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

The Callisto Protocol can be scary, but it’s true. But it’s not enough to simply have horrifying monsters and an oppressive atmosphere; developer Striking Distance believes it’s how you arrange these elements. It does this through what the team calls “horror engineering”. 

This is how the horror team builds scares to have the greatest effect. That ranges from designing a room with strategically placed entry points for the biophage, The Callisto Protocol’s monsters, to pop out, to obsessing over details as small as whether a light bulb should flicker two times or three. Imagine Disney’s Imagineering process applied to something much more gruesome. 

Horror engineering stems from the team’s desire to make The Callisto Protocol’s scares unpredictable even to genre enthusiasts. The developer recognizes the patterns players have come to expect and instead focuses on crafting surprises that buck those trends. For example, for players who think the formula will be “Big scare, tension building, big scare, et cetera,” there may be times that a frightening attack is followed by another terrifying surprise mere seconds later. You may hear a strange sound coming from your headphones, but it could be from the right. Striking Distance does not want The Callisto Protocol going one way.

“We want to throw the timing off as much as possible,” says creative 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.”

Schofield provided an example of Schofield’s suggestion: having the player open the door to get attacked in the beginning. The player will be more careful about entering other doors if they do this at the start. After several safe openings, players begin to feel more comfortable, but they are then attacked when least expected. 

In order to know when and where players should be scared, gut instinct is a major factor. Striking Distance maintains a detailed written record of every moment and each set piece. By doing so, the team can better visualize and remember when it executed a particular scare to determine the best 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. We can now do it again in Level 7 or similar. There is a lot of paperwork, if you will, to keep up with something like this.” 

Striking Distance recognizes how relentless The Callisto Protocol can be. However, Striking Distance also realizes the importance of giving players breaks from time to time. 

“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.” 

These reprieves should not cause players to lose their mind. Schofield teases “even then we might get you once or twice.” 

It has been designed so that certain players will only experience scary moments. While bigger scares are designed for the majority of players to witness, other moments may occur off the beaten path or are situated in a direction most people wouldn’t think of looking, such as peeking towards the ceiling in a room instead of just looking forward. In doing so, the team wants to create playthroughs that feel unique between players and for people to discuss the moments they did and didn’t experience. 


Callisto Protocol is available on PlayStation 2 and Xbox 3 consoles, and for PC. For more videos and exclusive features, click the banner below.

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