Upcoming horror game The Callisto Protocol is shaping up to be an amazingly scary sci-fi experience that's set in a prison facility on one of Jupiter's moons. The game comes from the mind of Glen Schofield, co-creator of the iconic horror game Dead Space. The Callisto Protocol promises rich environments that evoke fear on every level, from terrifying enemies to disturbing visuals and soundscapes.
The Callisto Protocol is a third-person game set in 2320 starring Jacob Lee, played by Josh Duhamel, who is trapped on Callisto within Black Iron Prison. Players will explore the terrifying, run-down facility as they uncover pieces of evidence in the environment about the prison's past and the human-like monsters that inhabit it. The Callisto Protocol promises a unique fighting experience that combines melee combat with ranged weapons that can do things like pick up and throw enemies. The game is shaping up to be one of the scariest games of 2022, and may prove to be even more spine-chilling than Dead Space.
Creator Glen Schofield sat down with Screen Rant to discuss what players can expect from The Callisto Protocol, horror engineering, and what he enjoys doing in his spare time.
You've had an interesting journey to get to horror. You've worked on a Simpsons game, a Ren & Stimpy game, and I think your very first game was a Barbie game. I know you've always had a passion for horror, but what brought you to the space of The Callisto Protocol, in terms of your evolution as a game developer?
Glen Schofield: If you do look at my history, I have a couple of games like Blood Omen 2, which I did, which was semi-horror. We dipped into it there. I did a very unknown game called Akuji the Heartless, which was very bloody and very brutal for that time. And then, of course, Dead Space was my first full-on horror game - or sci-fi horror.
I love horror. I love sci-fi. I started as an artist, so I did cartoons and I did science fiction art. They are very different, but you can see that my game career is kind of like that; a lot of cartoons, which I love, and then I started getting into realism and back into science fiction when I could. And then finally horror.
I took that hiatus for a while with Sledgehammer, where I did Call of Duty. But even with Call of Duty, if you look at WWII, I did zombies. My goal there was, "How can we make a four player co-op scary?" I think we did pretty well, and that was again dipping my foot into the horror, which was great.
And then I just wanted to get back into it again with Callisto. I found a welcome partner with Krafton, and CH who runs it, and they were all for it.
Talking about making things scary, you're an expert in what you call horror engineering, which is the combination of different elements to create an environment that does its own storytelling while you're playing.
Glen Schofield: Yeah, it's really important that you have the atmosphere. The atmosphere and mood is what sets up the rest of it; the brutality, the scares, and even the story itself. You've got to have those moments of, "What's around the corner? What's behind this door? Is anything going to happen?" It gets that the player into that emotion. They're tense, they're worried, but they're kind of excited. And maybe there's a scare, or maybe there's not right.
Then you have different sounds throughout. "Is something around me? Is it coming?" and stuff like that. There's a lot of setup for the scares.
In the trailer, there's a lot with shadows and seeing things that are maybe there or not. You’ve mentioned you had your employees watch a horror film without any sound, and then watch it with sound but eyes closed, and they all said that the sound version was way scarier. With this new sound design, what has that process been like, thinking of all the different ways to make this environment scary?
Glen Schofield: What was great was that I was able to get Nassim, our audio director who worked on Dead Space 2 and 3. He knows how to do a lot of it, but it's been a few years and things have changed. There's been new music and new ways of doing things, so we try and tap into what's new and what's exciting in that field.
We have this thing called the Apprehension Engine, and it's a device that they came up with in Hollywood that just makes these really weird, crazy sounds. You can do anything you want with them, and Nassim brought that into the mix, which was great. There's been a lot of different audio treatments that I've noticed. I started hearing a lot of what sounds like an oboe, or a really deep sound from the middle of nowhere. You hear [imitates sound], and you're like, "What was that?"
We try and pick up on trends in the movie industry, as well as new stuff that we've been thinking of.
I actually wanted to talk about movie influences a little bit. I know Dead Space took a lot from John Carpenter's The Thing and Event Horizon. What newer pieces of media have inspired you with The Callisto Protocol?
