The Callisto Protocol

0:17 Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Other Castle. The Other Castle, I'm Andrea. And my name is Tom. And here we cover video games, and we cover them from start to finish with the plot, lore and more. And that includes the development, the creation, the writing, the acting, the performing, all the way up to the actual plot of the game. If this is your first time, you can check us out over our website, theothercastlepodcast.com. That's the othercastlepodcast.com. Over there, we have all sorts of things. We have every one of our episodes. We have our Patreon. We have the ability to sign up for our free newsletter. You have the ability to sign up for our free Discord. You can do all sorts of fun things over there. Get connected. But for now, we are gonna get into the plot, lore and more of The Callisto Protocol.

0:57 The Callisto Protocol. That's a relatively new game. It is. And while you say it's new, it has roots in a much deeper, older game. And as a prerequisite to this, I would suggest listening to season four, episode seven of this very show where we cover Dead Space. Dead Space, wonderful. So it's a sister sequel to that. This is a complete sister spiritual sequel to the legacy of Dead Space. And that core lineage really begins with the creator, Glen Schofield. Glen Schofield is largely regarded in the industry as one of the most innovative game creators in the game because of his work on 2008 Dead Space and then later The Call of Duty franchise. Oh, that's right. He did do The Call of Duties. So in 2008, Dead Space was widely just praised critically and commercially became a complete cult classic for horror fans and mature gamers because it's super fucking scary and very fucking cool.

1:47 I mean, they had to remake it. It was so good. Yeah. Following Dead Space in 2008, Schofield was on a roll. In 2009, he was named one of the hot 100 game developers in Edge Magazine, which sounds really cool. Awesome. Good for him. And then the franchise of Dead Space would continue on where Glenn would end up under the Activision umbrella where he oversaw Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, and Call of Duty World War II. I didn't actually play any of those games. Now that I think about it. Well, I know you're familiar with the impact of at least one of these because in Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, you get the Press F to Pay Respects meme. Oh, that's where that comes from? Yes. Okay, so that comes from Glen Schofield.

2:28 Which is like, it's one of the most iconic things. Oh, super iconic. But you know, through doing all this warshit, he missed the spooky, scary space stuff. He's a huge horror fan. Like if you see any of his artwork outside of the video game industry, it's a lot of monsters and shit. It's really cool. Yeah, it's very consistent. Very much so. So he's just like, man, I'm having a good time knocking these big ass games out, but I want to do something where I can like push the envelope and figure things out on my own rather than working within this box, right? Cut some body parts off. Yeah. So by June of 2019, Schofield had left Activision and joined a production studio called Crafton. He was hired based on just his incredibly impressive resume and ability to work on it all angles of a game.

3:11 Like he came up as an artist that kind of grew into other pieces to get into directing and writing. He really worked his way up. So he knows a lot about the process, start to finish. And he of course has that legendary history of having gotten that award from Sony for delivering Dead Space two weeks early, fully debugged. Right. That letter is framed in his house, I'm sure. So within the Crafton umbrella, he was named the CEO of a very specific team within Crafton called Striking Distance Studios. In December of 2020, during the game awards, they announced the Striking Distance Studio's first title, The Callisto Protocol. Now, originally, The Callisto Protocol was pitched to be a part of the PUBG universe.

3:53 Really? Yeah, that's Player's Unknown Battleground, which is primarily a Battle Royale style. I think it's 100. I mean, it's one of the OG ones anyway. Right, people take it very seriously. But The Callisto Protocol did break off to be its own property throughout the process of creation. The game was considered a PUBG game between December of 2020 through May of 2022, which feels like a long time to have this game be a part of this specific universe. That sounds like the majority of the production process. At least the marketing cycle after it was announced. Yeah. And yeah, certainly the production process as they're building up before they announce it and stuff. But in May of 2022, Glen's Go Field went on Twitter and was like, it's its own thing now.

4:39 For context, PUBG is this cash cow battle royale game that's owned by Crafton. So it kind of makes sense that it's in the same world. Although ironically, that's kind of what Go Field left the Call of Duty teams to do. As we look at this narrative, it's fine. It's all fine. I saw that. I don't know if anyone else saw that in the moment, but it bummed me out. One thing about PUBG is that, because it's a battle royale game, they are focused on getting the lone survivor. That's like the core basis of battle royale games. It's like kill everyone to be the last man standing. PUBG specifically is very gritty. It's gnarly. And again, it's like that violent take on being the last man standing, where Fortnite can be a little more fun of like, ha, I got you, you're out, you know?

5:23 Yeah, yeah, definitely. Anyway, Scoville just said that of the 150 employees in Team Striking Distance Studios, he had worked with about 25 to 30 of them during the run of Dead Space. Oh, that's awesome. And there is also one that was around from the behind the scenes of Dead Space, Nicole, his daughter. Oh, right. Nicole Scofield is an environmental artist on The Callisto Protocol. Really? Isn't that sweet? So she grew up to go work with dad. And to drop some lore, the girlfriend of Isaac Clark is named Nicole in Dead Space as an homage to his daughter. So to have her come back around. Yeah, that's really great. Isn't that, that made me happy.

6:04 We have a few stories of kids going on to work on their dad's games. That's right, that came up in Spyro. I forgot about that. Yeah. And sticking with one of the more innovative elements of Dead Space at the time, there is no HUD at all. Again. Yeah, the player is immediately immersed behind our hero who sports a health bar on the back of their neck, just like Dead Space. Yeah, that sounds very familiar to anybody who's played Dead Space. There's also a slew of different sized evolutions of monsters, and there might be a secret evolution called, who's to say? This is also why I'm just like, have Dead Space in mind as we walk forward down this road. The fact that it came out so close to the remake of Dead Space 2.

6:45 Oh, I know. The Callisto Protocol came out on December 2nd, 2022, and the Dead Space remake came out on January 27th, 2023. Oh my God, weeks apart. Absolutely. Seven months after The Callisto Protocol was announced, the remake of Dead Space was announced by Motive Studio, which is obviously not the same studio. That was under the EA umbrella. It was a whole different group. And Glenn Schofield has said, not involved. Not even a little bit. Not even a little bit. They have added some side missions, I believe. I'm not sure if they're actually connected to the main mission. It just seemed like it was a side mission, from what I saw.

7:26 And they hired Gunner Wright, who voiced Isaac Clarke in Dead Space 2 and 3, to come back and reprise his role for one in the remake, to kind of keep it in world, but still an evolution of what was originally established in 2008, which is really cool. But yeah, Glenn Schofield was working very hard on The Callisto Protocol during all of this. He was also very kind about it, I think. He did take a stance of gratitude, saying publicly, to all of you who worked on the original, thank you for your contributions to an amazing game. It has withstood the test of time, obviously. And to Motive, thank you for your care in remaking the game faithfully. Congratulations. That's very graceful of him.

8:07 I think it is, because you never know what goes on behind the scenes. You don't know what was extended, what may or may not have been said, but publicly he took a stance of being appreciative and saying like, this is an honor. Thank you. Yeah, the rest of you took a job. I totally respect that. He's like, get the bag, whatever. So one thing that The Callisto Protocol did have a leg up on the Dead Space remake was some of the crossover talent from Hollywood brightening up the scenes. The Callisto Protocol stars Josh Duhamel of All Fucking People. Really? Yeah, he was Captain Lennox in the Transformers movies. Yeah. He's Coach Cole in the new Mighty Ducks. Hell yeah, he is. I'm sorry, I'm probably like one of 12 people that are enjoying that Mighty Ducks reboot on Disney Plus right now.

8:52 It's weirdly good. I like it. You know. And he was great in it. Not for me, but good for you. Yeah. No, I thought he was wonderful in it as like the new coach. If you're in the Romcoms, he's goddamn Todd Hamilton from When to Date with Todd Hamilton. He also did these crazy ass Taco Bell commercials. Have you seen these? No. He plays a conspiracy theorist about like the burger people coming to infiltrate your homes. How do I not remember those Taco Bell commercials? Holy shit. They're not that old. They're fucking weird. I'll find them and drop them in the discord so we could laugh about them. Okay. Now, Mr. Duhamel, Mr. X Fergie plays Jacob. My favorite thing is that he was married to Fergie for 10 years, and he still loves her so much.

9:34 He's like, she's my best friend. We co-parent, we trust each other. Like, good for you. So Josh Duhamel plays Jacob Lee, who is a pilot in The Callisto Protocol. And this is gonna be the first of, we're gonna do like, let's do a Dead Space sit up every time this comes up. We're gonna turn this into a nice positive thing outside of the drinking game we usually have in this show. Yeah, let's do that. Okay, so anytime Dead Space kinda just shows up out of nowhere, pop a squat. Do a sit up. Do a sit up. Jacob is named Jacob, because Jacob in the Bible is the son of Isaac. That's true. The protagonist of Dead Space is named Isaac. Oh shit, that's good. As in the forefather to Jacob.

10:14 And people have asked Gonskoeville about this, and he's always given like a wink and a nod of like, very good, that's clever. I'm glad you made that connection. You know, so we're like, oh, okay, I see you. Good for him. Other top build talent is someone I have a personal crush on. Kieran Fukuhara. Oh my God. Really? I love her so much. You really do. She only plays bad bitches. She's in The Boys, she's the woman who doesn't speak. Yeah. I think they have called her Kimiko and she's dating Frenchie. She's the coolest bitch. Oh, love her on that. Also in Bullet Train, which I believe is still on Netflix right now, she plays the cute little train cart girl, the only person who doesn't get fucked up in the movie.

10:54 Her eyes are better actors than some whole ass bodies. Seriously though. She is proof that there is good in the world. So these two, along with obviously the rest of the cast, recorded their parts with full mocap. Karen Fukahara said it was a super weird experience for her. Like I believe this was probably her first mocap job. She's usually just a screen performer. Yeah. And she was like, it felt like I had to learn how to walk again. Well, I had that whole fucking suit on me. You hear that from so many people that do this kind of acting, especially in video games. Yeah. Especially the people like the Roger Clarks and stuff like that, where they're just like, you didn't realize what acting was until you had to put one of those things on and really like notice every movement your body makes.

11:38 Fucking mocap and video game performers are so like violently underrated. Entirely. Their mindset of having to perform in this specific way is wild. Yeah, it's stage performers and video game performers have to think the same way. Yeah. Now Striking Distance actually built in an in-office mocap studio for everyone to come through so they could grab anything they needed and have people in-house to be like, okay, to that point, you moved your knee a little weird. Fucking run that shit again. Oh wow. One incredible element that stood out is how detailed that mocap and rendering of the performers is. Like you're not just looking at Jacob, a pilot, you're looking at a whole ass just straight up Josh Duhamel.

12:18 The pores in his face are visible, and you can see sweat form and bead down his brow. It's fucking beautiful. It's an absolute marvel of what we can do with technology now. Oh, that's so great. The devs worked closely with the art team to see their environments and get really into the scene. Now the scenes were built gory as fuck too. Just like the original intent with Dead Space, Glenn Scofield said he wanted to create one of the scariest games of all time. And he already did it once, like nobody was needing you to come back and do it again. It's that thing of when you get the high score and you're like the only person that can take my crown is me. Yeah. Let me see if I can though. He did specifically say that he wanted The Callisto Protocol to be one of the scariest games on the current console generation.

13:04 So we can kind of give him a break there, I guess. Yeah, I guess that makes sense to just want to do it for this generation of gamers. This was only furthered by having coding access to haptic feedback on the controllers, so you really get into it. And I played on a PS5. It totally works. It felt so good. It's things where when you punch someone, you can feel it reverberate through your hand a little, and you're like, hell yeah, that was fucking me. Fuck you. It blows my mind to see the transition of the rumbling controller over the years. It went from this add-on that you needed to purchase separately on the Nintendo 64. Really? Yeah.

13:45 The Rumble Pack, is that what it's called? The Rumble Pack, yeah, it was called the Rumble Pack. And, oh my goodness, that whole thing, all it did was just shake it a little bit. It just rattled it. And then, you know, it's been kind of standard ever since to have a controller that shakes and rattles and stuff, but the haptic that is going on now? Holy shit, this is a whole new level. I mean, I was still a little blown away that a game from 10 years ago, 2013's Grand Theft Auto V, has cell phone features that genuinely feel like your phone's going off in your hand. That's true too. That still kind of fucks me up, and that's from 10 years ago. I had a ball playing this shit. This shit came out recently. Yeah, I'm sure they incorporated into the jump scares and all that stuff. Oh, it was fucking terrible.

14:25 I loved it. The team was out there talking about how much love went into this game and also reflecting on Glenn Schofield's incredible career, right? Because this is really a culmination of a lot of games coming together. In May of 2022, the Academy of Art University awarded him an honorary doctorate in arts and video games. Holy shit, good for him. That's the same school Nicole Schofield attended to learn how to create art for The Callisto Protocol. Oh my goodness. This just all keeps coming back around for him and his daughter. Are you gonna cry? I think it's very tender and it feels very like it comes all around. So from now on, we will only refer to this man as Dr. Schofield. A few months after being crowned a doctor, in September of 2022, Dr.

15:09 Glenn Schofield tweeted, Hell yeah, gaming is hard as fuck. We work six, seven days a week, 12, 15 hour days, but this is gaming. You do it cause you love it. Oh no. And the internet went, What? Oh shit, dude. Didn't you learn anything from the Housers when they opened their dumb mouths during Red Dead Redemption 2? Oh, it just... And it was unprompted, which was wild. Yeah. Like he just kind of went, Hey, man, I haven't seen my family in weeks. I love video games. And he went, Wait, what? That's not healthy. So he like hardcore as fuck admits to crunch culture, like with his chest. And then following that, the team scrambled and he deleted the tweet and issued an apology being like, I'm sorry.

15:55 I'm very passionate and our team has boundaries, but crunch is wrong. I'm sorry. Oh my God. So it was like not really an apology. I don't know that he wrote every word of his own volition. I don't know that a PR manager said, give me your fucking password. You're not allowed to have internet anymore. I don't know if he was like, you know what? I was wrong. That was kind of fucked up. I need to be more reflective and support positive change in this culture that I contribute to. Yeah. Let's just hope for the best in this situation. Yeah. It's between that spectrum, but we can hope a certain way. That whole thing didn't really slow anything down though, because you know, they're crunching. Yeah, right. And marketing came to a head in the last month leading up to the game's release.

16:37 The team released a prequel podcast called The Callisto Protocol Helix Station. It was a narrative podcast with Gwendolyn Christie, who's Captain Phasma in the later Star Wars years. Oh, okay. She's in Game of Thrones as well. And Michael Ironside, who's in fucking everything. Really? I looked just for, if you can't place him, he's agent Sam Fisher in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. I know that doesn't help with your face, but maybe you get the reference. There's like 280 IMDB credits on his page. You've seen him. Character actor in everything. Yes. And the podcast was six episodes that included encounters with strange creatures.

17:19 Ooh. Spooky. You have so many things that are linking back to other episodes that you've done just this season. There was a podcast that came out with a quarry that was also six episodes and had like in-game talent and stuff. If you're right. And I was thinking again with Spyro with the voice actors and how the second one had a different voice actor. And then in the remake, they're like, all right, so we're going to use the new voice actor and replace the old one and that kind of stuff. I know, I know, it's great. You know, time is a flat circle more than anything. Nothing is really special. Right. Now, when the game came out, it was like, woo, okay. Admittedly, it was not perfect on release. So there were complaints about it crashing, bugs, black screen of death, and even there were areas where people were like, the AI is so fucking aggressive and violent.

