Inverse - 🎮 'The Callisto Protocol' falls short

T.G.I.F.

Dec 02 2022

Extreme challenges have been all the rage in gaming throughout 2022, from Game of the Year favorite Elden Ring to martial-arts indie darling Sifu. Sci-fi survival horror The Callisto Protocol is the latest experience that caters to hardcore thrill-seekers.

The Callisto Protocol succeeds as a desolate and brutal survival horror experience in its opening hours. It's a shame the second half of the game doesn't fight fair, and is hindered by massive difficulty spikes and clunky melee combat.

What's New

Review

Gaming

The Callisto Protocol completely falls apart in its final hours

The Callisto Protocol wears its inspirations on its sleeve. It’s a spiritual successor to Dead Space, directed by series co-creator Glen Schofield. Callisto puts you in the shoes of Jacob Lee, a transporter who becomes an inmate at Black Iron Prison on one of Jupiter’s moons. It’s your job to uncover the dark secrets of the facility, while surviving the deadly hordes of mutated creatures known as biophages.

As it stands, The Callisto Protocol is equally as fun as it is frustrating, making it tough to recommend, especially with the Dead Space remake lurking around the corner. Callisto will likely hook you at first, but it fails to stick the landing due to its excessively frustrating late-game enemies.

NEURALINK

Innovation

Elon Musk's Neuralink promised miracles — but a neuroscientist says the tech is decades behind

Everyone’s favorite neurotech startup Neuralink was back at it again with a show-and-tell demo Wednesday evening that felt very heavy on the tell and very lacking on the show.

Among other announcements, there were game-playing monkeys, monkeys typing on keyboards, monkeys wireless charging themselves, pigs walking on treadmills, and, a reprieve from all the animal content, a robot surgeon. Amid these demonstrations, Neuralink-CEO Elon Musk outlined lofty goals of fast-approaching clinical trials and expectations that the coin-sized wireless brain chip could see the inside of a human skull within six months.

Despite all the attention it has gotten over the years, the brain-computer interface technology touted by Neuralink has been around for decades, Chad Bouton, professor at the Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine at the Feinstein Institutes of Medical Research, tells Inverse.

Space

Science

NASA releases stunning Webb images of Saturn's largest moon

Behold Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. It appears in rare form in new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) imagery, and astronomers are thrilled.

“At first glance, it is simply extraordinary! I think we’re seeing a cloud!” This message from researcher Sebastien Rodriguez from the Universite Paris Cité poured into the email inboxes of many astronomers earlier last month. It set into motion an investigation that, while still awaiting the peer-review process, is an exciting start.

“We were absolutely delighted with the initial results,” they write.

Take a closer look

FUTURE OF SLEEP

Gear

I wore three sleep trackers for two weeks and this is what I learned

Sleep is elusive. Unless you’re participating in a sleep study, there’s no real way to know how you’ve slept other than conducting some personal inquiry. Do I feel tired today? When did I actually go to bed? It’s not exactly a foolproof system.

Consumer-grade sleep tracking devices promise an alternative. A slightly more definitive, “data-driven” way of knowing how long you slept, how well you slept, and even how long you spent in each sleep stage.

To put the benefits of sleep tracking to the test, I spent two weeks wearing smartwatches from Google and Apple, and a smart ring from Oura, in the hopes of gaining some insight into my sleep, and just what nighttime self-surveillance actually gets you.

Marvel

Entertainment

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 trailer reveals our first look at Adam Warlock

The Guardians of the Galaxy are done running. The third and final Guardians movie will bring an end to the journey of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most lovable band of misfits, and an end to James Gunn’s time at Marvel before he takes on his new job as the chief of Warner Bros.’ newly established DC Studios.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 picks up after the events of the Guardians Holiday Special with Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) still grieving for the loss of Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and stinging from the disappearance of her alternate timeline self. It turns out Kevin Bacon couldn’t cure his blues — Peter is still down in the dumps. But that doesn’t stop the Guardians from doing their jobs, even if they’re still ironing out the kinks, based on the first official trailer released at the Comic-Con Experience 2022 in São Paulo, Brazil.

Watch here

Review

Movies

The Eternal Daughter is a ghost story for the ages

Memories haunt us. They seep through the buildings we live in, the hallways we walk in, and the beds we sleep in, until they settle into our very bones. Our bodies remember every moment of joy and pang of sadness like a phantom pain in our hips, or a prickling of goosebumps on our arms.

Joanna Hogg knows how memories can manifest themselves. The filmmaker explored a tumultuous youthful romance with her deeply personal semi-autobiographical films The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II, in which Tilda Swinton played the mother of Honor Swinton Byrne’s Julie Hart, loosely based on Hogg herself. Now Hogg teams up with Swinton again in The Eternal Daughter, an eerie gothic horror movie that continues the story of The Souvenir films in an oddly abstract, confoundingly meta, and utterly mesmerizing way.

Meanwhile...

Understand the world through 7 images captured this week

This tiny 2D wormhole could finally solve the biggest problem in physics

First 'Indiana Jones 5' trailer reveals title, release date, and one controversial decision

'The Rings of Power' Season 2 is recasting one of its best villains

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Inverse - 🎮 'The Callisto Protocol' falls short

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