How Striking Distance’s ‘Horror Engineering’ Is Making The Callisto Protocol’s Scares Unpredictable

Believe it or not, The Callisto Protocol is a scary recreation. But it’s not sufficient to easily have horrifying monsters and an oppressive ambiance; developer Striking Distance believes it’s the way you prepare these parts. And it does so by a course of the crew dubs “horror engineering.” 

Horror engineering defines the meticulous method through which the crew constructs its scares so that they have the utmost impact on gamers. That ranges from designing a room with strategically positioned entry factors for the biophage, The Callisto Protocol’s monsters, to come out, to obsessing over particulars as small as whether or not a lightweight bulb ought to flicker two occasions or three. Imagine Disney’s Imagineering course of utilized to one thing far more grotesque. 

Horror engineering stems from the crew’s want to make The Callisto Protocol’s scares unpredictable even to style fans. The developer acknowledges the patterns gamers have come to anticipate and as a substitute focuses on crafting surprises that buck these tendencies. For instance, for gamers who suppose the components might be “Big scare, tension building, big scare, et cetera,” there could also be occasions {that a} horrifying assault is adopted by one other terrifying shock mere seconds later. Your headphones could choose up an unsettling noise from the left solely be assaulted from the fitting. If you suppose The Callisto Protocol will go a technique, Striking Distance needs it to go the alternative.

“We want to throw the timing off as much as possible,” says inventive director Glen Schofield. “There are times when you’re like, ‘I know you’re going to scare me, I know they’re going to get me,’ right? And then maybe we don’t.”

An instance Schofield gave us was having the player open a door and getting attacked early within the recreation. By doing this to start with, the player hopefully turns into cautious of coming into doorways going ahead. But after a number of ranges of opening doorways safely, the player relaxes solely to, lastly, be attacked once more after they least anticipate it. 

Gut intuition serves as one massive consider realizing when and the place to scare gamers. But Striking Distance additionally retains an entire written document of moments and setpieces. By doing so, the crew can higher visualize and keep in mind when it executed a specific scare to decide the most effective place and time to repeat. 

“We have these giant graphs,” Schofield says. “One of our producers has taken the levels and then marked exactly where the different scares are and the tension areas so that we can remember, ‘Okay, we did this one about three hours ago in Level 2. Now we can do it again or something like it in Level 7,’ or something like that. There is a lot of paperwork, if you will, to keep up with something like this.” 

As unrelenting as The Callisto Protocol seems to be, Striking Distance realizes that giving gamers a break every so often can be necessary. 

“If somebody plays five, six hours of the game, it’s hard to be amped up for that long,” Schofield continues. “So we kind of give you little moments – not a lot – where you’re just like, ‘Okay, this is just going to be combat for a little bit or maybe I’m just going to get a little story here and there, then I’ll get back into it.” 

However, gamers ought to by no means drop their guard altogether throughout these reprieves. Schofield teases “even then we might get you once or twice.” 

The crew has additionally crafted areas in such a approach that solely sure gamers could expertise a scary second. While greater scares are designed for almost all of gamers to witness, different moments could happen off the crushed path or are located in a route most individuals wouldn’t consider trying, comparable to peeking in the direction of the ceiling in a room as a substitute of simply trying ahead. In doing so, the crew needs to create playthroughs that really feel distinctive between gamers and for folks to debate the moments they did and didn’t expertise. 

The Callisto Protocol launches on December 2 for PlayStation and Xbox consoles and PC. Click the banner under for extra unique options and movies.