to escape the Black Iron Prison on Jupiter’s moon, Callisto. You’ll sneak through the prison, collecting resources to survive while also looking for a way off of the hazardous space rock teeming with the mutated remains of your former cellmates. The Callisto Protocol will be released on December 2, 2022, and be playable on your PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
