The Callisto Protocol

Take a walk down some of the moodiest corridors

- SHAUN PRESCOTT

THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL begins like all good prison films, with a mood of unbearable doom. Workingman pilot Jacob Lee has crash-landed on the dead moon of Callisto after his cargo ship is boarded by a notorious terrorist group. Someone else has died a bizarrely gruesome death during the crash, and we are given plenty of opportunity to study this misfortune. Lee is arrested and it's made clear that he has a life spent in the moon's Black Iron prison to look forward to. But almost immediately, the prison falls foul of some mysterious disaster that turns its inhabitants into crazed mutants.

What better way to set the tone of a relentlessly gory survival horror game than with a disaster, an injustice, and then the abrupt invasion of some walking pus buckets? The Callisto Protocol isn’t subtle about dropping you into a place of dread. Somewhat counter-intuitively, this dread is strangely comforting to players of this determinedly nasty horror game. The stakes are clear: Lee, played with action-hero stoicism by Josh Duhamel, is in deep do-do and must dig himself out of it. Perhaps we’ll learn a bit about that terrorist group. Inevitably, some subplots will creep in, and we’ll meet some characters who keep us company.

The Callisto Protocol wastes no time cementing the terror of its setting. Now, we just need to walk in a straight line for 15 hours and butcher our way through it.