The Callisto Protocol

It looks incredible. That has to be said first, because the lighting, the material work and the sheer physical detail of Black Iron Prison are as good as anything the genre has produced, and it makes what follows more frustrating rather than less.

The dodge is the mistake

Combat is built around holding the stick left or right to evade, with no timing requirement. You cannot fail to dodge; you can only fail to alternate. That decision removes tension from every single encounter — the enemy swings, you lean, you swing back — and turns a horror game into a metronome. Fourteen hours of it is exhausting in the wrong way.

Dead Space understood that horror combat needs a resource you can run out of and a mistake you can make. Here the mistake is not available.

Enemies dodged

Effectively all of them

Deaths from combat

7

Deaths from instant-fail set pieces

24

Corridors without a map

Dead Space's Ishimura was a coherent ship you learned. Black Iron Prison is a sequence of corridors, and the game knows it, because it draws a line on the floor pointing where to go. Every vent crawl exists to hide a load. There is no backtracking because there is no place to back to, which means the exploration half of survival horror is simply absent.

Where it slips

The instant-fail set pieces. Repeatedly the game takes control, presents a hazard with no telegraph, kills you, and shows a lavishly animated death — then reloads a checkpoint two minutes earlier. Twenty-four of my thirty-one deaths were of this kind. Elaborate death animations were a marketing point and they are a design smell: you should not be seeing them this often.

Performance at launch was also genuinely broken on PC, with shader compilation stutter that made the first hours unplayable. It was largely fixed months later, which does not help the people who bought it in December.

The verdict

Fourteen hours, beautiful, hollow. There is a good forty-minute stretch in the second act where resources tighten and the level opens slightly, and it shows what this could have been with a combat system that allowed failure.

Play Dead Space. Then play the Dead Space remake. This is the third thing on that list and there is no reason to reach it.