The Game Awards 2020 was packed to the brim with new game announcements and trailers. The biggest surprise of the show, however, may have been the new horror game from Striking Distance Studios, The Callisto Protocol. Debuting with a haunting cinematic trailer, The Callisto Protocol instantly cemented itself as a potential spiritual successor to Dead Space. If only to further that comparison, Striking Distance has released a new Red Band version of its announcement trailer.
Red Band trailers, for those unfamiliar with the term, are traditionally unrated or more maturely-rated versions of trailers already released for a wider audience, like at The Game Awards. The Callisto Project's new trailer lives up to that tradition, adding several seconds of new footage that gets viscerally more violent than what was in the original trailer. Additionally, the new trailer adds a sort of epilogue to the previous trailer. To call it unsettling would be appropriate.
In the original trailer for The Callisto Project, a prisoner in a jail cell discovers that there's a monstrous-looking figure in the cell with him. The figure walks out of the shadows to reveal a terrifying creature, moving within inches of the prisoner so that he can get a good look at him. The creature then jumps forward before the screen goes black. In the Red Band trailer, the screen doesn't fade to black. Instead, viewers are given a close-up view of tentacles from the creature's face going into the prisoner's various facial orifices.
The new epilogue isn't quite as disturbing as the new footage from earlier, but it does provide some interesting context to the situation. The sequence shows the prison door having been opened and the creature nowhere in sight. The prisoner is in a chair and looks quite clearly dead, killed by the creature. However, it's revealed that the prisoner is now alive and has become something else. They're an undead zombie creature themself.
The Callisto Project's reveal trailer hinted heavily that there may be a plague of some kind going on. The creature in the cell, for example, was likely the prisoner's cellmate before it turned into whatever it is. The Red Band trailer confirms this in gritty detail. The creature killed and changed the prisoner through its facial tentacles.
So while The Callisto Project may not be exactly like Dead Space, since it doesn't have a supernatural monolith changing humans into monsters, it's still quite similar. Something is changing humans into monsters, but it's closer to a zombie plague than anything else. Perhaps there's a supernatural monolith to discover in a later trailer.
The Callisto Project releases in 2022 on PC and consoles.