18:09 This has to be wrong. Really? Yeah, which is fucking wild saying like, okay, did you just tell on yourself? Like, whatever. I remember you were really disappointed when these reports were coming out, just because of how the first dead space game came out so early, and it was like debugged, and he just was, you know, known for delivering a quality product on release, and then didn't. And then didn't. Yeah, and I was rooting for this. I want to see Glenn Scofield do really well, because I think he is a good creator in the game space. I think he brings a lot of value to the table, and I think he constantly works hard to push gaming to be better. Honestly, the remake of Dead Space probably pressured them to get that release date, especially though.

18:53 Just to be the first one out. To get the first one out the door and stuff like that. And it might have just resulted in, you know, what we saw. I feel you. And to everyone's credit, these mostly across the board have been fixed. Okay, and that was quick then. Yeah, they were like, fuck, we're going back in. This is not cyberpunk level of wait two years to fix everything. Yeah, wait for the sequel for the first one to be playable. No, this is not a Phantom Liberty situation. They did act very quickly. They patched things. They were like, shit, are bad. This is a $60, $70 game. We're so sorry. Yeah, we were hoping you wouldn't notice, but I guess you did, so. Yeah, it just, it sucks for the launch story to come out, be so excited, and then have it not work, which is why you never pre-order.

19:36 Never fucking pre-order. I was trying to find a way to drop that in, so I'm glad it came up organically. Yeah. Now, maybe it was the timing with Dead Space on the way, but for the most part, people said it was okay, but it didn't capture the magic that Dead Space brought in 2008, which kind of fucking sucks to hear. It does, but is that because their expectations were to have the same game? Yeah, I mean, a lot of the marketing from the team was based on Glenn Schofield, and the biggest fucking title he has is Dead Space. And you go, well, this is another spooky space game, and it's horror, and it's supposed to be like this game we all loved, and it's not. Okay. And he's like, well, wait six fucking weeks, and that game will be out over there, but I'm trying to create something new.

20:20 And they went, but it's not Dead Space. You know, and I think that sucks. It's like when you see a performer who's pigeonholed in a role, and you're like, I want you to have fun. Yeah, right. Come on, man. I just, I feel for this team a lot. The studio had originally hoped to move 5 million copies of the game, but as of the end of June of 2023, they've only moved about 2 million copies. Oh, that's not a terrible number. It's not, for a first game out of a studio, it's not bad at all. But it's not the 5 million you were expecting. Yeah, and I think the team just set their sights really high because they were standing on Dr. Glenn Schofield's shoulders, but they needed to adjust their expectations because as a gamer, in that cycle of time, you're like, I can play Callisto Protocol, which is new, or I can play Dead Space, which is remade, remastered, fucking beautiful from the ground up.

21:12 I know I like it. And I know I like it. Yeah, the timing sucked. Yeah. It's like when Hollywood puts out the same two movies within like a month of each other, and you're like, why are you like this? Armageddon and Deep Impact. Just Friends and Friends with Benefits, I think is one. Yeah, that kind of shit. In early of August, 2023, Striking Distance Studio laid off 32 full-time employees. Oh, hate to hear it. I know. It just keeps happening in gaming right now, it sucks. But it's happening across all industries, honestly. Yeah, but there is a lot of talent floating around in gaming, especially. And I hope this comment really dates this episode. Yeah.

21:53 On September 20th, 2023, Bloomberg reported that Dr. Glenn Schofield, along with the Striking Distance COO and CFO, voluntarily left the team to pursue new opportunities. Oh, damn. With this departure, the sitting Chief Development Officer, who worked on the team for Dead Space 2, will step in as CEO. Okay. And then here we are. That leads us up to today, with the game out for just under a year, but heads rolling for it for missing, and nearly impossibly high mark, frankly. Yeah. For a brand new IP that was attached and then unattached, but still has some gentle ties, it's wild, and it's a game that was lost in the shuffle of its spiritual origin materials being remade for current consoles, along with its first outing, and it's released way too far into the holiday season to be gifted, frankly, being like so late in December, and there was a lot that could have helped this game that didn't happen.

22:54 And also the Dead Space remake was really well-received. It was, people really enjoyed it. But right now, I believe it is still on PlayStation Plus as of October of 2023, so if you want to check it out, you can, and if you are still hesitant, just stick around. I'll tell you every single thing that happens in the game. Yeah, right? Spoilers. Now, let me ask ahead of time. Did you enjoy it? I loved this game. You loved it. I had a great fucking time, and as soon as I finished it, I was tempted to open New Game Plus. Wow. Genuinely, and I haven't had that since the Spider-Man Miles Morales games. Yeah, and like, you are our horror queen on the show, but you also aren't that big into horror games.

23:34 I don't, I love the lore in classic horror. We were just talking about this the other day. Like, I don't love gore for the sake of gore. Right. Like, I'm not a hostile girly. I like Scream, I like Final Destination, I like slasheries, I like things that aren't too paranormal. Right. I don't like ghosts. I don't believe in them. I'm like, nah, he dead. He don't give a shit. He's like a flower now. Who gives a fuck? Oxenfree notwithstanding. Yeah, Oxenfree is fun, but between Oxenfree and this, I would absolutely play this again. The combat was fun. And anyway, everything aside, this game was still nominated for a Dice Award for Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction. Excellent. Good job. The game's timing had everything stacked against it, and the fatigue may have kicked in before the race even began.

24:20 But you know what? This game was goddamn fun. And we're gonna get into it today. This is The Callisto Protocol. Here in the year 2320, Callisto is home to a prison called Black Iron. And if you're a little bit of a nerd, Black Iron Prison is a nod to a Philip K. Dick book Valles, which came out in 1981. Yep, not even remotely on my radar. I'm just throwing it out there. Callisto is one of the moons of Jupiter and is known as a dead moon, perhaps because it's the coldest one. There was some speculation at some time that Callisto could be habitable because there was evidence of water. Near Callisto is another of Jupiter's moons, Europa.

25:04 On Europa, we see a busy city street at night. There's shops, there's restaurants, there's a Margaritaville. And the guy from Fort Solace is there just having a cocktail finally. He's earned it. We see a young woman cautiously navigate a street littered with bodies. Countless bodies are strewn across the streets with their faces and skin distorted as if they were poisoned, even at Margaritaville. Jesus. The street is quieted by death and the camera lands on a small glowing purple box. The camera moves from a cinematic to security footage camera of the same woman walking through the bodies. Someone is watching.

25:45 The view moves back to cinematic and the woman is attacked by a man. His veins are blue and dark against his pale skin and his eyes are changing color to stark white. There's blood pouring from his eyes and his mouth. He screams and attacks her aggressively, but the woman knocks him back. Our perspective moves back to security camera footage and that footage is revealed to be on a news report on the local news. It shows the woman's face from the security cam footage and reveal she is Dani Nakamura. Okay, so they can actually identify people with their security camera footage in 2330? Yeah, it takes that long. Okay. In 300 years, maybe we'll be able to get some decent security cam footage.

26:27 But don't hold your breath. This is fiction. Right. Dani Nakamura is played by actual angel-on-earth Karen Fukuhara. Dani is 20 and she is 5'2, so she's not necessarily a big dog in the fight. But what she lacks in brawn, she makes up for in balls. She's a Europa local who is involved with a rebellion group called The Outer Way. The Outer Way is kind of like anonymous. They're out here in secret, but they pull a lot of strings. They've been targeting a massive corporation that runs privatized prisons lately, called the United Jupiter Company. Fuck, those are still around? Yeah. They're not going away. The UJC sucks, and The Outer Way wants to expose them.

27:09 Hell yeah. The news footage pulls back to showcase their coverage of The Outer Way and what just happened on Europa, whatever fucking massacre just occurred. Yeah. The anchor goes on to describe the scene as a terrorist attack executed by The Outer Way, which she deems a terrorist group. Uh-oh. They name Dani as the notorious leader of this group. Oh shit. She's 5'2, how the fuck did she kill 30 people? Right. The security footage of Dani's face is moved to split screen, and the other half of the TV shows the footage of the small glowing purple box. We pull out further and we're in the cockpit of a spacecraft and the news is on the TV being watched by Max.

27:51 Max is a pilot and he's in the cockpit of the ship with Jacob. You know, Josh Duhamel. Right. Josh Duhamel tells him to turn off the news. We have a job to do. We have to save the Transformers. I haven't seen the Transformers movies. Now, something I want to ask, is this a full on cut scene during all this? Yes. So that's something that they didn't do in Dead Space with cut scenes. You're right. In Dead Space, there's like a part of a cut scene that seamlessly blends in a game play, and then you're just over the shoulder the whole fucking time. And even in cut scenes, you can move around and like walk back and forth and change your perspective. Here there are absolutely cut scenes. Okay, so no Bioshot on this one, guys. No, no, sit up, nothing.

28:32 Max and Jacob are space couriers who are leaving Callisto to go to Europa. They've been working together moving medical supplies back and forth for a while now, and it's been incredibly lucrative for them. Like this is actually their last run, and after today, when that final wire goes through, neither of them will ever have to work again. One last job. Exactly. Max is anxious, and he's like, this whole thing's been so weird, and the security on those runs is ridiculous. Like, man, this sucks. Jacob's like, yeah, well, Callisto is a prison moon, so security's gonna be tight, like, because of the crimes. Max is like, yeah, but what about the outer way?

29:12 Like, that's fucking crazy. And Jacob goes, that's a whole separate ass event that has nothing to do with us postmating shit across the galaxy. Right. Get over it. Max gets an alert of something weird going on in the cargo hold, and while it's probably nothing, we send Jacob out to go check up on it. As the player, we take control of Jacob Lee, our space postmate. He's a tall and confident Josh Duhamel, just the kind of confidence you get from being 50 years old and having spent 20% of that time married to Fergie. I did so much fucking research. We get the first section title card, Cargo.

29:55 And before you ask, I wasn't going to, but now that you said it, the chapter titles do not lead into a puzzle to solve. That's too bad. I mean, especially coming from Glenn Schofield. You almost expect it, but it's like, does every Ken Levine game have to have a fucking like mind control twist? Right. Sometimes you can just let a thing be a thing. His daughter's like, Dad, I suffered my entire life because of Nicole in Dead Space. Can we not? Suffered. Nicole in Dead Space put Nicole through school. I sound like such a dad right now. We are in the first of eight game sections for what it's worth, but that is also not a clue.

30:38 I'm just saying that so you can follow along. Jacob heads to the back of the ship to check on the alert that they got and starts making his way through like all the corridors. This is a huge fucking ship. His ship is dark and spooky, even though we're not even in the scary part of the game. He discovers and relays to Max that they are indeed in trouble. Way in the back of the ship, there's alarms going off, and it looks like a small explosion happened through some fogs of like clouds of smoke and shit. There's patches of fires going off all around what looks like an entry port area, which I've heard is bad for spaceships. Jacob tells Max we've been boarded. Max goes, Oh, my God, is it the Outer Way?

31:21 Jacob is like, I mean, maybe, yeah, actually, the Outer Way has been hitting a lot of UJC stations, including like Callisto is one of those. We're probably in the crosshairs, so this kind of sucks. Max is like, Well, that fucking does suck head back here and we will figure it out. Right. Jacob heads back and runs into some of the Outer Way members. He's hiding behind cargo boxes, but he hears a woman's voice say to search everything. It's got to be here somewhere. There's a few groups of Outer Way warriors on the ship, and they're all strapped with guns and helmets, like straight up battle year because they expected a fight. As Jacob gets closer to the cockpit, some of the Outer Way spot Jacob and run for him.

32:04 Jacob is able to yell out at Max, and he's like, Oh, they're coming. Close the bridge. Fuck my life. Right. Jacob gets past an airlock door with Max, like they're both in the cockpit behind an airlock. And we see our old friend, Dani Nakamura, yelling from the other side to open up the door. She's got a gun in her hand, and she's slamming it up against the fucking screen. Oh, shit. Max is like, Hey, Jacob, what are we going to do? And Jacob says, Whatever I have to. He's so fucking cool off the bat. Jacob then opens the back of the ship open, revealing that they've already taken off and are in space right now. Oh, shit. So as the back of the spaceship opens up, space as an entity starts to suck everything out of the ship.

32:47 Oh, damn. Including the outer way members. Oh, shit. Dani knocks on the door one more time with her gun, and then as she's being sucked up and out into space, she grabs onto a hand railing and shoots at the door at Jacob. Naturally, she misses him, but she does manage to puncture the airlock door. Oh, damn. This bitch had a split second and made the coolest decision. Right. As space starts to creep into the cockpit of the ship, Max immediately starts losing control. Jacob crawls and climbs his way up towards the cockpit so Max and he can take over and figure out how to fly this fucking thing. Yeah.

33:28 As Jacob slides into his pilot's chair, he's met with a wall of fire coming up at him through the ship's windshield. Jesus. Jacob hops on comms and yells, Mayday, mayday. The ship isn't too far from Callisto and he just left. So he's like, I'm swinging around. I'm crashing right now. He's like, I just give me emergency clearance and we're good. And Callisto is like, absolutely not. Negative. Do not crash on our planet. Because they're in the cockpit, Jacob is out right in the front of the ship and the planet of Callisto is hurling towards Jacob. It's dark. It's gray. And it's a dead moon, so it's covered in frost and ice.

34:08 He's like, we don't have this option. Aside from these frost and ice areas, there are structures of the prison and they're massive. They're dark. They're poorly lit. It's fucking terrifying. And Callisto again is like, negative. You are not authorized for reentry. And Jacob is like, I have no choice. Yeah. My ship is crashing. Jacob hangs on to the controls for as long as he can, but the inevitable happens. The ship crashes hard into rocky snow. This knocks Jacob out, but at least doesn't kill him somehow. Yeah. Sometime later, he wakes up in his cockpit with it like sparking and steaming with smoke, all this shit.

34:51 Jacob gasps for air in his empty lungs and then goes over to check on Max. As he turns Max's body over to face him, we see that the fire had eaten half of Max and one side of his face is completely burned through and off. Shit. It's fully Two-Face from The Dark Knight. Oh, no. Through his swinging, unattached jaw, Max says, Jacob, why didn't you listen? And then he dies in his arms. Oh, I was hoping it was like a horror moment of like him picturing him talking. No, he actually talked at the end. You thought it was like a final destination, like ghost moment of like, oh, it's trauma.

35:34 No, that was his last beating heart moment. Oh, fuck. Jacob is double traumatized now, and he looks forward, and he's like, oh, my God, what's happening over there? The door to the cockpit is being cut open from the outside. What the hell? You just crashed here. Uh-oh. So the door is cut off and then thrown aside by an eight-foot tall security unit robot. It's big and it looks like an evil iron giant. It's like if Iron Giant went through a goth phase. The security unit comes in, detects one life force in the area, which is Jacob because Max is dead as fuck, and continues a search for survivors.

36:16 Then just a regular ass man comes in and introduces himself as Black Iron Security. So he obviously works for the prison. He gives Jacob a face mask because we're on a dead ice moon of space. And he's like, all right, let's get you out of here. Very like, just structured of like, all right, we're doing this, let's fucking go. This guy is Captain Leon Ferris, and he's a senior security man for Black Iron. Captain Ferris checks his shit and sees that Jacob was running things out of Callisto's hangar and makes a comment about not getting a lot of freelancers out here. Jacob is exhausted and sad and fully fucking traumatized after a massive crash and seeing his fucking co-worker die.

36:58 Right. And he's like, I'm just doing my job, man. Jacob starts telling Ferris that it was the first ship he's ever lost, which really adds to this too, and that they were just leaving and then they were boarded by... And as Jacob steps out of the wreckage, we see a security unit robot holding Dani by the arm. Oh shit. She's telling it to let go of her, and she looks so tiny next to this giant, evil iron giant-ass fucking robot. I figured she was going to survive somehow because of Karen Fukuhara. Avi. But like also, how the fuck did she survive that shit? Well, she was hanging on. Maybe she stayed in the front part near the cockpit and held on through the crash. Oh my goodness. I don't know. I mean, to not be strapped in during the crash and to survive it.

