A Callisto Protocol roguelike is, frankly, the last thing I expected to come out this year. The Dead Space spiritual successor was quite the debut from Striking Distance Studios, so color me surprised when the team announced Redacted. Set in the same universe as the big-budget horror game, Redacted is a very different beast. The scares are replaced with infinite replayability, the action is ramped up, and there’s a punk-rock aesthetic to boot. Taking place 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, Redacted plays a lot like Hades. From an isometric viewpoint, you move from room to room, fighting hordes of enemy mutants. There are different biomes, bosses, upgrades, and an array of permanent currencies to enhance your next run. There’s only one escape pod left, though, so you’ve got to fight tooth and nail to get there. When you do find upgrades, you’re forced to choose one of three options, just like in Supergiant’s mythological roguelike.
In practice, however, Striking Distance’s take on the genre is unique and refined. As Nat also praised in our The Callisto Protocol review, your weapon swings and dodges have a real sense of weight to them in Redacted. Your twin-stick melee and ranged options come with some proper heft, while the kick and slide present some diverse combat opportunities. It’s not groundbreaking by any means, but Striking Distance has created a strong combat system that everything else is built upon.
Sliding an enemy into a wall and stunning them so you can create room to thin out the numbers is a delight, and maneuvering behind other opponents for extra backstab damage is always rewarding. Redacted is filled with these small mechanics, which stack to form a smooth and distinct experience.
Redacted really shines when it tries something entirely new. As you progress through myriad runs, you’ll meet more and more rivals. These colorful characters are like Dead Rising’s psychopaths: normal people pushed to the brink while trying to reach the only remaining escape pod. Suddenly, Redacted becomes a race. Up to three of these rivals are trying to escape at the same time, and they’ll mess with you as much as you mess with them. You’ve got recharging abilities 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 are racing you, the pressure’s on. You need to choose who to slow down and when. We’ve all had runs of Hades, Enter the Gungeon, or The Binding of Isaac where we feel safe. You can hang back and use your overpowered build to slowly creep forward and preserve health. In the best way possible, Redacted’s rival mechanic throws that safety out of the airlock.
I love a good sense of friction in my videogames, 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 on them to reduce their effectiveness in battle.
In every Redacted run, you play as a different guard. Their name pops up at the start, and you swiftly send them off to what will most likely be their untimely death at the hands of grotesque and infested inmates. It’s a roguelike, so dying is par for the course. But Redacted has another 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 them as a boss. Their build is exactly the same as the one you made last time, and defeating them nets you a spate of extra rewards.
Not only does this provide a sense of permanence after each run, but it also creates a really interesting relationship with how you treat builds. I made an incredibly overpowered ranged build, died at the first boss, and then had to fight my old self on my next go around. Being on the receiving end of that character was a tense moment, but it also completely changed my perspective on the build I’d just made. I had to flip my strategy, and my own progress in a previous run quickly became a roadblock.
Between the rivals and reanimated corpses of your failed runs, Redacted has a lot of distinctive ideas. In the moment, it might play like any number of similar games, but it’s the long-term decision-making that truly sets it apart.
You can grab Redacted over on Steam right now.