Redacted Review – Prison Break

You wouldn’t know just from looking at it–with its vivid, comic book-esque art style and irreverent punk-rock tone–but Redacted (officially styled as [REDACTED]) actually takes place in the same sci-fi universe as 2022’s The Callisto Protocol. While that was a third-person survival-horror game trying to capture the same magic that Dead Space bottled up over a decade and a half ago, Striking Distance Studios has taken a wildly different approach with this spin-off, repurposing various elements from its debut game to create an isometric roguelike dungeon crawler.

It’s a drastic shift for the young series, ditching the grisly melodrama and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em combat of The Callisto Protocol by pivoting to referential humor and twin-stick shooting. It still feels immediately familiar thanks to how loudly it wears its Hades inspiration on its sleeve–even the title is seemingly a nod to Supergiant Games’ seminal roguelike. This isn’t inherently negative, and Redacted has some impactful ideas of its own. Yet, looking past the game’s derivative design can often be difficult when it struggles to reach the same heights as its primary influence.

Much like The Callisto Protocol, Redacted takes place within the icey, industrial walls of Black Iron Prison. With mutated biophages running amok–turning prisoners and staff into hostile, zombie-like creatures–you’re cast as a modest prison guard attempting to reach the penitentiary’s final escape pod and get the hell out of dodge. Unfortunately for you, other survivors–made up of coworkers and inmates called Rivals–are trying to do the same thing, forcing you into conflict with biophages and humans alike.

Each failed escape sees your guard die and join the ranks of the infected while you begin a new run as another guard striving to reach the exit. Along the way, you’ll accumulate various currencies, such as contraband and security codes, that carry over from one guard to the next, letting you purchase new permanent weapons, skills, and so on in the game’s starting hub area. Aside from creating a gradual sense of palpable progression, this also ensures that failed runs rarely ever feel like a waste of time, as you’re constantly making future attempts slightly easier.

It’s a similar setup to Hades, challenging you to fight your way through four different zones in a single run, with a formidable boss waiting at the end of each one. Randomly selected battle arenas populate these zones, and you’re given a choice of doors to enter after defeating every last enemy in an arena, letting you choose between being rewarded with various buffs (called experiments) for your current run or the aforementioned currencies that can help you in subsequent attempts. Again, much like Hades, you’re given three of these buffs to choose from after clearing a room. One might increase your health or add elemental damage to one of your weapons, while others can alter how your firearm functions or augment your dodge with damage-dealing effects. These buffs can also be leveled up depending on the doors you choose, thus making you more powerful the longer you survive a run.

All of this eventually makes for a satisfying gameplay loop. I say “eventually” because Redacted doesn’t make a particularly great first impression. You embark on each run equipped with two weapons–one ranged and one melee–but your initial options are lacking in the fun department. The pistol, shotgun, and assault rifle are slow to fire and lack any kind of gratifying punch. Meanwhile, the violent swings of your melee options feel labored and stilted, which sadly doesn’t change even after unlocking every available weapon. Some of the potential buffs improve things, but then you’re relying on the game’s RNG to make combat enjoyable.

Fortunately, your ranged options do steadily improve, lending each fight a more frenetic and fast-paced feel as you unlock more permanent weaponry. Melting biophages with the scorching energy beam of the atom gun is delightfully pleasing, as is evading projectiles as you pepper enemies with dual blasters. It’s still disappointing that melee combat quickly becomes an afterthought, though. Bashing an enemy upside the head is useful in spots, but I quickly learned to neglect melee buffs in favor of improving my firearms because it just isn’t very engaging.

This results in combat feeling somewhat one-note, although the sheer variety of enemy types keeps you on your toes–forcing you to evade all kinds of projectiles, exploding mutants, and melee-focused threats. You can kick enemies, but I never found this to be a particularly useful skill. You also have access to The Callisto Protocol’s kinesis-like GRP ability, letting you launch enemies backward to create breathing room or send them hurtling into various environmental hazards. Flinging a biophage into a vat of toxic green acid is certainly satisfying, but your use of GRP is limited.