37:40 Oh, ridiculous. Max was strapped in and still died. Right. Jacob sees Dani and goes, Her! She's the one who... And then Captain Ferris tells him to cool it and calm down. Don't ever tell someone who's upset to calm down. Right. Never a good idea. That's a bad thing. It's just mean. It is. It's mean-spirited. Ferris is like, You're doing your job. Let me do mine. Calm down. Ferris then gets a message on his earpiece from a supervisor. And he's like, Yes, sir. Yes, sir. There's a pause. And then Ferris gets some updated instructions, looks over at Jacob and says, Whatever you say. Ferris tells the security robot to take him too, and points at Jacob.

38:22 The security robot grabs Jacob and escorts him alongside Dani's security robot and Captain Ferris. Jacob is put off and is like, I can fucking walk. I don't need the robot. What's happening? Yeah. The group walks towards the prison campus, and the camera tilts up, and we see the title card, The Callisto Protocol. In a new scene, we reunite with Jacob, who's sitting in a transport vehicle across from Dani, and we get a new section of the game called Outbreak. The cabin of the vehicle opens up, and Captain Ferris comes in, and he's being a prick just off the bat immediately. He barks at both Dani and Jacob that inmates cannot speak unless spoken to, which is just shut the fuck up.

39:07 Are we inmates? Jacob, to your point, is like, hey man, I'm a pilot. I drive airplanes and spaceships. I'm not an inmate because that's a legal thing to do. Right. Like, I didn't commit a goddamn crime. There are invoices that show why I'm here and everything. You know, there's a paper trail. Captain Ferris interrupts him and says, you are inmate 532-521, and you will address me as Captain Ferris. To his point, he didn't have permission to crash on Callisto, so now he's a prisoner. He could have been dead or in prison. And so Captain Ferris is played by Sam Witwer, and he has a lot of animation and voiceover work, especially in the Star Wars world.

39:49 He was Darth Maul in The Clone Wars, and the actor is also in Riverdale. He's in Smallville. He's in Battlestar Galactica. He probably does a lot of conventions. He's in a lot of nerd shit. Another great character actor. He is so good that every single actor that worked with him was like, he's on another level. And I genuinely think it's just kind of the energy he brings to nerd shit. I think he's like, hell yeah, I'm a geek. God, let's fucking do this. But Josh Duhamel was like, he is fucking crazy. He is too fucking much. He is on one. Yeah, Josh Duhamel took a project that happened to be a video game. And then Sam Witwer was like, no, I got a dream job.

40:29 I get to do a video game. Yeah, it's pretty good. And there are some like nerd shit nods to him because under the character information of Captain Ferris in your HUD, when you can kind of go through like your weapon wheel and all the other pieces of artifacts you collect along the way, it says that his hometown is from Rimohad on the moon Io. And that is, of course, Dathomir spelled backwards, which is Darth Maul's place of origin. Really? And I will not take any questions about my pronunciation. But that's really like a deep cut. Yeah, so they found like a very hyper specific nod to Darth Maul's origins, lining up with Captain Ferris in a weird mirror universe, which I thought was very clever.

41:12 But truly his performance in this is fucking balls to the wall. Awesome. So Jacob is like, I am a fucking pilot. I didn't do goddamn shit wrong. She's from the Outer Way. She boarded my ship and crashed it. I did everything I could just to not fucking die. She killed my co-pilot. Like, what the fuck? Ferris could not care less. Ferris is like, you are an inmate. 5, 2, 1, shut up. Warden's direct orders. And as he says this, the Warden of Black Iron, Warden Cole, appears in the middle of the vehicle as a hologram. Now, this hologram appears to be a welcome to prison onboarding video. Is this a welcome to prison video?

41:53 Holy shit. I was thinking it in my head as a joke, and then you led with that it actually is. That's great. It's dead-ass prison orientation. He's talking about choices and choices leading you here and finding your purpose in life. It's the first day of school for prison. Now, Warden Cole is played by James Mathis III, who also did some additional voices for the Dead Space remake. He got checks from both sides, bitch. And he's also an incredibly well-storied performer with lots of really cool projects under his belt, especially animation. Now, this weird-as-fuck inspirational speech from Warden Cole ends with him being like, together, we will find your purpose.

42:39 Welcome to prison. Not quite the welcome to rapture moment. I was thinking like, welcome to Jurassic Park. But instead of the dinosaurs coming out, it's just a bunch of people being imprisoned. Captain Ferris says he loves the onboarding video, which is also just a deranged line. I love that video. I fucking love day one. The transport arrives at Black Iron, and Jacob continues to tell Captain Ferris he doesn't belong here. And Ferris continues to not give a shit. He tells Jacob, like, hey, you know what? You would have been dead if I didn't come fish you out of the crashed ship. So you know what?

43:20 It's time you moved on because as far as anyone else in the entire fucking world is concerned, you are dead. He tells Jacob that he is crossed over into Ferris' kingdom. Oh my god. So immediately terrifying. Ferris tells him to let go of his old life because his new life, his prison life, is entirely in Ferris' hands. And with that, Ferris grabs Jacob and walks him into prison, followed by Dani being walked in by a security robot. Jacob is walked into prison into the new inmate processing where he immediately gets just raw dogged fucking surgery to get an implant put in the back of his neck.

44:01 No anesthesia, no cleaning the skin before they cut in, nothing. God damn. A female doctor, Dr. Mahler, confirms his inmate number and then informs him that she's implanting a core device into him per the prison's rules. Her assistant says that Jacob isn't even in the system, but she's like, who gives a shit, just prep the device. Jacob gets held down in a chair with straps facing down towards the ground, kind of like a massage chair, but in the worst way, just so you can't see what's happening. And he's screaming, fuck you, as a robot comes down from the ceiling and cuts his neck open and implants this huge health device in the back of his neck.

44:44 This device, for practical purposes, functions as the player's health bar. Right. In the same vein as Dead Space, there's no traditional HUD, so you just get a little bar on the back of the neck, so do your fucking sit-up or whatever. It's really good for immersive horror atmosphere, though, just not having a bunch of shit on the screen. Yeah, totally. Jacob gets this wildly painful neck implant done, screaming the entire way through, and after the doctor steps away, he begins to flatline. We hear the long beep, and then Dr. Mahler injects something green and goopy into Jacob's neck. We see his implant go from one red chiclet bar to a fully lit-up green battery bar.

45:26 He is alive, and now we have a tutorial on how health works. I was going to ask you, too, just because you said that the practical reason for it is so that we can see our health bar, what is the in-world reason for this? It's tracking the prisoners. Okay. So you can be like, oh, here's all this shit. There is some weight to it being able to have access in different places. Security guys have their core devices set up to open doors and shit. But it's a tracking thing for this prison. Got it. Jacob passes the fuck out, and he has this dream where he's in his street clothes, no neck implant, but he's in a prison cell.

46:07 At the base of his cell is a small glowing purple box. It's the same one from the Europa attack that we saw on TV. Before he can touch the box, he has a vision of Max burnt up halfway dead as he lay dying, grabbing at him. Jacob actually wakes up from this horrific nightmare to the actual horrific nightmare he's living. He's in his green orange jumpsuit in his prison cell. His health bar implant glows green against the nearly pitch black cell. And in the middle of the room, a hologram of Warden Cole alerts everyone that security needs to report to the main block. This is not a drill. An alarm is ringing out, and Jacob looks through his prison bars and says, what the hell, something's not right.

46:51 He's a pilot, not a detective. I've been here for one day, but this seems wrong. As he puts his hands through the bars, the door pops open. Jacob just walks out of his cell and sees fires popping up everywhere. Clearly, he's not the only prisoner who was able to get out of their cell. Yeah. The prison is several stories up and below, and the cells are all in this big circle facing inward. In the middle of the circles of cells is a big watchtower. Jacob starts navigating through the chaos, and while he's running over, he's called by a prisoner who's stuck in their cell. This is where Jacob meets Elias, played by video game veteran Zeke Anton. He's in Ratchet and Clank, he's in Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War, done a ton of shit.

47:35 He's a great performer. I really like his performance. And Elias is like a little street British kid. It's not cockney, but it's almost cockney. He keeps calling Jacob like, hey, bruv. All right. And the fucking subtitles say B-R-U-V, like, just to make it clear. Also, how do these accents survive, you know, interplanetary fucking communities and shit, you know? Yeah, you know, we're past continents here. We're talking about whole ass planets. Yeah. How the fuck does Josh Duhamel sound like he's from LA? And this guy sounds like he's from fucking Dover. Jacob is like, I was working and my ship crashed, and now I'm here and I don't know what to do, and I'm fucking scared.

48:17 Elias is like, okay, you're new. I've been in this prison for half my life. I can navigate the entire compound and get us out of here, but I need your help first. I need you to get me out of the cell. I'll get us to a ship and you can fly us out of here. And then he does the coolest shit imaginable, and he pulls out a full wrench with one side shaved down all the way to a shiv. Oh shit. It's the coolest prison fucking shiv I've ever seen. He really has been here a long time. He tells Jacob to go to the control room and unlock his cell. Jacob has no other prospects, so he's like, yeah, absolutely. I got you. You've given me a weapon. I could use it. Yeah.

48:57 As Jacob makes his way to the control room, he encounters the first fight of the game. Inside the control room, there's two gang members beating up someone we can't really see. Jacob sneaks in quietly, but then a third gang member grabs him and jumps him. Jacob gets caught in a full fight tutorial, and by the time he's done with that, the two gang members who are jumping someone else are laid the fuck out on the floor. Hell yeah. And then Jacob sees who they were fighting. Or I guess what they were fighting. Ooh. We see what used to be a man, and is now a mutated mess. Used to be a man. This guy's hair and skin are starting to rot off his body, and his eyes are glassy.

49:38 Most often these mutated grunts have pants on, which is great because I wouldn't want to imagine. Right. But these guys are fucking everywhere, and they seem to be former inmates, and they're turning into whatever the fuck is happening here. Jacob manages to grab a hammer as a melee weapon, and we're off to the goddamn races. Fighting with the infected is truly so much fun, and that's what I really enjoyed about this game. It's unrelenting. And of course, get ready to do your Dead Space sit-up. You can dismember them. All right. That's a signature Schofield move. Yeah. After clearing out the control room, Jacob kickstarts a measure to open up the cells in prison, because Elias, we're coming for you.

50:22 When Jacob gets to Elias' cell, he sees Elias is still trapped in it. The console shorted out with the fires, and he's like, well, I'm still fucking stuck in here. Jacob's like, honestly, that's probably safer. There's something crazy going on. Right. And it's not human. So Elias is like, no, this place can mess with your head, but focus, buddy, you're with me. Come on. If you're scared, that's just more motivation to get the fuck out of here. So he's a little skeptical just off the bat. Elias tells Jacob to meet him in the center watchtower, and he'll find his way there. He's like, I'll fucking crawl out of this or something. Okay. Looks like some walls have collapsed in the chaos, so Elias can kind of figure out how to get through the other way and meet up with Jacob later.

51:03 This area brings more of those infested fucks, and some are bigger and angrier. One major thing we see in these fuckers is that they're incredibly agile. They'll pop out of goddamn nowhere, fall from the ceiling, climb at you through the floorboards. These fuckers come out of nowhere. So they're just like living in the walls. Yeah. Real rat people. As Jacob gets to an elevator to get up to the watchtower, Elias pops up in his head. Elias says he turned on two-way comms with Jacob via the core devices in their neck. So a couple purposes there. He cites that he's been here for so fucking long. He's learned how to do some crazy shit. Elias is in Jacob's ear to help him navigate through the prison while Jacob encounters more and more infected.

51:48 So I guess you can take a bio shot, because you're alone fighting in an unknown world with some stranger with an accent in your ear. Right. Ah, it's fine. It's fine. I'm fine. So the fighting includes Jacob stomping on the corpses of some, and when you stomp on a corpse, that's how you loot the body to get all the fun shit out. Nice. And it's also just very satisfying to stomp motherfuckers out and is a signature Schofield move. Well, it's like the Gears of War curb stomp, too. Yeah, I guess it is just kind of a signature move of like aggressive dude games, but it's still very fun. I don't give a shit. I think I fuck with dude stuff.

52:29 So for Jacob to get to the watchtower, there's this really long way to like navigate through the prison appropriately to get in there, but Elias is in your ear and he's like, I got you. But you do have to go through a place that has a lot of crazy people and it's called Solitary Confinement. Oh shit. Is that okay? And you're like, I don't have a fucking choice, buddy. Yeah, there's a reason they're in Solitary. Yeah, of Space Prison? Solitary looks like the insides of a mine. There's rock walls. It's incredibly dark and scary and damp down here. The cells look more like cages, and the infected are coming up fast and angry as shit.

53:10 Elias radios down to Jacob and is like, hey, so I just ran into one of my longtime friends here, but it wasn't him. He was like, he was changing into one of those things, and he attacked me, and I had to kill him. Like, some crazy shit is going on. What the fuck? Jacob is sympathetic, but with an air of like, you know what? I'm not supposed to be here today. This is my clerks. Jacob finds the elevator up, and we're like, OK, cool. We're back on the road. You're actually close to an armory, so you can gear up before you face some of these more like really fucked up motherfuckers. And you have to be careful, because these security robots are back online, and Elias is like, hey, be careful.

53:51 They're real bloodthirsty. Jacob looks over from behind a box and sees a security robot scan a prisoner who isn't infected. The robot then says, lethal force authorized, and then shoots his fucking face off. Oh, shit. This kicks off a stealth section that kind of reminded me of Stray's like hide from the cameras and robots section if it was directed by Eli Roth. These robots are crazy violent. Jacob can get dismembered by them. He can get his head squished by them. He can get shot down by them. They programmed so many sick as fuck grotesque deaths into this. It's honestly a marvel.

54:32 Jacob can find a box here that in most cases has some loot like health or Callisto credits, which is the in-game currency. But in this loot box, Jacob opens it, and whatever the game's equivalent of a facehugger jumps out and attaches to his face. Now there's facehuggers? Yeah. Oh, shit. These things are gross, possum-sized worm creatures, and they're hiding all over the game map, and it sucks every single fucking time. I hate them. Is this the jumpscares that you were telling me about? Yeah, a couple of these got me. I'm not gonna lie. Jacob takes his shiv and stabs blindly at the meat, eating his own face to break free, which is also just a study in trusting your own stabbing ability.

55:23 The fun of the game is finding where these motherfuckers are coming from and why this is happening, so I will get into more of the lore, but just don't jump ahead. We're gonna get there. There is reason for all this crazy shit. I would hope the fuck so. So as we're going through, I'm not gonna describe every single scary encounter because, like, holy shit, that would be just bad. So I'm gonna kind of describe senses of them, so I'm giving you a little bit of a lore dump right now. We're gonna get into why there's different ones and all the crazy shit, so just hang with me. Be scared and just know these motherfuckers are coming out of every goddamn corner, and it's great every single time. It fascinates me to no end that so many video games, like, throughout history, like, all the way back to, like, Dragon's Lair, where they focus on different deaths and, like, different animations for different ways that you can die in a game.

56:13 Yeah, it's great. I love that. You know what I also love? Taking a bio shot, baby! Oh, no, what's happening? Because we're going to start seeing audio files all over the game map. These files are from the staff at Black Iron Prison and just give context into what's happening so we can start painting a picture. And also, I'm not going to call every single one out, but I am going to culminate them into the story. I'm saying that mostly for any hundo chasers that are like, you forgot about the fucking facehugger in this level. Hey, if they have that much to say, they can come to our Discord and talk to us in our I'm actually channel. That was smooth. I ain't gonna lie. When Jacob finally makes it to the weapons lockup, he sees it's already been raided, which completely makes sense.

