The new Callisto Protocol roguelike has some of the best ideas the genre has ever seen

A Callisto Protocol roguelike is honestly the last thing I expected to come out this year. The spiritual successor to Dead Space was quite the debut from Striking Distance Studios, so I was surprised when the team announced it Edited. Redacted is set in the same universe as the big-budget horror game terribly different beast. The scares are replaced with infinite replayability, the action is ramped up, and there’s a punk rock aesthetic to boot. Being set in The Callisto Protocol’s Black Iron Prison, I found my time with the roguelike welcoming, familiar, and surprising in equal measure.

At a glance, Edited plays a lot like Hades. From an isometric perspective, you move from room to room fighting hordes of enemy mutants. There are different biomes, bosses, upgrades and a range of permanent currencies to enhance your next run. However, there’s only one escape pod left, so you’ll have to fight tooth and nail to get there. As you find upgrades you are forced to choose one of three options, just like in Supergiant’s mythology game. roguelike.

In practice, however, Striking Distance’s take on the genre is unique and refined. As Nat also praised in our The Callisto Protocol Reviewyour weapon swings and dodges have a real sense of weight in Redacted. Your twin-stick melee and ranged options come with a decent heft, while the kick and slide offer some diverse combat options. It’s not groundbreaking by any means, but Striking Distance has created a strong combat system upon which everything else is built.

Sliding an enemy into a wall and stunning them so you can create space to thin out the numbers is a joy, and maneuvering behind other opponents for extra backstab damage is always worth it. Redacted is filled with these little mechanics, which stack up to form a smooth and distinctive experience.

Redacted really shines when it tries something completely new. As you complete countless runs, you’ll meet more and more rivals. These colorful characters are like the psychopaths of Dead Rising: normal people are pushed to the edge while trying to reach the only remaining escape pod. Suddenly Redacted becomes a race. Up to three of these rivals will try to escape at the same time, and they’ll mess with you as much as you mess with them. You have charge options to slow them down, but each rival will sometimes act as a mini-boss, or even remotely change your next encounter.

This is by far Redacted’s coolest feature. When three rivals race against you, the pressure is on. You have to choose who to slow down and when. We’ve all experienced Hades, Enter the Gungeon, or The Binding of Isaac where we felt safe. You can sit back and use your overwhelming physique to slowly crawl forward and maintain your health. In the best way possible, Redacted’s rival mechanic throws that safety out of the airlock.

I like a good sense of friction in my video games, and Redacted’s rival feature has that in spades. It’s a brilliant layer on an otherwise solid but familiar experience, requiring you to learn their quirks and find files about them to reduce their effectiveness in battle.

In each Redacted run, you play as a different guard. Their name pops up early on, and you quickly send them off to what will most likely be their untimely death at the hands of grotesque and infected prisoners. It’s a roguelike, so dying is par for the course. But Redacted has a different idea. If you manage to get back to the point of your last death, you can choose to reanimate that guard’s corpse and fight him as a boss. Their build is exactly the same as the one you made last time, and beating them will give you a range of extra rewards.

Not only does this provide a sense of durability after every run, but it also creates a really interesting relationship with the way you handle builds. I made an incredibly overwhelming ranged build, died on the first boss, and then had to fight my old self on my next round. It was an exciting moment to be on the receiving end of that character, but it also completely changed my perspective on the build I had just created. I had to pivot my strategy, and my own progress in a previous run quickly became a roadblock.

Among the rivals and reanimated corpses of your failed runs, Redacted has many distinctive ideas. Right now it might play like any other number of similar games, but it’s the long-term decision-making that really sets it apart.

You can grab Redacted Steam now.