It helps, then, that Redacted looks fantastic throughout. The game’s comic book art style pops off the screen with a wonderful vibrancy, coating explosions and smoke effects in halftone dots as your resplendent attacks punctuate through the noise. This, along with the game’s twin-stick shooting, is eventually strong enough to prop up Redacted’s combat on its own, even if it does lead to tedium in the latter hours.

Before then, however, your first objective is to survive a run through all four zones and escape the prison. Once you’ve achieved this for the first time, weapon upgrades are unlocked and you’re able to activate a plethora of difficulty modifiers to increase the game’s challenge and earn extra rewards. Whether you’re decreasing your overall health, adding a timer, or increasing the number of enemies in each room, there are multiple ways to shake up the experience.

You fight your past self, too, seeing as your most recently deceased guard will quickly join the undead ranks. Challenging one of your failed attempts to a battle is optional and basically boils down to whether they have an upgraded buff you might want to use again. Depending on the weapons and upgrades they had when they died, these zombified guards can be fairly formidable foes, and I never felt the reward was worth the considerable risk.

As for why you might want to escape Black Iron Prison more than once–there is a lone incentive. Unlike Hades, where the story propels you through one successful run after another, Redacted’s stimulus isn’t quite as appealing, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

You see, amidst the chaos of each escape attempt, you also have to contend with the game’s Rivals. These escaped inmates and former colleagues of yours are a one-dimensional assortment of stereotypes, from a Dungeons and Dragons-obsessed LARPer to a dreaded Karen and punk-rock Cockney. There isn’t much of a narrative to speak of, with most of their dialogue focused on referential humor. There are a few funny moments, but the reference is usually the whole joke, whether they’re name-dropping The Simpsons or Hades itself.

Where Rivals excel is in how they add another random element to each run. There are eight Rivals in total, but you only have to contend with three at a time. Like you, they’re trying to reach the final escape pod first, essentially turning each run into a frantic race to the finish. You can slow down one Rival at a time and chip some life off their health bar by utilizing remote attacks. The catch is that they respond in kind, throwing a spanner into the works with gas leaks you need to hurriedly switch off and bombs you must avoid as they fall from the sky.

It’s not all remote work, either. Occasionally, you’ll come face to face with one of your Rivals in a mini-boss-style fight to the death. If you manage to kill them, that’s one less person to contend with once you’ve reached the escape pod; otherwise, you’re thrown into a gauntlet against everyone who survived. It’s great stuff and stands out as the one element of Redacted that differentiates it from other roguelikes, adding a thrilling wrinkle to an otherwise familiar gameplay loop.

Once you’ve completed your first successful escape, Rivals also become your primary focus if you want to reach the game’s end credits. Each one has a redacted dossier full of irreverent information about their lives, but it’s the passcodes hidden within that you really want. Eight passcodes for eight prisoners, and you need all of them in order to open up a vault containing who knows what. This is Redacted’s endgame, if you can call it that. So off you go, looking for the doors marked “Computer” scattered throughout each run. You can unredact a single paragraph from inside, of which there are 10 for all eight Rivals. That’s 80 files to uncover, and the best-case scenario during a single run is to find, at most, four or five of these Computer rooms.

It’s a lengthy endeavor. In total, it took me 17 hours to reach the end credits, encompassing 40 runs and 14 escapes. Your prize for doing all of this is a final do-or-die run back through the prison, where death means you lose all of your progression, and success means you unlock some new permanent gear. It’s not the most enticing prize. After 17 hours, I couldn’t imagine returning for more, especially when the only incentive for playing any longer was removed. Obviously, this isn’t unusual, and Redacted still has a significant amount of replayability. It’s just disappointing that the final reward is so lackluster when the journey to achieve it is a slog.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it’s hardly uncommon in the video game industry. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to recommend Redacted when both Hades and its sequel exist and do almost everything it’s attempting to do with much more aplomb. The Rivals system is a compelling breath of fresh air for the genre, and its combat is engaging–even if parts of it are severely lacking. There’s a good game here, somewhere in the middle, once you’re past the lackluster opening and monotonous ending. Redacted doesn’t really expand on The Callisto Protocol universe, but I’m glad it exists. For as flawed as both games are, I still haven’t lost interest in seeing more stories from this world, and I hope Striking Distance has a chance to tell them. Redacted just falls short a few too many times.