56:58 But he is able to get an electric baton, and now his melee weapon is an electric baton. Hell yeah. It's kind of those in the real world here, like they're cattle prods, something they're called. It's the same kind that the guards would use on the prisoners here at Black Iron, so you know it's like a real fucked up version of that. Elias tells Jacob he's really close to the watchtower, so they should be able to reconnect real soon. Jacob's like, sick, this fucking sucks. Jacob gets to the watchtower first and overhears chatter about the guards getting overwhelmed with everything happening. Captain Ferris is in front of dozens of security screens barking orders at his units. Jacob starts to sneak past fuck-faced Ferris as he's breaking out of a door, and then Ferris catches him.

57:44 Aw, fuck-faced Ferris. We see a wave of energy come over Jacob and hold him in place, and then as we see Ferris kind of enter the fucking scene, he flicks his wrist and Jacob is pulled up to meet him. Ferris is wearing a glove called a Gravity Resistance Projector, a GRP, a grip. That's literally just a telekinesis glove. It's the gravity gun. Yeah, it's sick and there's also a version of this in Dead Space, but it's like for stasis, so you could hold the alien or the Necromorphs, excuse me, actually it's a Necromorph, in place to dismember them. Here, it's just to pick shit up and throw it, which is very fun.

58:25 I respect that there can be calls of this being derivative. Is it derivative? It's still fucking fun. No, if you can make it like original, even if you're like using it from something else, that's okay. Yeah, it's very fun and it's very cool to see because Jacob is like, what the fuck? I'm floating. So, Ferris pulls Jacob face to face with him and is like, how the fuck did you get in here? Ferris is like, you know what? I don't have time for this. And before Jacob can say anything, Ferris throws Jacob across the room. Oh shit. And then suddenly, Ferris does have time for this shit and decides to recap the game up until this point.

59:07 So you're probably wondering how he got here. He's a little campy, which I really appreciate, because he is truly like one notch a little over the top from the other performances that feel very grounded and like truly people navigating a unique circumstance that is scary and unknown to them. And Ferris is just like, I hate everything. I love killing things. Well, the only way that works is if they are still in the same game as everybody else. Yeah, they're certainly in the same game, but he's on another level. Okay, good. Ferris goes, I'm gonna recap the game. Let me get this shit straight. Your ship crashes here. Everything burns to the ground. And what's up with that?

59:47 It all started when you came back down here. Why are you so special, 521? What's going on with you? He picks up Jacob again with his glove and suspends him in the air and gets really close to him. Ferris says, why did the warden want you alive? That's a good question. He doesn't wait for an answer. Ferris throws Jacob again and Jacob lands near a door, crawling with infected on the other side. Ferris says, I told you, this is my kingdom. And he whips out his electric baton to beat the shit out of Jacob. And Jacob says, it's all yours. And he whips open the door. He pulls the door open and is standing in a corner, so he actually gets protected holding the door against him in the corner.

1:00:30 Hell yeah. They infected pour in and start attacking Ferris while Jacob hides behind this door and just watches as they overtake him. Ferris can kind of shoot a couple, but then one body slams Ferris through the glass and out of the watchtower down into the depths of the prison, which again, stories and stories and stories down into the depths of this Jupiter moon. Bye, Ferris. Jacob waits for all this to calm down and then messages Elias and is like, I'm here, Ferris is dead. Elias is like, oh, shit, that's awesome. All right, I'm not far. I'll see you soon. Jacob continues through the watchtower and we enter the section Aftermath.

1:01:14 In the guts of the prison, Jacob pushes on and he meets up with Elias. As he does, he triggers one of the many hologram messages from Warden Cole that appear throughout the game. It's a speech to the team about how he's the new warden, but he's not a regular warden, he's a cool warden. Oh my god, really? Basically. He's willing to do anything necessary to do the right thing for his team and for mankind. You can have one shift beer. It's very much like swooping statements to make to the team on your first day as space jail warden. I know that you guys had a different warden, but I'm not like him. I'm here for the fucking good of the prison, which is an oxymoron anyway.

1:01:57 The watchtower is crawling with infected, and Jacob is swinging away at most of them. A lot of them are rotting out of their prison issued uniforms. Elias spots Jacob and ushers him into an area and then hides him away from the infected hordes. Elias has gotten he and Jacob to a safe locked area, and the two can finally catch their breath. Jacob is like, what the fuck was that? And Elias is like, bruv, it doesn't matter. We have to get the fuck, I'm not going to do the accent. It doesn't matter. We have to get the fuck out of here right now. They're in a security room, but all the guards have been killed, so they're completely alone. Elias pulls a gun off of a dead guard and hands it to Jacob to use.

1:02:38 He introduces the gun wheel to you and then the upgrade system, which is like actually kind of a cool thing because the upgrade system is a 3D printer built into the walls of the prison. Nice. And you use your Callisto fucking credit bucks to pay for upgrades. It's also like, to your point, I have done another space game where a boy was very excited about a 3D printer. Yeah. 3D printers are clearly the future. While Jacob's dicking around with his 3D printer, Elias is dicking around with the security, and they're looking for the best route of escape. Jacob catches back up, and then Elias explains that they need to be able to get a ship that Jacob can fly to get them out of here. Jacob is like, I will fly fucking anything.

1:03:20 I'll figure it out, okay? Just get me something with wheels. To get a ship, they need someone with hacker skills because all the ships are actually floating in orbit around the moon. There's nothing like on the ground. They have to be able to pull a ship down from the space parking lot. Which is kind of cool. Like the docks? So he's like, all right, I need to find a hacker going through the files. There's one hacker here that I know can pull it off better than anyone else. So we need to get that person. The only thing you're not going to like is that they are in the shoe, which is the most maximum security part of the prison. Yeah. It's hard to get in and it's hard to get out.

1:04:02 For a reason. Yeah. And again, Elias knows everything about this prison because he said he had nothing but time. And this hacker was so dangerous, they put them in the shoe. Yeah. They're a hacker. So, you know, I can get the ship fucking parked. Yeah. They can valet the fucking boats and shit. All right. So Elias is going to stay here and open doors and navigate Jacob through because Elias actually knows how to uncode the security doors while Jacob doesn't. So it's a way to separate them. Well, as he said a thousand times, he's been here a long time. Yeah. That's kind of his whole deal. Naturally, Jacob starts his descent, and then he runs into even more infected and varying levels of mutation.

1:04:44 Some of these motherfuckers are starting to get bigger. Some of these motherfuckers weren't even inmates. Some of these motherfuckers are still in their security uniforms. Oh, shit. So it's not just the prisoners. And then Jacob is talking to Elias and he's like, look, it looks like they can infect any human or whatever's happening because it's not just the prisoners. Like, I'm seeing dudes a little like cops. Well, yeah, because I mean, my initial thing was like, OK, so they were experimenting on prisoners that got out. And now it's like affecting things. But no, there's security guards also. Yeah. This is something else entirely. I clocked that same thing. I was like, OK, so it's not in like the food. Yeah. It's not in like their clothes.

1:05:25 It's here where we also start to see bulbous, infected pores through the map. There's these like it's very less of it. It's very Xerxes and stray. OK, there's kind of just these bulbous blisters growing into the walls. Got it. It's fucking gross. But Jacob can stomp them out, and that is very satisfying. Oh, good. I've definitely been like, I don't want to move on from this section yet, so I'm just going to stop shit and see if I unlock something. I didn't. Jacob is also very quickly confronted by a form of infected that throw acid balls at you. Acid balls. It gets so gnarly. A lot of these are cliches of like video game bad guys, but an acid ball is always a big fuck you.

1:06:09 Oh, it's great. Between these and searching corpses of guards to get the right kind of clearance, it's messy as fuck as we make our way to the shoe. By the way, when Jacob finds security guards, Elias has him shiv the guard's core device out of his neck to get Jacob the right security access levels, which is kind of what we talked about. It's really gross. Yeah, but still. But I appreciate that they take what is typically a very straightforward game device, like get the security guard off this corpse, and they make it as gory as fucking possible with shivving something out of the neck. Out of the neck. Yeah, in Fort Solace, it was pick up a card. Right. It is the same size as a credit card.

1:06:49 It's fine. And that's all you need. With this one, they're like, you have to cut it out. It's a saw trap. Right. Through this and some other findables in the world, you can hear some of the security guard chatter from when the prison started going to shit. It includes Warden Cole staying calm through others' panic and he's saying he's watching it all go down from his tower. When one security officer asks him what's happening, Warden Cole responds, the end of a long journey. And that's the end of that piece of audio. It just fucking cuts after he says that. On the road, while Jacob makes his way through the laundry area, he sees an elevator just fly by, completely unhinged and untethered, which feels like the most classic elevator scare moment in any game.

1:07:35 Yeah. Speaking of scares, down here is where you can run into the first secret room. This room is totally optional, but it is interesting. It's a large conference room with tables set up for meetings. On the wall, there are what's possibly the most heavy-handed thing I've seen in a game, big red flags. Literally red flags, which I know is an aesthetic choice. Red is a beautiful color, and against this very dark backdrop, it makes this morbid yet secretive kind of group. It's a literal red flag, though. And the color pops. Oh yeah, and it has a big gold symbol on them.

1:08:16 There's one interesting thing you can find, an audio log from Warden Cole. He says that the tower renovations are almost complete and that the program has been reactivated under the watch of Dr. Moller. Now, Dr. Moller is the same doctor who put the core device in Jacob. Oh. In the audio log, someone asks what Warden Cole wants to achieve. And Warden Cole says, Evolution doesn't happen in a lab. It happens in the wild. I mean, that's true. But it's also now, it's like, okay, yep, so they were experimenting.

1:08:56 Yeah. Laura confirmed. Pass that area through the medical bay, Jacob finds an audio log of someone in the medical ward treating an outbreak of something violent that they cannot contain and that they need to find Dr. Moller. This bitch, she's up to some shit. A little further down, and Jacob finds a GRP glove of his own. So now you get my favorite fucking thing where you can move everything, including boxes and baddies. Nice. Some baddies. Not everyone you can pick up and throw, but it's a good idea. Picking up a motherfucker and throwing him into spikes or into the darkness or into the nothingness is fun to do and fun to watch and very good gameplay, and I appreciated it.

1:09:44 I'm glad. More files show prisoners who appear to actively be mutating and security trying to subdue them and that not going well. It's a bummer. In a section of one wing, there's bodies of security officers torn in half, hanging by their entrails. They've been here long enough that flies have started swarming. Where are flies coming from on another fucking planet? Jesus. That's a great question. I didn't question that at all. I'm just like, hell yeah, that's what happens. That's the one thing I make sure doesn't make it. You're like, we do not need any of the flying bugs except for bees. I appreciate that bees have a lot of good qualities. I enjoy honey. I don't enjoy horse flies.

1:10:26 The elevator Jacob needs to use is busted, but Elias says he can drive it up and down for Jacob if he can just hop on, which is like, what a good guy in the chair. Elias says he's going to let him down nice and easy, which obviously means the elevator just starts freefalling as Jacob is like, hey, the brakes aren't working and I'm definitely going to die. The elevator shorts out and Elias can't control it anymore, so Jacob throws a pipe into the threading of the elevator to jam it the fuck up. This doesn't work, so Jacob ends up kicking the elevator brakes until they stop. Whatever works, I mean, God.

1:11:08 With the system shorting out, Elias tells Jacob to get through to another elevator. Deep down here, stories and stories below, the rot of the infection is getting really thick. The basement you're in is mostly storage, so there's some fun, like, maze set pieces to go through, but still, it's getting really gross. Jacob comes up to an elevator that he takes up finally to the shoe. The whole prison is like a donut with the watchtower being at the top part of the donut hole. Now, deep in the bottom of the donut, there's another hole, and that hole is the shoe. The shoe sits in the very middle of the prison, suspended by wires to float out by itself.

1:11:48 It is an in-world Alcatraz. There is no hope of sneaking out when this was operating. When Jacob is up at the right level as the shoe, he steps out and sees Elias there, waiting for him, fiddling with some security panel. Actually there, though? Yes. Nice. Not a Dead Space situation. Yeah. Elias says that with the power out, he has to do a manual override to get the gondola to run, which like how fun. I love a gondola. Yeah. So only Jacob can go into the shoe to extract the hacker. Naturally, your gondola ride is interrupted by acid hurling infected just as a nice precursor for what's to come in the shoe. You would think that it being so isolated, you wouldn't run into them.

1:12:34 No, they're everywhere. That's the whole thing. The shoe is immediately completely blacked out and on lockdown. So Jacob has to get the power started. Don't say it. Because it's just a dance of moving fuses and flipping switches. But there's always a goddamn generator. No, it's not in this case. It's just flipping switches. Anyway, as you're turning it on, waves and waves of infected are flooding you while the power is being restored. Huge gears and machinery clank on and give away your location. So everyone just rolls up on you. It's gnarly. It's very fun. With the power on, Elias tells Jacob, would you kindly get to the control room so we can access the cell?

1:13:20 Take a shot. There's a lot of killing as Jacob gets through the shoe to the control room to access the right cell. He pulls up the hacker cell and Elias is like, perfect. I'll be right there. Jacob cautiously opens the cell and doesn't immediately see anyone in there. He's like, is this the right one? Because I opened the one you told me to and no one's fucking here. And then Jacob is jumped by the hacker inmate who was hiding in the corner. Nice to see you again, Dani. Dani knocks Jacob on his fucking ass long enough for her to maneuver out of the cell and lock the door on her way out, trapping Jacob in her shoe cell.

1:14:01 I'm sorry. So she has been here for 15 minutes. Yes. And got thrown into the most maximum security prison available. She's a wanted terrorist. It's true. She's a wanted terrorist. But still, like, she must have given them some serious shit. Oh, yeah. She's mouthy. She don't give a fuck. And the fact that she was the hacker, I never saw that coming. I don't know why. You didn't know anything about her other than she's very angry and she's very small. Well, you described her as, like, being, like, anonymous earlier, so... Yeah. Jacob immediately recognizes Dani and is reasonably upset. Yeah. Elias comes in and is like, Hey, guys, see, you've met. What's going on? Why is he trapped?

1:14:41 Jacob is like, all right, first of all, fuck you. You made me release the leader of a terrorist group. The Outer Way bitch. Are you kidding me? And Elias is like, hey, get over it. She is the only person in the system that hasn't turned into a monster and has the skills to call down a ship. So everyone shut the fuck up. We're going to work together and we're going to get out of here. Yeah, that's fair. Dani says, why would I help you? Elias is like, so we can leave. What the fuck? Are you kidding me? Look around. You hack, he fly, I navigate. Get your shit together. We go. Dani is like, I'm not interested. And as she's leaving, she tells Elias not to trust Jacob.

1:15:22 She tells Elias not to trust you? Yes. And again, Jacob's like, I'm not even supposed to be here today. She leaves and then the security system kicks back on. An auto lock procedure is in place. And now Jacob's cell is completely covered by steel. So he's in a full just box with no vision. He calls out to Elias as his cell is clearly being moved. Elias is like, OK, I swear I didn't know who she was. I just went through the fucking hacking charges and figured this person can get us a plane. I also don't know what's going on with you two. What the fuck is going on there? Anyway, because of the lockdown, Elias has to leave. Otherwise, he'll get trapped in the shoe.

1:16:04 But he says he'll talk Jacob through making his way back so they can reconnect. He's like, I still got you. Just one thing, you're not going to like it. You do have to go through waste management. Anyway, after that, we can leave. He has to shashank himself out of there? Oh, bitch. Oh, no. Once his cell docks, Jacob is able to break through the door, through a poster. I'm kidding. He's able to break through the door of the cell and navigate through the guts of the shoe. It is dingy, it is dirty, and it is so gross, and of course, wildly claustrophobic and crawling just so deep with infected and security robots.

