Striking Distance Studios announced its follow-up to the action horror game The Callisto Protocol at Gamescom 2024, and it’s a roguelike dungeon crawler set in the same universe.
Redacted, stylized as [REDACTED], which is set to release on October 31 for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC, follows a security guard who’s trying to escape Black Iron Prison, the setting from the first game, by any means necessary. As per the roguelike formula, you’ll die over and over again trying to get out, but along your journey to the last escape pod, you’ll collect weapons, suits, skills, and what are called experiments.
The developers have added a few twists. For one, you won’t just be fighting against mutated inmates and alien monsters. There are other people trying to get to the escape pod that you’ll have to contend with as well. The trailer shows off three other blue-collar, forgotten workers in the prison, including a lunch lady and a custodian. There’s yet another foe you’ll have to fight: your own corpse. When you die during a run, your corpse, complete with all your collected gear and upgrades, will try and attack you. Roguelikes typically have some in-story reason why you get to come back to life repeatedly, and this is certainly a way to do it.
Redacted which is apparently the real name and not a placeholder title, looks very different from The Callisto Protocol. While that first game was photorealistic and dark, Redacted is bright and colorful, with bold outlines, a comic book-inspired aesthetic, and superfast gameplay.
The Callisto Protocol was the first game from Striking Distance Studios, a Krafton developer led by Glen Schofield, and it was meant to be a spiritual successor to Schofield’s most famous game, Dead Space. It shipped in December 2022, although according to some recent Schofield comments, it could’ve used at least three more months to cook. He has since left the studio, although the team has been working on another AAA project alongside Redacted.
