In The Callisto Protocol, the monstrous Biophage are both mysterious and deadly. To understand the process behind the Biophage and the game’s copious amounts of gore, we spoke with Striking Distance’s Character Director Glauco Longhi to find out how the studio created nightmares it hoped would scare players.
Biophage was born out of the studio’s philosophy of creating enemies grounded in reality, while also applying their own creativity. Longhi calls realism one of the most effective factors of horror monsters.
“It has to feel grounded, it has to feel real,” Longhi explains. “It doesn’t have to be real, but it has to feel real, right? That can mean many different things. But in my opinion, it has to be interesting, and captivating, and intriguing, and maybe disgusting…but ultimately, you got to believe that it’s real, or it could be real. So [we’re] really try to hone into the believability of what we’re doing.”
This focus on delivering hyper-realism led to its artists looking up all kinds of horrifying reference materials, such as human deformations and infections. By taking these realistic elements and applying their own personal twists, Striking Distances’ design team crafted adversaries Longhi describes as “very gross and interesting and dynamic.”