1:16:46 As Jacob gets close to leaving, Elias warns him, Oh, by the way, there is a trap that the prison built to keep people from escaping the shoe. Heads up. And Jacob is just like, copy that. Doesn't have questions about anything or asking what the trap is. I was going to say, just vague, a trap? Yeah. Now Jacob comes up on the trap that Elias warned him about, and this trap is a narrow hallway with an occasional small alcove to hide in. But the second you step foot in the hallway, two vertical cylinders of spikes come spinning and roaring up and down the hallway. What the fuck kind of security measure is this?

1:17:27 It is some like haunted house at the fair kind of shit. Wait, if this was Styrofoam, I'd be able to run through this like a child, you know? Honestly, this is a video game security measure. Exactly, bitch. I know we're playing one, but like to build one in real life is ridiculous. I appreciate how much you've bought into the reality of Black Iron Prison. You're like, this is real. It's similar also to that sequence in Galaxy Quest. Yeah, like whoever wrote this episode should be shocked. Yeah, exactly. So without any secondary question, Jacob's like, cool, this must be the trap.

1:18:08 There are infected jumping out, and the best thing in the world is to jump into the alcove, wait for it to go by, push the infected and watch them get eaten by the fucking spikes and shit. Oh, it's so fun. I mean, I'm sure it is, just still ridiculous. But it's so fun. And like people don't talk about how fun the gameplay is. Like that is a cool fucking set piece. It's a little campy, but all horror should be. Right. Without the camp, you get into this really dry horror. I like juicy horror. I like horror that has dedicated lore, but can't take itself too seriously. And this is one of these moments of glory levity that bring me joy. I apologize if that sounds like I'm waxing poetic too hard, but I really enjoy it.

1:18:50 After he gets through the trap, Jacob finds himself way the fuck deep in the guts with a window to the surface of Callisto. There's a flurry of storm raging on the ground, and the sky is completely, deeply dark. Elias tells Jacob to go to the window and describe what he sees. Together from wherever he is, the boys look out at the view together. Elias warns Jacob about the storm and that he doesn't want either to get caught up, especially with how bad the weather is. You know those space storms, real fucking bad. Elias has eyes on the hanger where Jacob could easily pilot both of them out of there. Jacob is like, oh, the hanger, I used to work out of there before I was a prisoner.

1:19:31 That was like a million years ago. And Elias is like, that was six hours ago. But he's like, I understand. I will help you get back to your old life if you work with me and pile us out of here. We have to work together, buddy. I promise you. I've just heard these promises so many times. You don't have trust issues from dating, you have trust issues from video games. Right? Elias tells Jacob he needs to get to the dome, and he looks out, there's this beautiful big dome out there. And you're like, yeah, Jacob sees it. He's like, that's far, but I got you. Elias is like, look, buddy, I know this won't be easy, but I have your back. Jacob is like, wait, no.

1:20:12 What does that mean? Why are you reassuring me right now? Yeah. Elias says, it's cool. My core in your car, I connected, so I'm going to send you files that will appear from my research and time here. And Jacob is like, why can't you just tell me? And he says, well, because you're going underground and you're going to lose comms, and you will not be able to talk to me while you're underground. Well, shit. And Jacob is like, that fucking sucks, dude. But it turns into those ghost holograms that like Warden Cole had for like prison onboarding. Elias doing his prison jobs throughout the prison and saying like, okay, looks like we can get out through here. Are we going to get more training videos? There's no more like onboarding videos.

1:20:54 It's mostly Elias being like, I think if I follow this pipe, it will lead to this next room. That kind of thing. I was thinking he's going to be watching like training videos and like in watching those, he'll see like, oh, there is a little escape route this way. Oh, here's the emergency escape route. What a nightmare to have to film and produce those for prison. Anyway, Elias is like, look, once you get through, I'll meet you at the dome. I'll have a tram. You'll be there. It'll be easy peasy. Just roll with not hearing me for a while. And Jacob is like, I have no choice. Poor Jacob. He really is just thrown into the shit. Yeah. And with that, we get into the fourth section of the game, Habitat.

1:21:35 Jacob goes down way the fuck into the depths of this area and finds himself in like the guts. There's tubes and machinery, and Jacob triggers the first hologram from Elias. In the center of the room, hologram Elias is like, well, finally transferred into waste processing. This place is a shithole. And yeah, it processes poopies. Yeah. The hologram is helpful though because it shows Elias calling out which pipes follow to get out of here. Jacob follows the pipe. It leads right into a waste tunnel. Like, he lands in a waste tunnel. It's so gross. And like the sick little freaks that they are, there's a bunch of infected down here.

1:22:15 Jacob visibly looks more upset in this section of the game than in anywhere else. I think it's the nuances that got me because like the waste starts to cake on his clothes. He's clearly upset about being there. He just looks more angry. And I appreciated that because obviously, the poop tubes are disgusting. They're crawling with infected, super bulbous, goopy fucking infected shit is on the walls. It's disgusting, and I hate it, and I feel like I could smell it smelling bad from home. I mean, that's a very good graphical representation if you feel like you could smell it. I hated it. The art in this is incredible.

1:22:56 Art should move you, and this moved me to being upset. A hologram of Elias shows the way out of waste management and into the dome. And he's like, perfect. The only way to do this is to drain the tubes, which is perfect because like ideal situation, get less tube goop. Right. Down here is Jacob makes his way to the controls of waste management. He runs into another Schofield signature move. Disembodied instructions written on the wall in blood. Oh wow, this is pretty late too though. Yeah, get your dead space sit up in. Down here, the infected have mutated, and the tentacles have started bursting from their stomachs after you attack them. Tentacles.

1:23:37 Sometimes you're fighting an infected, you don't even realize they have tentacles. Until you fight them down to a point where they should die, and then the tentacles come out and revitalize them, and they mutate into a bigger, more powerful form of infected. Round two. Holy shit. Jesus. So, as you can imagine, on the wall in blood, it says, shoot the tentacles. Thank you, mystery blood author. Jacob makes it to the control center and starts the purge cycle to make his way through the dome. And he's also relieved, which is the wrong thing to be in a horror game. Right. Because as soon as he gets the cycle moving, a spider-like mutant creature appears out of the corner of his eye.

1:24:22 It's fucking huge. It crawls around on its arms and legs. It's fast. It can go on the fucking ceiling. It can go under the fucking ground. It sucks, and I hate it, and it's a fucking great enemy. Pure horror. I balance this out with being like, yeah, this sucks. This is a difficult enemy. This is a terrifying design to being like, and that's what I enjoy about this. I need to play like Animal Crossing and just calm my fucking brain because now I'm wired for weird shit. Yeah, you sound like a Soulsborne player. After that fully realized nightmare, Jacob soldiers on and heads through the tubes to the dome. The tubes are pitch dark, and even Jacob takes a minute to be like, God, it smells so fucking bad down here.

1:25:06 I hate this. As he makes his way down, the automated voice comes on and says, Pressure check complete. Releasing gate valve. Upon realizing he mistook purge cycle for drain, the fluids are released into the tubes Jacob is now into. Oh. A flood of fluids come rushing down and sweeps Jacob off his feet. You have to use fluids, because otherwise it's a river of shit. And not to sound too on the nose, but this section plays like a video game, like an old video game, not like one of these. But Jacob is flying down broken tubes and equipment and machinery, and it has to dodge them as they come flying up at him.

1:25:51 It's like if you're doing Guitar Hero, but instead of hitting notes on the guitar, it's a guy wrongfully imprisoned, hiding from shit monsters. It looks cool, and playing it feels fun, and there's a sequence in Spider-Man 2 that also feels like that. I know you know what I'm talking about. But it's fucking great. Eventually, though, the tubes start to lead down to the end of the tubes, which means full waste management, where all the shit tubes lead to. It appears the waste management tubes feed into an endless pit of the moon, but there was a loose leaf chain that Jacob manages to grab on to before he falls into the endless pit, which is good. So it just goes into a bottomless pit of shit?

1:26:32 It's a moon. It's not even a planet. Ugh, but still. It's so gross. An infected spider monster does immediately leap onto you while you're swinging, but it's fine. Jacob climbs the loose chain all the way up to a maintenance platform, climbs on, and catches his breath because holy shit. Shortly after, there's a door right to the dome, and as Jacob opens it, he's overwhelmed with light. This being a moon, he has a full gorgeous view of Jupiter. It's almost overwhelming and gives Jacob a moment of reverence in otherwise the biggest nightmare he's ever imagined happening at him. He lets Elias know he's at the dome, and Elias is like, Oh, thank God, I assumed you died.

1:27:17 I'm so grateful. I'm nearby. See you soon. The boys decide they'll meet at the tram station, and it's not too far from where we are now. There's obviously some drama with unlocking security measures, but what's really interesting in the dome is that there's trees and plant life here. We know from other games that a chief botanist is always behind the weird shit. It's still just so jarring to see nature in a sci-fi game. So this adds some really great aesthetic dimension to an otherwise pretty singular toned horror atmosphere. So he's going to get an opportunity to walk through the park, but not take a shower. Yeah. Yes. Oh, poor guy.

1:27:58 Jacob lifts the security issues, and Elias parks his tram, waiting to pick up Jacob. The walkway to the tram is broken, so Jacob has to take this fuck-ass route to get to Elias. It does at least take you back through some of the treeline, which is, you know, a welcome surprise again in a sci-fi prison setting. Just seeing trees in space, it's good. Jacob does make it to Elias, and Elias is like, wow, you look like shit. And Jacob goes, yeah, I smell like it too, and you know why. This is your fault. The boys get some terrifying nightmare monsters chasing them, so they run off into the tram station. In the station, Elias is like, hey, sorry, heads up, we do have to go outside to get to the tram itself, so here's a spacesuit.

1:28:44 We're going on foot, buddy. Poor Jacob is like, I have one friend and I fucking hate him. As they suit up, Jacob finally has that magical prison conversation. So what are you in for? Elias is like, murder. I murdered someone. You're helping a murderer escape. Of course you are. But in my defense, it was a long time ago. I was defending myself and I was young and dumb. It was a different time. Jacob honestly is impressed. He's like, you know what? You were probably dealt a shitty hand. Shit happens. Elias goes, no, no, no. I have to take responsibility. That was on me.

1:29:25 You can't outrun your past, Jacob. Uh-oh. Jacob. Oh, no. Jacob looks at Elias and nods. As he leaves frame, we see Captain Ferris standing on the other side of the airlock. Captain Ferris? He's not dead and he's not looking good. Oh, shit. Did he use his glove to make himself float? I don't think they can go that far into the depths of the moon. Yeah. He screams through the door that there's always a price to pay. His voice is guttural and his skin is pale, showing big dark veins pulsing across his body. Ferris hits the airlock and the door swings open with Elias and Jacob flying out into the storm.

1:30:08 Oh, shit. Jacob lets go and falls into the snow, and we start section five, lost. Jacob is surrounded by storm on the surface of Callisto, and his helmet starts to malfunction. It's unable to seal, and he starts choking on lack of air. He ends up punching his helmet, and it doesn't work, so he takes out his shiv and starts blindly stabbing the top of his helmet to get the airlock to seal over his face, and somehow this works. Well, good, but still, I didn't think hitting it was going to make it work. It's kind of like you hit the side of the TV when it didn't work back in the 90s. But when you're fucking with an airlocked helmet that will protect you from space air, I don't know, look for a button.

1:30:52 Yeah. Jacob gets his bearings and starts calling out for Elias, but he hears nothing, because, you know, you're in space. It's dark, except for the minimal lighting from the prison compound lighting the way. Jacob has no choice but to trudge ahead in the snow. Through the desolate snow, some of the silence is broken when snowmen break free and are secretly mutant, infected fucks waiting to strike. I was going to say, I'm sorry, did you say snowmen start attacking you? It's the scene in the office where all the snowmen. So it's not Frosty the Snowman. Obviously. I was using some flowery language. It is, guys, frozen in place on the surface.

1:31:33 Oh, shit. So you walk by and some are truly dead and some are not. And honestly, this was such a great fucking set piece for some to not be dead and some to be dead. Yeah. Because then you end up hitting everyone. The paranoia is real. You see a line of them and you're like, fuck my life. It's that exact moment in the office where he's hitting all the snowmen. It's so fucking good. I really enjoyed this. I think this was such a clever set piece. And you can fully understand the fear. Yeah. You're like, there's some of these will try to kill me. I know that for a fact, I don't know which ones though. Oh, it's so good. Jacob finally hears from Elias, who probably just regained consciousness after toppling out. He tells Jacob his suits running out of power and he needs help.

1:32:16 Jacob is like, I need you to activate your emergency beacon so I can run straight for you. And then Jacob is like, I'm coming, buddy. Jacob finds Elias just outside of a gate with his beacon going off. Elias' face mask is broken and we're in space and he was concussed from flying out of an airlock. Oh no. So he's real fucked up. Jacob picks up Elias and starts walking him to cover and Elias slumps limp in his arms. Elias eventually is like, nah, bruv, and falls to the ground. Shit. He thanks Jacob and says, because of you, I got out. Jacob holds Elias in his final moments as the storm seeps under his skin and twists his organs until his body stops working.

1:33:00 Jacob says, I'll see you on the other side, buddy. This was one of the biggest shocks that Elias wasn't trying to kill me. Yeah. I'm not going to lie. I was like, oh, it's a buyer shock. He's in my ear. He's telling me what to do. He's like fully guiding this experience. No, he was genuine the entire time. Shit. It really does kind of remind me of Dead Space. There was the one character that I kept going back and forth on whether they were good or bad, and they ended up fucking dying. And I was like, oh, I guess I don't have to worry about that anymore. Yeah, because the other girl's like, I don't trust him. He's just like, I just want to get off the fucking ship. And then he dies. And you're like, oh, his intentions don't matter now.

1:33:40 No, it didn't. And same with Elias. Yeah. Behind Jacob, a vehicle comes nearby and parks just a few feet away from him. Jacob pulls a gun to get ready for a fight, and out comes Dani in a space suit. Of course it's her. She's alone, and she walks to Jacob and Elias, sees Elias and says, I told him not to trust you. Oh my god. Kind of a fucked up thing to say. Damn, just immediately blames you for his death. She saw the emergency beacon and pulled over to see what was going on. Dani goes over to Elias' body and pulls out his core. She says he knew Black Iron like the back of his hand, and now she does too.

1:34:24 She pulled the core to get all of his intel because the core holds all of your memories, all of your bearings, everything. Of course it does. And you can upload it to your core so you can like backdate all of your data with their data and then you know everything that went on in their head. Jacob is like, oh my god, he's not even fucking cold. He just died. This is his final resting place. And she's like, yep, but now I know where the doors are. Yeah, and he's out in the snow. He's probably cold. Dani heads back into her vehicle and Jacob is like, okay, but wait, what the fuck? Dani turns, gun pointed at Jacob. He says, look, I'm a pilot. You need me to get off the planet. And she says, well, the hangar's that way.

1:35:06 Better start walking. She closes the door of her vehicle and she just fucks off. As she drives off, Jacob goes, oh, come on. So basically she's like, well, I'll meet you fucking there then. I'm not hanging out with you though. She's like, good luck, dick. Now fully alone, Jacob's like, okay, I guess I'm going to go to the hangar and maybe meet her there. I don't know. Here in one of those weirdest fuck areas, Jacob finds evidence that there were teams prior to the prison who were terraforming Callisto. Terraforming means going off planet and making it habitable for humans, which is probably why there was a botanical garden and kind of like other shit and labs buried deep in the prison.