Glen Schofield: I watch as much horror as I can, and it feels like there's been some good stuff, but there's been a lot of bad stuff. I'll pick up stuff like, for example, Sicario 2. It's not a horror movie, but if you listen to the opening music, it's really tense and scary. I talked to Nassim, and I'm like, "I love that piece. I love that oboe that they have." He said, "Actually, that piece of music is called The Beast." It was very interesting, so we kind of looked at that.
There was another one, a six-part Chernobyl series. There was a couple of places where it was really scary, like when they go underneath. I came to find out the woman who did Sicario 2 also did that, so it was very interesting.
I've been watching a lot of Korean horror as well. They've really been getting into zombies and things like that. They have different ways of scaring you, and they have they do a lot of body stuff. You'll see some of that in our game. You'll see different influences throughout.
I still think James Wan, who did the original Saw stuff and Annabelle, is really good with camera. And he's really good with audio, so I'll watch his stuff. Actually, I worked with him on Dead Space; he cut a trailer for us.
Callisto is a real moon. Do you think that grounding it a little bit in reality is an important part of making something scary?
Glen Schofield: I do I feel like it is. If you read about Callisto, which is called the Dead Moon, it is one of the places that they say man could possibly live. Even though it's really cold, it has water. So, that's really important.
I felt like it was already scary to begin with, and then you add a prison. Prison is pretty scary to most people, so we're trying to start in two places that we know set it up as a scary location. I think that having stuff that grounds you and that you can relate to is just scarier.
I spoke about how even some of the enemies are based on humans, and even that's scary to me. What's the scariest thing? A human.
When it's something that you're familiar with, but it's not right. It's a body horror version of the uncanny valley.
Glen Schofield: Yep. You never know what they're gonna do, but you know that man can be really cruel.
A prison setting really adds a new element of horror to the game. If it's too far removed, people can't see it happening to them in any sense, and it probably loses something along the way.
Glen Schofield: I did this on Dead Space as well, so I didn't go as deep on this one. But we started with, "Hey, let's make some enemies spiders." So, you will actually see one of the enemies in the game that kind of resembles a spider - but in the end, we made it out of human parts. As a spider, it was like, "In most cases, I can get out the spray and kill it, or I can step on it." Even though it was big, it didn't come across to me as scarier.
That's a pretty common enemy that you see in horror settings.
Glen Schofield: Yeah, even in Lord of the Rings. So, we decided to go back to, "Humans are scary." We have a crazy one called the Bloodworm that was in our trailer, and if you look at what grabs him, it's a head. There's human parts on all of them.
Speaking of these enemies, I know that there's a new combat system where players have to get up close and personal with the enemy. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Glen Schofield: We have a really cool melee system, and we also have guns. You're gonna have to use your long range on some of them, there's no doubt about it. But in the beginning, there's a lot of melee.
I can't go too deep here, because there's a couple of things we haven't talked about yet. But you're gonna need to melee them in some cases, and then use other weapons that you're gonna want to upgrade as you go through the game.
But melee is pretty cool, because we have a gore system that we've added to the game. If you saw the end of the trailer, it's pretty brutal. You've got pieces of the enemies all over, and it's much deeper than just the dismemberment system.
We have something that's like a grab gun, but the difference is it can pick up enemies. A lot of grab guns just pick up objects around the world, but this will pick up the enemies, and you can fling them into giant fans or into rotating blades. We've got a walls that are spiked, and you can shoot them into that. It's pretty cool and really brutal. Also, you can pick up objects and fling them at the enemies.
It's pretty cool because, in a game like this, you don't get a ton of ammo. That's why the melee system is pretty important. You're gonna want to use the GRP, or grip as we call it, and cut off their legs or cut off their arms. But they're still gonna come at you; if cut off their legs, they're still coming at you. Even if you cut off their arms, they're gonna come at you, which is sort of a an addition. Every once in a while, if you cut off half their head, they're still coming after you with half their head.
