Cold Start: The Callisto

I'm editing my review because of the update on Nov 2023. The developer is a scam artist and paid the main voice actor $60 for all his voice lines, threatened to destroy his voice acting career, lied to attempt to gain sympathy in a game dev discord. I bought this game as the game dev's friend when I was still friendly with him but after watching the meltdown of lies that he pulled with this game I would want nothing to do with him.

A crash-course on how to not design a game. On a game-play level, it’s puzzles are infuriating and nonsensical. Key item placement is obtuse and requires tedious pixel-hunting. The mere act of using items and solving puzzles is a hassle due to the abysmal, non-intuitive controls. On a user-experience level, it’s unusable. Poor user-accessibility and user-interface design. And on a writing level, it is uninspired, boring, and riddled with forced-exposition. There are no interesting characters. No interesting dialogue-exchanges. No interesting motivations. Nothing. This game is in such a broken state. There is a fine chance you won’t even be able to beat it due to the technical issues abound. The only redeeming aspect is that all the broken bugs present are amusing in some sense. It’s a “detective” game where you don’t actually talk to suspects. Don’t bother. There is a myriad of excellent, story-driven detective experiences on Steam. This ain't one of them.

After wasting an hour of my life on this game I wanted to know if the developers would ever deliver on giving this game the updates they promised. However, the more I looked into the company, the more I started to distrust the developers and the company as a whole. In this case, GiB Games have (most likely) ditched supporting this product indefinitely, only updating the game with a desktop mode feature and nothing else seemingly since its release over a year ago. With the game still being completely riddled with bugs, visual glitches, glaring UI difficulties, puzzles that make no sense contextually, having rampant amounts of AI generated artwork that isn't consistent, lacking an art style, zero optimization, and no support for Windows Mixed Reality users. They have also announced that they have started development on another game, SCP: INFOHAZARD on their website (https://gib.games). Which makes it apparent that the developers have not at all learned their lesson from this endeavor. Ei...

The best way I can describe this game is "scuffed". It feels very much like the GIB Games first attempt at a Unity project. The first puzzle, required to actually get into the game proper is bugged in such a way that the panel that you need to pull down gets stuck on an anchor point. At one point, I managed to glitch the wall out of it's stuck pivot point, and continue the game. From there, I managed to make it into the lobby, pick up an important card that had exposition. It took entirely too long for me to notice the very small text that I needed to pull the trigger to play the audio. As I went to pull the trigger, the card flew out of my hand, and would not replay the dialogue again for life or money. I then proceeded to teleport past the door into the elevator entrance, and fall out of the world entirely. This got me an achievement for dying. The physics tries to fight you any time that you try to pick up any object. The first puzzle, required to actually get into the game pr...

Cold Start: The Callisto is a detective puzzle game where the main focus is on observing your surroundings, gathering clues and putting together whatever the heck happened at hotel Callisto. The game aims to be as immersive as possible and you can interact with most objects (including pushing buttons on wall panels). Expect to do a good bit of walking as you scour the hotel for clues and evidence while you are being guided by a police advisor who gives you relevant (and sometime irrelevant) information. You can also gather case and lore information from text and audio logs scattered around the place. From the playable part you really get the feeling of multiple undercurrents running behind this high profile murder case. All the information and logs get added to your data bank which you can consult at any time. As the The Callisto is in Early Access it only contains the first part of the story and the first area of the hotel complex (the hotel proper + maintenance). Some bugs and some...

Seems like it has the potential to be pretty solid. The major bugs I noticed were loading issues when walking through doors, and audio issues where it would cut out and sound robotic. The performance is really great, i had no frame rate issues whatsoever. In terms of design, I find it hard to know what I'm supposed to do next at some points, it isn't exactly clear and I find myself wandering without a clue what I'm doing. Other bugs I noticed were tips being covered up by geometry and I couldn't read them. It would be nice if there was a map and potentially quest markers, something to help lead the player. Sometimes I can walk through geometry and sometimes geometry will unload. It would be nice to have a menu where I can see the controls as well. Other than that, it was a fairly enjoyable experience for what I've played so far.

Its a really fun game that's much better with VR than on desk top but with lots of little Easter eggs and an intriguing story. I hope I get to see the final product. Definitely going to look at VR headsets now so i can pet the robots