1:35:48 This was a terraforming colony. And specifically botanical gardens because when you're terraforming, you focus on botany to make sure that there are ways to harvest crops, ways to generate appropriate oxygen for humans. That's really like a good starting point. Yeah, fun fact about terraforming, not a scientific term. Really? Yep, it was invented for fiction. It's a sci-fi term? It's a sci-fi term, yeah. They have adopted it to being a scientific term at this point. So NASA was like, that was good. Yeah, but it was never coined by the scientific community. It was coined by fiction writer. I love that. So anyway, we're like, well, that's interesting that that closed down.

1:36:29 Why is it a prison now? Is it for space taxes? You don't know. Anyway, Jacob navigates the abandoned terraforming stations on the surface of Callisto. Because this encampment has been abandoned for a while, the moon took it over, and it's largely snowed through and frozen. Hidden in the frost are so many infected. It's great. The storm is cruel, and so are the surface conditions that Jacob is navigating on his way to the hangar. There's one great set piece where you're swarmed by infected while a non-infected employee is behind a wall begging you for help. And the entire time, no matter what you do, you cannot help him before he's eaten by a scary thing.

1:37:10 It's very half-life. Yeah, he's like, Help me, help me, man. You need to open the door. And then by the time you get through enough infected to help, it's too late. It's good. Through a voice memo, we see that Dr. Mahler, you know, the prison doctor, was down here working on the terraforming team. She found some matter that would spontaneously combust and is like, Interesting. What can we do with this? Is this something? Is this terraforming? Am I terraforming it? Here in the terraforming campus, there's infected that crawl around and explode in acid, which is disgusting and very cool. Jacob makes his way through the hangar and actually runs back into Dani.

1:37:52 So she took the fast way, but still got to the same place as Jacob, thank God. She's able to pop into his core so they can connect with each other and stay in communication. When they run into each other, Jacob's like, hey, you left me for dead, and that was fucking rude. And Dani is like, well, you tried to kill me on your ship, and I thought that was fucking rude, so we're even. Jacob shrugs that off and is like, look, we don't need to be friends, but we do need each other to get out of here, so we have to work together. Elias was right. Yeah. Dani is like, you know what? Fine, okay, you go to the controls and do some space shit. I'm going to work on fixing some shit, and that'll get us to the hangar. So we should split up for the game's sake.

1:38:34 We should split up. Jacob is like, you know what? Can I trust you? Like, are you just going to fucking leave me here again? And Dani hands him a gun and says to watch yourself, which, you know, someone hands you a gun, they at least trust you enough to not immediately shoot them. Right. So Jacob fucks off to go find the controls and open up the gates to get to the hangar, and Dani stays behind to fix some equipment to get them out of here. Win-win. They do their little prison escape chores and meet back up. Dani has her snow vehicle up and running again, and Jacob opened the doors, so we hop in. And in the vehicle, on the way to the hangar, Jacob tries to make some conversation with Dani, but she tells him not to fucking talk to her.

1:39:16 Jacob is like, you know what? What's your fucking problem? Dani says, it doesn't matter. We're almost there, which is not an answer. Right. Dani is hauling ass, and Jacob is like, hey, I can see the hanger and it's the other way. Where are you taking me, space bitch? She's like, hold up, I'll be right back. The best thing to say in a horror game. Jacob looks around and realizes they're at the crash site of his ship. We're back to where it all began, baby. When Jacob sees his ship, he jumps out and follows Dani. He asks her why we're here, and she says, I gotta see it with my own eyes. And then she sprints unnaturally fucking fast to the ship.

1:39:56 Like, it's just a follow part, but they programmed her to haul ass so fucking fast. She's deadass sprinting Usain Bolt style up through space. It's amazing. Gravity's different here. Even though this happened recently, the ship is already starting to freeze over on the surface. Jacob walks through his former livelihood and sees Dani breaking open a storage container. It's one of the secret shipments between Callisto and Europa from the UJC. He's like, hey, can you not? What the fuck? Dani goes, what's in it? Jacob looks at the branding and says, well, the box says medical supplies, so I bet medical supplies.

1:40:38 Dani calls bullshit and demands Jacob open up the box. As he does, the box opens, and Dani's face frowns heavily. She sees regular, schmegular ass medical equipment and is immediately angry. It was exactly what it said it was going to be. Yeah, she says, no, no, no, the manifest says you made several drops before the incident. I know you're involved. Jacob says he had nothing to do with what happened on Europa. Dani's upset, but she's like, you know what? Whatever, we have to get out of here. Jacob, get your shit together. I need you to fly us. And Jacob's like, yeah, I'm fine with that. Can we go now? This is weird. That was my plan. Yeah, Dani is like, I invented this idea.

1:41:19 They head down to the hangar, and Jacob asks what Dani thought she was going to find. And she tells him she was expecting a bioweapon being built by the same corporation who runs the prison. She traced what happened on Europa to this bioweapon, and to this prison, and to Jacob. She boarded Jacob's ship to intercept the bioweapon and prevent other areas from what happened on Europa. Whatever it is, it killed all of those people. On the way, Jacob asks Dani why she cut Elias' corps out. She was like, look, I'm in a hurry. I need as much information as possible, especially when it gets to coming out of here, and that dude would not shut the fuck up about knowing everything about the prison.

1:42:00 Dani gets behind the controls of a panel and has a ship in mind that's parked in orbit. She starts calling it down to the hangar so they can get the fuck out of here. Through the hangar, they see even more bodies, and Dani figures they're covering something up here. She's not paranoid, you're paranoid. The ship starts to land, and Dani and Jacob go out to board it on the hangar platform. Jacob is like, man, you're super chill. You're not even phased by this shit, Dani. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. Dani's like, yeah, I saw something like this on Europa. Jacob is like, I saw that on the news, and the news said you were responsible for it and that you're like a crazy terrorist. She goes, hey, have you ever heard of propaganda?

1:42:41 Like the concept of propaganda? Things are not always what they seem. Anyway, it seems like the ship is coming down and Jacob is like, fuck yeah, there's the ship. I could absolutely fly that. Let's get the fuck out of here. Dani says the ship needs two minutes to dock and then we're golden. And then the ship stops descending. Oh shit. A hologram of Warden Cole comes on and he starts pontificating about how one must learn to accept what they cannot control. He says he's impressed the two of you came this far. He says he's got too much at stake here and the protocol cannot be broken. And as he says this, a cannon from the hangar pops up and is aimed at the ship.

1:43:25 Damn it. He says to them, your story ends here, but please know you have my respect. The cannons fire and their escape ship is destroyed. The ship being on its way to land comes crashing down violently on the hangar, completely obliterating it. Oh shit. It obliterates it and the last chance Dani and Jacob had at leaving Callisto. As the hangar collapses, we see that Dani has grabbed something to hang on to, but Jacob flies and free falls down through space and the darkness of the prison. As this part of the compound collapses into the depths of the moon, Jacob free falls through debris and damage.

1:44:09 This is similar to that earlier pipe scene, but bigger and through like fucking prison space where Jacob has to navigate sliding down through this destroyed hangar and like stories and stories deep into the prison. So even in repeating a mechanic, they still like it original to that moment. They made it bigger. They made it more violent. They made the stakes higher than like, oh, he can knock his head in a pole to like, oh, he's gonna get crushed by rubble. It's so fucking fun. The escalation's good then. I love the escalation on this. Awesome. Jacob manages to hang on to some scaffolding and gets into a structure and passes out reasonably. In his dreams, Jacob wakes up on Europa.

1:44:51 He sees bodies on the ground, mutated like the infected he's been seeing in Black Iron Prison. In his dream, he sees Dani. She's standing over a small glowing purple box. She's facing the box away from Jacob. As Jacob walks to Dani, she turns, and all we see is Matt's mangled dead face. And here we start the section below. After that fun fucking moment, Jacob is woken up to the sound of Dani in his comms yelling for him. Jacob opens his eyes, and Dani isn't far, and she's telling him to stand up. They have to get out of here. Wherever they are, it's actively collapsing. They run through rubble, and Dani is furiously messing with some controls and security panels and shit.

1:45:35 Jacob takes a second to take his helmet off and catch his breath. Dani is concerned and says they're on Arcus, and she looks terrified. Jacob is like, what is Arcus? Dani explains Arcus was the original colony here, the one that the prison was built on top of after it was abandoned. Dani finds a map and routes away through the colony and back into Black Iron. Jacob is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, no more Black Iron. Bad shit happens there. We're not going. She says, it's not about escape anymore. The hangar is fucking gone. We can still expose the truth. Why did the warden just shoot down one of his ships and destroy his hangar?

1:46:19 What happened for real at Europa? It's all connected, man. Jacob is like, look, this was my last day of work before retirement. Of course it was. Is he a fucking cop in an 80s movie? With a bum ticker? Dani has one brief moment of sympathy and goes, look, I get it. But it is what it is now. They have a moment together, they rally, and then they head deep into the colony. They hear the hangar continue to collapse stories above while they make their way through. To get them separated for game purposes, the colony structure begins to collapse, leaving Jacob on one side and Dani on the other.

1:47:01 They'll have to make their way up and back to each other eventually. It's quite quiet down here at least, which is nice. They get to a point where they almost reconnect, but again, the colony collapses more. Jacob falls deeper into the colony, and I mean that like literally he's hanging off of a surface. Dani tries to pull him up and can't lift him up all the way, so he just free falls into the colony. Oh damn. Jacob wakes up in an irregular way. This dude gets knocked out too many times. Yeah, he's fully concussed. But when he wakes up here, he is upside down hanging by his feet. He opens his eyes and sees something unfortunately familiar, the infection rot.

1:47:43 It's on the floors. It's coating the walls. It's on the ceiling. It's all he can see. He is in the middle of it. Through a pillar of infected spores and rot, a mutant breaks off of a clump of fucking pus and walks by Jacob. Oh. These have mutated and rotted through their entire body so thick that they are blinded and moving away that shows they have some like echolocation abilities, which is giving some serious Last of Us vibes. Entirely. Just coming out of the wall, I was thinking Last of Us, but then you said blind and echolocation. Some people just call them clickers. Yeah. Once this clicker goes by, Jacob cuts himself down and finds himself with more infected, clearly suffering from something similar to Black Iron.

1:48:31 These for sure used to be real people. In some audio logs, Jacob can hear about how the prison came on this land about 75 years after it was abandoned. It really shows in the infected. They are huge. They're nearly rotted straight to the bone. When the prison came in and the terraformers came in, they discovered these infected in the colony. They had been down in the dark just rotting for years, and they were not happy about it. And when they first kind of met them after starting to build a prison, Dr. Mahler was the first person alerted during the first contact with this set of infected. Jacob finds a transport hub that should get him backed up to the part of the colony that Dani was navigating to.

1:49:15 He's hoping he can catch back up with her. He just needs to do one quick thing that Tom loves doing in video games. Oh, no. Is there a goddamn generator? And there's a goddamn generator. There's always a goddamn generator. On your generator fetch quest, there is the possibility to find another secret room. This is the second one, similar to that first one we saw, which means it's a conference room with big ass red flags. There's an audio log in this room from Yannick Sage, an administrator from the Arcus colony. He says that Paramo was the sign that pointed the way, and the proof is here on Callisto. And now PUBG fans will recognize Paramo as a PUBG map.

1:49:59 Oh. He says we have to dig deeper. We have to find the source. That's his deal. It's not what Jacob's about, so let's get back on track and get out of here. Yeah. When Jacob gets the power back on to get through the transport, he gets a message from Dani. She's like, please let that be you. The power just came on here, and if it's not you, I'm really fucked. But if it is you, I feel better. She said that with the power on, she was able to boost the comm signal, so that's why Jacob can hear her. Jacob's like, I'm here. It's me. Don't worry. I'm surrounded by infected, so I can't talk right now, but I'm heading back up to base colony, and I will ping you when I'm there. It's very like, can't talk right now.

1:50:40 I'm doing hot girl shit. Jacob gets back up to the transport hub and gets it up and running. And as he revs her up, the sound attracts and awakens a lot of infected. Jacob's on this platform, and more and more infected crawl onto the battleground and come at him. And this is where, this is the first place I got stuck in the game, if you remember that. I do remember you getting stuck here. I was losing my mind on this fucking platform. And this is where we get our first mini boss, and his name is Two Head. Two Head is exactly what he sounds like and then some. He is two infected mutated bodies fused together through rot and infection to make one Rat King monster of an infected lunatic.

1:51:25 I'm so glad you said Rat King. I was like, oh, okay, the Rat King. Yeah, he fucking sucks. I spent an embarrassingly long time on this fight, just managing the waves of infected before Two Head came in. And that really kicked the shit out of me. I just remember hearing you go, give me some fucking ammo. Just screaming for ammo downstairs. Fuck Two Head. In many Schofield games, there are functions to stomp a motherfucker out, like I mentioned that is here. And in this game, I stomped this motherfucker out for so long, the game was like, you have to move on. The game was like alerting me like, hey, get the fuck off the platform and stop stomping him. I hate Two Head.

1:52:05 Fuck Two Head. And you know what? Fuck being down here. We're going to start section seven called Colony. Once you land on the Colony's transport hub, Jacob and Dani make plans to meet up at the old Colony area. Jacob starts in a service tunnel and does get to explore these little tiny towns in the colonies. You know, the ones that were abandoned 75 years ago. There's a lot of miners working on terraforming the area way back when, and some mention working overtime for the UJC, the same corporation who would later run Black Iron Prison. And these little tiny towns in the miners live in, they're kind of like the stacks in Ready Player One. They're like shipping containers that were like stacked on top of each other to make tiny homes.

1:52:49 The former residents of this tiny town were not tiny. They're fucking gigantic now, and they're rotted through their mutation, so it's a whole ass thing. Oh damn. It's gross and it's awesome. Jacob unlocks his way through security to get reconnected with Dani. Dani's really excited to reconnect because she said she found something, but of course she won't specify what. There's another audio log here from our friend Yannick Sage, that Arcus administrator who's in the secret fucking room. He said, I had no choice. I couldn't let it spread. They were all disposable. But what I found could be the key to everything. I must contact The Circle. It's just vague enough, but you're like, they were all disposable.

1:53:32 Oh, it's so Icky. Because you know they're talking about prisoners. Yeah, they're talking about the people that got mutated. And at this point, these aren't prisoners. These are just miners. That's right. Jacob drops in on Dani while she has her net core device connected to the core of a corpse down here. Jacob calls out to her, but she's in a trance. So he goes to Dani and yanks out the cord. Dani's eyes were white, and she gasped for air now that she's disconnected. She yells, I won't go. You can't make me. And then she throws Jacob up at a wall. She's screaming, You killed them all. Jacob respectfully shoves her, and then the building starts to collapse. It's a bunch of rotting storage units, so like go figure.

1:54:15 They both tumble and topple, and Jacob gets knocked out, which I think is what, the fourth or fifth time he gets his ass knocked the fuck out? Yeah, easily. When Jacob wakes up, he rolls over and comes up on a scene of people who had died in the colony, rotting where they stood, frozen forever in their last moments of their lives. Dani runs up to one corpse on the ground and says, No, I'm sorry. I tried to protect you. Jacob tries to comfort her because everyone needs to get their shit together, and Dani screams, Get away from me. That knocks her back into reality, or out of her concussion, it's unclear. And she's like, Oh shit, my bad. I'm good. I'm fine.

1:54:56 And Jacob goes, Are you sure? Because you do not seem okay. You don't sound fine. Dani says, I plugged in and I was seeing their memories. She says, 75 years ago when this colony was abandoned, there was an outbreak, just like how it's happening upstairs at Black Iron Prison. To contain it, they killed everyone. She says, it's a pattern. Arcus, Black Iron, Europa. These outbreaks and then death suppression, it's all connected. Just as Dani is present and coherent and lucid, a two-head comes up, grabs her, throws her 12 feet at a steel wall, and then starts coming for Jacob. Another two-head, though. I fucking hated it so goddamn much.