But with the up close and personal, you've got to be careful. We've got a couple of enemies that, if you get too close, they're just gonna wipe you out. Especially as you go deeper into the game. We've got a couple of really cool enemies. We've got one that has a ranged weapon, so you've got to be careful on that. Actually, the range weapon is him shooting out another enemy at you.
That's very cool. Do these creatures have backstories that players can discover through the environment at all?
Glen Schofield: You're gonna discover a pretty deep backstory on the creation of the enemies, how they came about, and why they came about. There's a deep history. The story is pretty intricate, with a lot of nuance and a lot of details; with some with some twists and turns. You've got to pay attention. But then we have audio logs and things along the way.
I've read that you paint in your spare time. Is that correct?
Glen Schofield: I'm an artist, yeah. I started when I was five. That's how I came up the ranks; I started as an artist and art director. But in the early days of video games, the artists were the designers. So, I've been designing ever since as well. But I'm painter, and my first degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Do you still paint in your free time, or is it relegated to game design artistry now?
Glen Schofield: No, I paint. I've taken a little time off, for the first time in my life, on this particular game. Running a studio during a pandemic, and hiring about 150 people has been a lot. But I have so many paintings that I have a storage unit here with a couple hundred paintings in them.
How much subject matter crosses over for you? Are you painting lighthearted landscape pictures, or are you also taking some horror elements into your painting?
Glen Schofield: No, my paintings are so different. They are big landscapes or seascapes, and I don't know how I got there. I've gone from science fiction, which I used to do as an illustrator, to big landscapes and seascapes these days. I go out, and I'll photograph. I have to take a thousand photos to get one or two that I then will mash together in Photoshop, and then paint.
But as I'm painting, I'm thinking. I'm thinking about the game, and I'll come up with ideas or thoughts, then I'll stop in the middle of it and text somebody the idea. I'm taking a little bit of a break, but my wife and everybody wants me to get back. Because they they're like, "With the stress level you're at, it'd be great if you got back to painting."
Do you ever release any of your paintings for sale, or are they all for you?
Glen Schofield: I've had some big shows, but when you're running the company, there's no time to do that. But a couple years ago, after I had just finished Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, I had a giant show in San Francisco. We had a nice opening and a few hundred people came.
But for me, it's all about the game now. I'm 100% focused on this, and I want to make this great. I'm really excited about the game. The team has put their heart and soul into it all through the pandemic. Everybody has just worked really hard, and there's no slowing down.
We had our hiccups with getting computers and everything to everybody. But it's just been a lot of passion. We've got a really talented team, and I want to be 100% there for them.
Before we have to go, is there anything that you want players to know about The Callisto Protocol?
Glen Schofield: There's so much I want you to know about it, but this is different than Dead Space. The characters talk, we've got a deep story - not that Dead Space didn't. But this is pretty intricate, and we've got a bunch of different types of horror in it.
I've learned a lot over the last few years. And, of course, Dead Space taught me a lot. I think that you're gonna see some of Dead Space in it; there's no doubt, because it's the same DNA. But this is a different game. It's a different story, a different universe; different scares and different monsters. It isn't Dead Space 4; this is a different game, and I think people are gonna appreciate that and hopefully really enjoy it.
If you want to get scared, this is the game.
It sounds incredibly terrifying, to the point that I don't know if I'll be able to finish.
Glen Schofield: I heard that on Dead Space. I heard a lot of people be like, "Glen, it was so scary, I couldn't finish it." I don't know if that's a compliment or not! But we did put in story moments, so that at least you would have breathing time. There's a little bit of that. Here and there, we may scare you during that as well, but we do hopefully allow you that moment of breath to get your composure and get back into it.
But people who are jumping adrenaline junkies and really love horror, that's what they want. They want to be terrified; they want to be at full attention. It just brings that emotion out.
I think it’s definitely a compliment. You have said you want this to be the scariest game on next gen consoles.
Glen Schofield: Well, I'd like it to be. I don't want to brag; I don't want to do anything like that. I just want to make a great game.
The Callisto Protocol releases December 2 for Playstation consoles, Xbox consoles, and PC.