"Callisto Protocol" begins like any good prison movie. Jacob Lee, a worker pilot, crash lands on the death moon Callisto after his cargo ship is attacked by a notorious terrorist group. Someone dies a strange death in this crash and we are given ample opportunity to study this misfortune. Next, Lee is arrested and it is revealed that he is looking forward to a life spent in the Moon's Black Iron Prison. Almost immediately, however, the prison suffers a mysterious mishap that transforms its inhabitants into insane mutants.

These events cascade efficiently over the first 30 minutes, and what could be more fitting to set the tone for a relentlessly gruesome survival horror game than disaster, injustice, and the sudden invasion of walking pus buckets? The Callisto Protocol is not careful to drop us into a place of extreme fear. Somewhat counterintuitively, the scares are strangely comforting to us, the players of this decidedly nasty horror game. Lee, played stoically by Josh Duhamel as an action hero, is in a terrible situation and needs to get out of it. Perhaps we learn a little something about that terrorist group. Inevitably, some subplots will creep in and we will meet characters who will keep us company. But "The Callisto Protocol" wastes no time in solidifying the horror of its setting. All we have to do is walk in a nearly straight line for the next 15 hours and make our way through it.

I wasn't kidding when I said that "Callisto Protocol" is a comforting video game, albeit on the edge of the axis of, say, "Dragon Quest." Familiarity is comfort, and "Callisto Protocol" is a consistent, big-budget horror game. The indie horror scene covers powerful psychological discomfort ("Visage," "Signalis," etc.) and is also the home of grindhouse schlock ("Murder House," countless PS1-era creeps, etc.). Big-budget horror games, whether in the "Resident Evil" sense or the "Dead Space" sense, are about roaming moody corridors and regularly blasting shit out of them. There is a creepy hallway in [The Callisto Protocol]. There are claustrophobic engine rooms with ruptured and spewing valves, access halls, maintenance rooms, age-old steel, echoing vents, flickering holographic terminals, and underground crawlspaces overgrown with festering slime. There is plenty of that stuff in the middle to late game as well, but some areas are a bit more spread out, and by the end of the game there are some surprising deviations from the "grimy dark corridors" format. Is this "Dead Space 4"? Or is it "Dead Space 3" as many believe it should be? [because the feeling of playing the "Callisto Protocol" in the early stages is very similar to the feeling of playing "Dead Space". It has the same primitive diegetic user interface, the same laid-back feel of maneuvering a muscular man over your shoulder, and the same freedom to stomp a corpse with your foot and dunk it in a pool of chewed pudding. Callisto Protocol's director is Glenn Scofield, who directed the original Dead Space, and he recreates that game's sharpened balance of "powerful, yet very vulnerable."

I don't blame Scofield for going back to formula. I like the fact that Lee's turning radius is on par with a child's toy tractor, and that no matter how feeble the enemy may seem, proximity stun locks are never successful, forcing him to use a somewhat unwieldy left-right dodge system. Why doesn't Lee run at full speed like his enemies? Why does he move with the tough grace of a fast bowler televised in slow motion? Why does he keep putting away his baton and why does he take it out slowly?

"Callisto Protocol" takes a rhythmic approach to white-knuckle combat, but even after 15 hours of play with a controller, I never felt like I could effectively time the ostensibly simple evasion system. Maybe I'm just not very good at it, but when it came down to it, especially when dealing with multiple enemies, I often resorted to panic shooting. As for actual bludgeoning, however, it is satisfyingly vicious, especially when broken up by a shotgun pellet at close range.

Lee has a green bar on the back of his head indicating his strength and a blue bar indicating if his "GRP" is overheated; the GRP is Callisto Protocol's answer to Control's levitation and Half-Life 2's gravity gun, and it is great fun. In a game full of spongy bad guys, this weapon can be used to hold up most of them and throw them into platforms, canyons, or more often, into wall-mounted spikes. There are a surprising number of wall spikes in this moon colony. Alternatively, they can pick up nearby explosives and throw them at their enemies. This is less fun, but makes sense, since picking up objects consumes less energy than floating mutants.

While the addition of a "make enemies disappear" button to the survival horror is puzzling at first, "Callisto Protocol" gradually makes up for it: after receiving the GRP, I forgot I had it for a while, and then I realized that I had to use the "make enemies disappear" button to make them disappear, and that I had to use the "make enemies disappear" button to make them disappear. I continued to beat the bad guys with my baton. When I was overwhelmed in one encounter, I turned to the GRP. Once I learned to face every combat situation and be alert for environmental hazards that could be weaponized, this approach to combat fit perfectly.

GRP energy is finite, but I didn't find myself desperately wanting resources even on medium difficulty, like the ammo stockpile for Callisto's five ranged weapons (all standard, with a hard upgrade path). In fact, I decided to sell my ammo and occasional health to level up my capabilities at the regular 3D printer workstation. I concentrated on GRPs as soon as I realized how useful they were, but in the end I felt I should have invested more in regular weapons as well. That said, not all upgrade paths are filled in a single play, so it's worth investing early in your preferred death-drawing method.

Mutants can be chopped limb by limb, but this is less a matter of tactical accuracy than a way to keep the carnage fresh. I didn't find the warty, veiny, salivating bad guys particularly scary, but that's only because I've played a lot of horror games featuring these kinds of enemies. It is not the appearance of these terrifying mutants that poses a threat, but how they move around in the environment. There is also the ever-present threat that if the emerging tentacles are not shot down, the mutants will transform into something more fearsome.

Checkpoints are generous enough that, aside from a few tricky areas, I rarely had to repeat encounters until the end of the game, when the difficulty increases dramatically. I often spent five minutes at a workstation selling loot or upgrading weapons, only to die shortly thereafter and need to trade again.

Late in the game I often died, but at least there was the novelty of a new death scene. These were naturally repeated, and a few scenes were left out of the mid-to-late game, but they were numerous and mostly surprisingly gruesome. I don't find the over-the-top gore depiction in "The Callisto Protocol" very interesting or shocking. It is well done. But also in a horrifyingly comfortable and relatable way.

This is a roller-coaster of a video game. It is peppered with cinematic video game clichés. Yes, you navigate through structures that begin to crumble as you cross them. Yes, you have to find three breakers in three dangerous locations and turn on generators. You need to survive for a certain amount of time in a claustrophobic space where bad guys are attacking you. And, of course, there is more going on than the scenario outlined above suggests. In many ways, The Callisto Protocol feels like a competent but new studio singing to the crowd: "We can make the game you really, really want. And we the audience (most of us anyway) will sing back: 'You can do it, go on.'

Most of me would like to see Hideo Kojima go a little off the rails of blockbuster horror games, as he hoped he would with "Silent Hills". But it's hard to blame nailing or GRPing a row of wall-mounted spikes to what "The Callisto Protocol" aims to be - an engaging, linear sci-fi survival horror that spins a deepening dystopian yarn around dozens of stressful encounters. In other words, it's a masochist's delight, a comfort food for the wackos, or "Wario Dragon Quest."