1:55:38 I was like, this was like the good, like what, two third point boss. Fuck my life. And now they're like, and now it's a mini boss. Fuck you. It's just gonna show up. But also, just through a cynical lens, this would be very funny for Dani to be like, I'm fucking figuring it out. And then to get all sense knocked out for immediately after. Just get tossed. Fully. Naturally, this fight attracts more and more infected to come out and join the battle as well. So just like, truly fuck you, two-head. I hate you, two-head. Fuck you, two-head. All my homies hate two-head. Facts. Once the battle is over, Jacob rushes to check up on Dani. Dani's like, I'm fine, he just got the drop on me.

1:56:18 And she is such a fucking trooper for this shit, to be real. Because Dani mentally linked with that body that she found through the core devices, she knows a way up to the surface through the colony now. And because she is tasked with impossible knowledge, she is deeply depressed. Dani feels like she's being two people at once, and they're not always going to be as charismatic as Johnny Silverhand. I was going to say, she got Johnny Silverhanded? A little, yeah. Oh, no. Dani sadly leads Jacob through more of the rusted, claustrophobic colony until a rotting walkway separates them. Jacob falls several stories for the fourth, fifth time and has to work his way back to reuniting with depressed ass Dani.

1:57:03 They reconnect, they get to an area with a huge dome. It's probably three or four stories high, super wide, and it's glowing. You can't see in, but there's something happening in there for sure. So like, let's fucking cruise up. Dani says, from the memories of the miners, this whole dome thing, this used to be a mine shaft up to the surface. Why would this be new? They closed this all 75 years ago and like sealed it. This whole area was fucking abandoned. Why would they cover it with a dome? Jacob's like, I don't know, let's just get the fuck in there. And he runs inside. As they walk in, they're greeted by a hologram of Dr. Mahler.

1:57:43 She says she's excited to show you her findings, and it's a culmination of decades of research. Jacob says, who is this fucking for? What's the audience here? I was actually going to ask you the same thing. Like, was this a live hologram or was this just... This is a pre-recorded hologram. A pre-recorded hologram, another welcome video. Yeah, so we are established, to your point, there are orientation videos that are pre-recorded and are triggered when you walk through a certain area or just like when there's bodies in a certain room. And then there are some live ones, like Warden Cole being like, ha ha, fuck you too, I'm going to blow up the hangar. Yeah, exactly, that's why I was asking. Certainly, this one is pre-recorded. Dani is like, I'm going to sit here and download as much information as I can, and I'll meet you further in the dome later.

1:58:26 Have fun walking in the Lore Garden. And that's exactly what it is. The Lore Garden. Jacob enters the dome and it's a laboratory. There are test plants and mutation formations in these huge tubes of stasis. Dr. Mahler's hologram continues that it all began with a distress call on Callisto. There was a mysterious contagion spreading. She believed it was a form of accelerated evolution similar to what they saw on Paramo. Again, that PUBG map that we heard about earlier. It was talked about by the Secret Society. She says that if they could understand the disease more, they could re-engineer it to unlock the secret of the Paramo effect.

1:59:09 After the site was secured, a lab was constructed. Then a prison built surrounding the lab. A research base with a readily available pool of test subjects. And here we move from dead space to Outlast. It's a goddamn corporate prison using prisoners to test crazy shit on. No way. I never would have guessed that. We don't get a lot of things that are rooted in Outlast because people are like, I'm not touching that shit. But if it's horror, that's too dark. But Callisto Protocol was like, honestly, great idea. Towards the back of the lore museum, Dr. Mahler says that after decades of searching, the prize is finally within our grasp.

1:59:54 The source? Where it all began. A bold new chapter for our project. Vir, Sola Terrace. At the end of the museum, there's a staircase that goes down through a rock tunnel. Jacob goes down the staircase and looks up. And up and up and up, because here he stands at the base of a 50 foot monster that looks like teeth wearing a hat. Monster. It's got rows and rows and rows of rotting sharp teeth, multiple glazed over eyes and burnt skin that's rotting across itself. And now in a meta moment, I'm gonna show it to you because I would love your take on it.

2:00:35 I have the same reaction. The screen grab Andrea's showing me right now has a caption from him saying, my God, what is that? And that's about best I can say. It looks like a giant potato with teeth and eyes. Yeah, like a rotting potato if you've left it in the cabinet too long and like the spores start to come out. Yeah. I see that. Anyway, it's 50 feet tall. Yeah, oh fuck. So to that point, Jacob goes, my God, what is that? And hologram Dr. Mahler rejoins us. She says, an alien life form released by the miners when they broke through to Callisto's subsurface ocean. That water we were talking about at the beginning. Yeah. It was dead by the time we arrived, killed by security forces.

2:01:18 But inside the carcass, they found thousands of larvae. She says their primary disease vectors for the biophage pathogen. They collected specimen and transported them to their central lab on Europa. Jacob finds some of the exact storage units he moved for the UJC from Callisto to Europa so many times before. It's packaged as medical equipment. Dr. Mahler continues that the pathogen acted as an evolutionary accelerant, mutating the colonists into little more than mindless brutes, which is kind of what we're seeing. These dudes are just crazy violent and swinging at everything.

2:01:59 Right. Except for one, she continues, so-called Subject Zero. Somehow, Subject Zero was able to reap the benefits of the contagion, greater strength, endurance, longevity, that agility that we talked about, while persevering their intelligence and humanity, which feels like a tongue-in-cheek thing to say humanity. Right. As Dr. Mahler continues, Jacob notices a trick latch on the side of the storage unit, just like every storage unit he has moved from Callisto to Europa. The case of what he thought was all medical equipment pops up, and that reveals a hidden section under a false top, and that section is holding tubes of preserved larva from the alien.

2:02:46 Oh, damn. Jacob has been transporting the larva for the UJC with their intention being unleashing it on people to further their study on evolution. What the fuck? So just like fuck an entire planet over. Yeah, and that's what happened on Europa. It was released to the population on Europa, and they had to kill everyone in that area because no one was triggered like subject zero. They all just turned into mindless brutes, so they're like, that was a waste. Kill them. And that's what's happening now at Black Iron. Dr. Mahler says that subject zero was killed by security forces during the outbreak, but his body was transported back to the Black Iron Lab, forming the bias of the original research program.

2:03:32 Jacob is having a fucking meltdown, realizing he truly is directly responsible for the deaths and destruction on Europa. Yeah. That Dani was fucking right. He was completely complicit in moving a biohazardous chemical weapon and killing so many people when he thought he was just a fucking postmate. He's the fucking terrorist. And while he's having this horrible moment, he's interrupted by fucking Ferris. God damn Ferris. I still need to know how he survived that fucking fall. Ferris yells, 5-2-1 at Jacob. He says, you and me got unfinished business.

2:04:13 And I will address how he survives because Ferris does not look like himself or Sam Witwer anymore. His skin has rotted off like Deadpool, but he looks buffer and taller. His veins are popping off his body and are deep and dark against his gray skin. He is evolving with the biophage. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Somehow Ferris became the next prodigy. So he's the new subject Zero. Yep. Jacob shoots at Ferris and Ferris is completely unbothered by this. He says, as you can see, things have changed. Dani is in your ear saying she found the surface access door and she's going to work on getting through to it.

2:04:56 She has to do her hacker magic, so she's not involved. Right. Now you fight a souped up, infected and mutated Ferris who is truly at the peak of evolution of mankind. It's fucking sucks and I loved it. He's lost his hair and his temper. The battleground here is tight and it's relentless and it's gnarly and I loved it. This was a fucking great boss battle. Oh, good. Instead of beating him, Dani actually gives you an out and you take it. She has an elevator and she's like, Jacob, get the fuck in here, we're leaving. Ferris says, no one escapes me, no one. And as he says this, Jacob escapes him. The elevator door closes and Ferris looks on at you through that fucking panel and he's like, I can't get through, god damn it.

2:05:43 But then he looks past Jacob and says, looks like it's too late. Jacob turns around in the elevator to see one of those little crab worm guys sucking Dani's face off. She's on her back screaming and kicking and can't get it off of her. Jacob runs over and peels it off her face and throws it across the room. Ferris says, she was just trying to help you and now she's gonna be one of us. What? The elevator starts moving and Dani says, she's fine. They'll just have to keep moving. They make it to a platform that Dani says will take them up to the surface. And as they board this platform and Jacob starts getting it moving, Dani collapses.

2:06:27 She turns and she is infected. The biophage pumping through her blood is making her skin pale, her veins dark and her eyes sunken. Damn it, Dani. Jacob props her up and tells her she's gonna be okay. Dani tells herself, this isn't fair. She says, I promised I would stop this. I can't turn into one of those things. Dani reaches for her firearm and Jacob snatches it out of her hands. He says, no, we're not doing that. We're gonna fix this. And Dani reasonably says, how? Jacob says, we stick to the plan. We go to the warden's tower. We find an antidote. Dani says, you don't know that there is an antidote.

2:07:09 You don't know if we can reverse this. Jacob admits, you're right, I don't, but I'm not gonna fucking give up now. This isn't the point where I say, all right, kill me, Ferris. He promises, they're gonna finish this thing together. What's left of decaying Dani agrees and gets up to complete the mission. The platform arrives and nothing in Dani's memory base knows where they are. You can find an audio file here of Warden Cole calling, what happened on Europa, a revelation. He's just really excited to report to his eternal life cult that they could potentially evolve into these mutant infected things if they stop beefing the test subjects.

2:07:49 Sucks. The walls do say Black Iron, so they know that they made it out of the colony and they're back, at least on the surface near the prison. Yeah. Dani sees a control panel and runs to it while Jacob looks for a way to get out of here. Dani sees the shoe completely crawling in infection. She's like, well, the warden's signal is in the tower, so we should go there. That's probably where the shit is. Let's do that. Dani opens the door from her panel, and as she does, Jacob is grabbed by a security robot. The robot says, inmates, return to your cell, as it holds him still and punches him hard in the face. Oh.

2:08:30 As Jacob falls, we see another security robot in the background doing the exact same thing to Dani. And so begins the last section of the game, tower. Were you knocked out again? Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Where's our concussion counter? Maybe we should have done like a drinking game to the concussions or something. Because Jacob's brain is fully rattled. Yeah, it is mush. He is seeing yellow. He is like, I can't make the colors out. When you had a concussion, you said you only saw yellow, right? Correct, yeah. That's wild. I had one concussion. I really don't remember much of it. That's the point. Probably because I had a concussion. Oh no, I've been concussed twice. I think after like three or four, that's when it's like a flag, right?

2:09:11 Yep. Okay, so I got one more in me before. We got one more left. My punch card's almost done. Jacob wakes up as a security robot is throwing him into a cell like a bag of rice. He is back in the same cell he started the game in. Jacob tries to talk to Dani on comms, but she's not answering. He's like, fuck, I don't know what to do. And then he hears a woman's voice, but it's not Dani. Shit. It's Dr. Mallard. I was gonna say. There's only one other woman. She tells Jacob to find her. He's like, are you Dr. Mallard from the surgery I didn't consent to and all the holograms?

2:09:52 And she says, look, there's not much time, but I have Dani and I can help you get out of your cell, but you need to come to me. Jacob asks where Dani is. Mallard tells Jacob she's in the Black Iron Lab, but that's not important. You just have to be fast. Like stop asking questions and run. I can cure Dani, but I need your help, and I can also get you the warden. I can help out across the board. Just please trust me. Jacob is like, well, you were a dick, and you gave me surgery against my will. Why do you feel like helping me now? And she says, stop asking goddamn questions. I will see you soon. Now because Dr. Mallard is a man in the chair, she unlocks the doors and passageways, and Jacob is like, all right, fine.

2:10:36 So he just has to follow the linear path that she's knocking down for us. Along the way, we have another claustrophobic beat down with that fuckface two head. There's so many of them. Another two head. There's so many two heads. It's in this smoky server room, so it's super tiny and narrow and horrible to run through. I loved it. One thing that they're doing is even though they're recycling a boss, it's a different playground. So the first time it's this very specific platform with a couple boxes, there's not a lot of cover. And then you're in kind of a different arena, and this one's really tight. So while you know how to battle them, you adapt to battling them in different environments.

2:11:16 Okay, so it changes it up enough. Yeah, so it doesn't feel dry. It just feels like, god damn it. That's really cool. Following the smoky server room two-head encounter, we get through to the psych ward, because now it's just actually goddamn Outlast. But you have guns, so it's even more violent than Outlast, so hell yeah. Jacob says that the psych ward looks older than the rest of the prison. The infected down here are like super rotting and infected too, so it's kind of extra shitty to be down here. Deeper in the rotting psych ward, there's observation rooms. Rooms where prisoners were held and studied through big clear doors.

2:11:56 Dr. Mahler pops on comms and is like, you're doing great, sweetie, but you need to go faster. Dani is looking worse, like, get it together, man. Do it for Dani. In this psych ward, Jacob finds a medical wing, complete with some testing labs. Here in the psych ward's test lab, we have our final confrontation with goddamn two-headed fuck face, two ass, two head. Jesus. God, I hate two head. He's so goddamn good. He's also not alone because there's a ton of rotted test subjects here as well. It's fucking great. And this one's especially dark. Like, it's nearly pitch black, so they're really rolling up on you. It's fucking awesome. I sound deranged.

2:12:39 You sound like you're really enjoying the horror. I think I'm a horror girlie. Just now is when I'm realizing it. You're just realizing it. After that whole fun thing, Jacob follows a trail of unlocked doors to Dr. Mahler and Dani. The door trail takes Jacob through a more modernized lab, actually. Way nicer than the rot hell hole of the psych ward. This is all like titanium and gorgeous and has huge test subject tubes big enough to suspend infected bodies and stasis. Along the walls, there are cells similar to the ones in the psych ward with infected prisoners in them. Jacob says to himself, at the lab, at the heart of the prison, experimenting on prisoners. That figure's like, yeah, Jacob, that's what's happening.

2:13:21 He's a pilot. He's not a detective. There's a bunch of actively live infected at different stages being studied. He says, it looks like they were trying to see how long it takes to turn after being infected. Through the back of the lab, Jacob opens a door. The door opens to a wider, darker lab. And the first thing we see is an infected body, opened and splayed out, suspended by wires. The skin is being held up by cords and cables, and all of the insides are on display. It's fucking horrifying. If you've seen Midsommar, it's that scene in Midsommar.

2:14:03 It's fucking gnarly. And this is all Jacob can see, and then sees Dr. Mahler standing over Dani's body. Dani is out cold, and Dr. Mahler is administering an inhibitor to slow her infection. Jacob runs up and holds a knife to her neck and demands to know if Dr. Mahler can really cure Dani. Dr. Mahler is strangely calm as Jacob holds a knife to her neck, and she says, I can, but I need your help. And she needs him to trust her. She tells Jacob he's wasting time with this bullshit, and Dani doesn't have much time left. Jacob puts his knife down, and Dr. Mahler assures Jacob it'll all make sense soon.

2:14:45 Jacob asks about this, and he dramatically whips out one of the tubes of the alien larva he's been transporting for God knows how long. Unflappable, Dr. Mahler is like, yeah, well, you saw the recordings on Europa. And Jacob is like, yeah, but I don't know what happened. I wasn't there. Dani was. I saw this on the news, and now everything I know is a lie. So can you give me like a crumb of context? Dr. Mahler is like, yeah, you weren't there, but she was there while she gestures to Dani. She confirms, are you sure you want to know what happened? And Jacob goes, yes, of course I do. I've been saying that. Dr. Mahler says, as you wish, and then explains that soon all of Dani's brain, her memories and mind will be linked with Jacob's.

