THE MAKING OF . . .
REDACTED
How a quest for the fast and the frenetic transformed survival horror into a comic-book Roguelike
By Jon Bailes
Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series
Developer Striking Distance Studios
Publisher Krafton Origin US
Release 2024
We’ve grown so used to game development stories turning into heroic sagas that it’s hard to imagine any studio completing anything with minor fuss nowadays. Yet it wasn’t so long ago that Redacted wasn’t even a twinkle in its creators’ eyes, let alone a fully fledged, and entertaining, digital release. The process began in 2023, as Striking Distance was polishing off DLC for The Callisto Protocol. The studio had shrunk since that game’s release, with 32 employees being laid off and founder Glen Schofield leaving alongside its former COO and CFO. But, of the remaining team members, a few were pulled away before embarking on the next triple-A project, to try a little experiment instead.
Redacted was born not from a storyboard or a design document or even a long-nurtured dream, but from a desire to tinker with combat systems, to create something fast and fluid. “We’d started doing it in The Callisto Protocol,” creative director Ben Walker explains, “but, that being a horror game, we wanted it to have some weight. [With Redacted] we tried to see how far we could push past that.” Within a few days, one of the side-effects of the experiment was a change of camera angle, from The Callisto Protocol’s over-the-shoulder view to a top-down perspective. “In The Callisto Protocol, we wanted that forward-facing vision, where you’re worried about what’s around you,” Walker says. “[Here] we needed to see where enemies were coming from, so players could react. That naturally pulled the camera up.”
In their bid to make the fight faster, the core focus from the start was the feel of character and combat, especially when playing with a controller, and that carried on right through the project. “That’s how we decided whether a feature made it in or not,” Walker says. “Did it feel good?” Following the camera shift, it wasn’t long before a twin-stick control setup fell into place, so players could aim and move in different directions simultaneously. With that, the foundations were soon set, while the scenario was still The Callisto Protocol’s space-prison zombie outbreak, although its ‘feel’ too had begun to change.