2:15:33 Once the sync is complete, they'll know everything about each other. She says Dani's memories will give Jacob the answers he seeks. Jacob's like, okay, my head hurts. I have a migraine, probably from the core connection. Yeah. But how do I save her? Dr. Mahler hands a medical injector to Jacob. She says, you can use this to synthesize an antidote, but you'll need to extract a sample from the warden's alpha. Jacob says, his what? Dr. Mahler says, his goal in all this, his reason for the protocol. Then she lore dumps that during the original outbreak in the Arcus colony, a colonist known as Subject Zero demonstrated the unique ability to synthesize the biophage and control it.

2:16:17 That's how they were able to get all those great pieces of like getting strong and agile and still maintaining their mind. She walks Jacob over to the body that splayed up in the air in the lab. Dr. Mahler introduces Jacob to, in her words, the next phase of human evolution. Unfortunately, he was killed during the Arcus sterilization. Dr. Mahler continues, and now the warden seeks to replicate the conditions of the original outbreak, hoping to recreate Subject Zero as Subject Alpha. Jacob is like, by releasing it in a prison? What the fuck? Dr. Mahler quotes Warden Cole himself, and she says, as he says, evolution doesn't happen in a lab.

2:17:02 It happens in the wild. The Callisto Protocol itself was to release the infection in the prison in hopes of spawning something, becoming infected, and being able to maintain their intelligence and mind through the infection process and truly evolve. Like biological terraforming? Jacob is like, how could he do this? This is way too much to cover up. It's a fucking prison. Yeah. Dr. Mahler tells Jacob that Warden Cole is not acting alone. He's part of a group that dates back centuries. They're a group dedicated to guiding the process of human. Oh my God, Dani is waking up. Hey, Dani, so you know those secret rooms with the red flags?

2:17:44 Red flags. Dr. Mahler runs to Dani's side, and on the way tells Jacob to be careful. Not because he could die, but because once synthesized, the antidote will contain the pure essence of the Warden's alpha. The Warden will want it more than anything. It's the genetic key to everything Warden Cole wants. Jacob says, all right, well, what about you? Dr. Moller turns and says, I played my part in this. I belong here in Black Iron. She turns and leaves into the lab. Jacob walks up to Dani, who's sitting up now, and the two set off to finish this. Dani says, it feels like there's something in her head trying to take over.

2:18:25 Jacob tells her to hold on. They're almost at the end. And that's also a promise to you if you're listening. Jacob and Dani head to the Warden in his tower. Going up to the Warden's office, it's clean, it's white, it's bright, and there's no infected. There's actually some like artifacts and shit on display. It's kind of douchey. As Jacob gets closer and opens a door, he hears a notice in his head that the data transfer is complete. As Jacob turns his head, he finds himself no longer in the Warden's tower, but in Europa, in what's essentially a brain dance of Dani's memory of the Europa incident. Dr. Mahler's voice comes on in his head and tells him that the Europa incident was a result of a diluted test sample being released from their lab.

2:19:11 She calls it the tragedy that inspired Warden Cole to use Black Iron as a test. In this memory, Jacob walks around to a small glowing purple box, the same one we've seen over and over again. As he gets closer, he sees the body of Max, and Max attacks him, knocking him to the ground. No, two-faced Max. Exactly. Max holds Jacob's head and screams, look at it, and holds Jacob's head towards the ground. Jacob looks and all he sees is a small glowing purple box. Max screams, do you see? Do you see? When Jacob reaches out for the small glowing purple box in his hand, the box transforms into the sample tube of the larva.

2:19:56 It flickers back and forth between the box and being the larva sample, and then the memory shifts to one of Jacob's. Jacob sees Max come into his ship storage area and asks Jacob what he's got there. Jacob has opened a UJC storage box that they were commissioned to move, and he's looked under the first layer of medical supplies to see what he was really transporting. He's found one of the test tubes, and up until now, he's pretending he didn't. Oh, shit. Now, he doesn't necessarily know exactly what this is, but he knows it's not the medical supplies he was signed up to transport. He then thinks about how this job is paying him enough to comfortably retire, and he tells Max that what we've got here is none of our business.

2:20:40 We flash back to Dani's memory on Europa, and Jacob watches as Dani walks the city streets, stunned silent by the devastation and the death. She sees one woman's body lying on the ground and runs to her. Dani is frantic and says, no. She hugs her sister's limp dead body for the last time and cries that she tried to protect her, that her sister didn't deserve this. Jacob puts it together that Europa was never a terrorist attack, that the footage was all doctored to blame Dani, but it was actually a test run of what Warren Cole was gonna do at Black Iron. He says he could have stopped it.

2:21:20 He could have prevented this, but he didn't, he wanted the money. Jacob settles on making it right. We cut back to real time and on the way up through the tower, Dani collapses in pain and Jacob promises he'll be back with the cure. Through more doors and hallways, Jacob makes it to Warren Cole's office. Warden is on a Zoom call with a masked council. As Jacob enters the room, Warren Cole says, there he is, right on time. He calls Jacob the Survivor. The council agrees. They say, the Survivor, Ver Solo Terrace. Ver Solo Terrace means soul survivor or kind of last man standing in Latin, which is the concept of a battle royale game.

2:22:05 I was going to say of PUBG. So that's, you know, that and the Paramo elements are pretty much the PUBG illusions. There's one PUBG helmet that you can find at one point in the game, but they were pretty good about making this its own thing with just some light Easter eggs. Jacob doesn't care that he's their fucking survivor and raises his gun to Warden Cole. He says he needs the goddamn antidote. He's not going to let her die. Warden Cole is like, what, your friend? I've been watching you two through this whole thing. Jacob is like, why are you letting people fucking die? Warden Cole says the protocol isn't about death. It's about life. Humans weren't meant for space.

2:22:47 We have to evolve to survive. Warden Cole then says there's one more contest to determine the true survivor. Humanity being Jacob, or evolution is Alpha. He gestures to a door which opens to reveal a fully evolved or perhaps infected Captain Ferris. God damn it. Of course, Captain Ferris was the only one that was infected and able to optimize the biophage infection and mutate while retaining his god damn brain. Captain fuck face Ferris says, well, well, well, 521. What is he got in god damnly miserable?

2:23:30 I was thinking Mr. Anderson, like he's in The Matrix. He says at first he thought this was a curse, but then he realized it was a gift. Ferris says the warden has shown him his purpose, and now he's gonna show you, Jacob. In this fight against Captain Ferris, he is immediately more aggressive than last time. He is swiping and sprinting after you, and he is completely relentless. Captain Ferris gets the better of Jacob and stands on top of him saying, I'm superior, I beat everyone. And then he starts feeling pain, pulse through his mutated body. Out loud, Ferris says, what's happening? And your boss battle goes from a regular boss battle and evolves into a larger boss battle.

2:24:15 Oh shit. Captain Ferris mutates further. His skin peels and splits the way the skin of a tangerine does. Through his body, bloated muscles burst out and he reaches a new form of high revolution. He becomes huge, nine or 10 feet tall and looking more monster than man. His body glows like embers and his jaw hangs open as he pants like a dog. Crazy ass mutated Ferris says, there's always a price to pay. His mutated flesh is rotten hard and is better shielding than we've ever seen. He's bulky, but he's incredibly fast. He throws acid spit and if he gets too close, he will 100% one hit kill Jacob.

2:24:58 Oh shit. The lights start to flicker and lower and then eventually go completely out. So not only are you being hunted in this arena, you're being hunted in the dark by someone who's slightly faster than you. Oh shit. Acidic infected can come up through the woodwork and pop and throw acid at you and explode at you. It is so fucking gnarly. It's so difficult and it was awesome and felt so good to finish. It sounds like a real barrage. Truly like the escalation of all the battles in this are worthy and they make you feel so good. After a very long battle, Captain Ferris falls to his knees and stops moving.

2:25:40 Jacob catches his breath and then plunges the antidote device into Captain Ferris' eyeball and pulls the plunger. The DNA of the Alpha who is able to evolve alongside the infection is now mixing with the antidote and will work on Dani to make her overcome her infection. Jacob says to himself, hold on, Dani. Beside Jacob now is Warden Cole. He says the Ferris was weak in an imperfect vessel, immediately talking shit. But what's in that vessel is the key to unlocking a centuries old dream, and it belongs to him. Jacob says, no. Warden Cole says, shut up and gimme that.

2:26:21 Leave the sample and walk away. There's an escape pod right there. You can go home back to your life. We both get everything we want. So tell me, Mr. Lee, tell me what you want. Dani enters, gun drawn. She says, I'll tell you what I want. I want my sister back, fuck her. And she shoots. She unloads an entire fucking clip into Warden Cole, and then falls to her knees. Fuck yeah. That is a serious, like, the Princess Bride moment. Each shot goes straight through Warden Cole as we see his hologram flicker through the bullets. He was never there. Jesus, fuck no.

2:27:03 I'm so sorry for the whiplash. Oh shit. I was so excited for that moment. That's how it feels. Cause you're like, fuck yeah, Dani, you're the baddest bitch. And then she collapses out of all this exhaustion. And you look up and he's just like flickering, like, all right, fucking what's up? I'm Princess Leia. That was useless. Yeah, he tells her it was a valiant effort, but you know by now that I never lose. Dani is collapsed and Jacob runs to her with the antidote. Jacob says, no, this time you do. He shoots the antidote into Dani's neck. As the vial is unleashed into Dani's veins, she opens her eyes and catches her breath in deep inhales.

2:27:47 Warden Cole heckles them. What a waste, all this to save one life. Don't think you've stopped us. The data gathered here will carry the protocol to the next phase. As for you, the security voice comes over and says the self-destruct sequence has been initiated. There's always a self-destruct sequence. Warden Cole hit the button to burn all of Callisto to the ground. Warden Cole's hologram walks out of the room after saying a cryptic goodbye. Goodbye, Ms. Nakamura. Mr. Lee, I hope you enjoyed your stay at Black Iron. What the fuck, man? Like it's a hotel? Yeah, leave me five stars. Jacob leads Dani to the escape pod that Warden Cole mentioned, hoping it wasn't a lie.

2:28:32 Dani and Jacob hurry down a long hallway and only find one escape pod. Jacob says, there's only one. He takes a beat, and then in one motion, Jacob opens the door, grabs Dani by the shoulders, and shoves her inside the escape pod. The pod automatically locks Dani into a safety harness guard, and she is confused at what all is happening so fucking quick. Dani yells out, what, you don't know what you're doing, which is true. Jacob says, he didn't, but now he knows he's responsible, and he can't keep running from what he's done. He looks Dani in her eyes, and he says, he belongs here.

2:29:12 Dani knows she can't change this, as her escape pod is already starting the takeoff sequence, but she says, no, Jacob. And she yells for him as her pod takes off into space. Jacob breaks eye contact with her first, as he is approached by a horde of infected. Dani shoots up in the sky, and soon she's far, far, far above Black Iron Prison. And for the first time, it's quiet. Dani's core says that her data transfer is complete. Now, just like Jacob has all of her memories, she has all of Jacob's as well. Oh, shit. As she ascends, she realized Jacob had slipped her of sample vial of the larva.

2:29:52 She holds it in her hands and looks down. She realizes also that Jacob is gonna die on Black Iron, but he gave her enough to tell the truth. She wonders if this is an attempt at redemption, but whatever. She just hopes he found some peace. Back on Callisto, Jacob has slain every infected that came to him after sending Dani off in that escape pod. He catches his breath and a hologram of Dr. Mahler appears. She says, Jacob, there might be a way out of this after all, but I'm gonna need your help. The Dr. Mahler hologram is interrupted as Captain Ferris steps through her screaming in Jacob's face.

2:30:33 And that's how The Callisto Protocol ends. What the fuck, really? That's not like one of 12 endings? Okay, yeah, there's one ending. There's one ending. Okay, but there is DLC. Okay, good. In June of 2023, the DLC, The Callisto Protocol Final Transmission was released. And this DLC ties everything up and is seen as the true ending. And now in October of 2023, The Callisto Protocol is available on PlayStation Plus for spooky season. It's nearly a year after release. It works, it runs, and the whole last story, including the DLC, is available to play in one sitting if you want. Wonderful.

2:31:15 So that is the game. And I haven't gotten to the DLC yet. I'm actually a little backed up on games that I'm playing right now. But if you guys are curious or you wanna talk to me about it on the Discord, I'd be happy to, and I could run through it if you want. But yeah, that is The Callisto Protocol. God damn, that is a sudden, jarring ending too. Oh, I mean, when you think about the ending of Dead Space, it's Isaac Clarke leaving and being like, holy shit, and then being attacked by a ghost, Nicole. True. So there's the parallel in that, there's that last parallel in the very last moment of like, maybe a moment of hope or serenity being interrupted by something screaming at you. Right. Oh, it's a fucking ride, and it got knocked a lot, but you know what?

2:31:58 I kind of stand for it. Well, that's good. I hope a lot of people get to play it now. I do too, you know, now being on PlayStation Plus, this opens doors. It's so fucking great. And you know, I don't know where Dr. Glenn Schofield will go after this, but I'm excited to see what he has next, because I think this is an important creator, especially in horror gaming, that doesn't rely on jump scares. It doesn't rely on like, ooh, creepy pasta. It's an interesting story where it builds on itself, and his game design is incredible. He's a legend for a reason, and I want to see what happens next. I am always fascinated by so many sci-fi stories being about something terrible happened somewhere, and we have to keep it quiet.

2:32:40 A lot of political notes in sci-fi, huh? Yeah. So this is my last one of this season. You have our season finale coming up next week. And nobody on the Discord has even remotely guessed it yet. Oh, that's true. It's an old game. It is the oldest game I think we might cover ever. But it's a classic. It is. But with this being my last game of the season, I just wanted to leave all my friends here on a note. Just remember, you can't control the storm, but you can control the sails. Thank you all so much for your support. And just know that even though you can't see me, I'm giving you a big auditory hug every episode, and I'm so grateful for all of you. And I'm proud to be someone that you choose to spend your time with.

2:33:22 Yes. Thank you so much for choosing to listen to us, honestly. You are all so much greater than you realize. And I think about how much I adore anyone who listens to this every day. Truly, thank you for making my life better. Thank you for spending time with me. Yeah, honestly, this eccentric, weird hobby that we started just for ourselves, the fact that there are now people listening to us and giving a shit about it is pretty amazing. And honestly, we couldn't be more grateful if we tried. Yeah, and if that made you happy or brought you some joy, I'd appreciate if you'd throw us a like or a subscribe and just know that we will be here for you no matter how weird it gets. Yeah, definitely. But we still do have one more episode, so make sure you go to our website, theothercastlepodcast.com.

2:34:05 That's theothercastlepodcast.com. Over there, you can definitely make sure that you subscribe to us on whatever platform you'd like to listen to us on. You can also sign up for our Patreon, where it's just $2 a month. We will be airing monthly episodes during the off season, so you can still listen to The Other Castle all year long. Yeah, and if you are subscribed, you'll get an automatic update when the next season starts, so stay tuned and we'll come back when we're ready. But until then, I'd love to especially thank the people that helped produce this episode. That'd be Paul, Omar, Aaron. Cyrus, Trevor, Molly. Krisha, Molly Mock, Jackie. Ellen and Tijen. Thank you all so, so much. I had a blast this season, and I'm so grateful for all of you.

2:34:47 Yes, thank you so much. We'll see you over on Discord, see you over on Instagram. Thank you so much, Goombas, for being here, and we appreciate you listening. And in the meantime, this is Tom and Andrea reminding you. Don't take the weird job just because it pays a little better. Think about your mental and physical health. And don't skip the cutscenes. Also that. Thanks, everyone. Bye!