A Callisto Protocol roguelike is honestly the last thing I expected to come out this year. The spiritual successor to Dead Space was a debut from Striking Distance Studios, so I was surprised when the team announced Redacted. Set in the same universe as the big budget horror game, Redacted is a very different beast. The scares are replaced with infinite replayability, the action is stepped up, and there’s a punk-rock aesthetic. Taking place in the black iron prison of the Callisto Protocol, I found my time with the roguelike welcoming, familiar and surprising in equal measure.

at a glance Redacted he plays a lot like Hades. Isometrically, you move from room to room, battling hordes of enemy mutants. There are different biomes, bosses, upgrades and a number of permanent coins to enhance your next run. There’s only one escape clip left though, so you have to fight tooth and nail to get there. When you find upgrades, you’re forced to choose one of three options, just like in Supergiant’s mythology. roguelike.

In practice, however, Striking Distance’s take on the genre is unique and refined. As Nat also praised in our Callisto Protocol Reviewyour weapon swings and dodges have a real sense of weight to them in Redacted. Your two-battery melee and ranged options come with adequate weight, while hitting and sliding present some diverse combat opportunities. It’s not groundbreaking by any means, but Striking Distance has created a strong combat system that everything else is based on.

Sliding an enemy into a wall and stunning them so you can create space to thin the numbers is a delight, and maneuvering behind other opponents for extra backstab damage is always rewarding. Redacted is full of these little mechanics that stack up to form a smooth and distinct experience.

Redacted really shines when it tries something completely new. As you progress through countless runs, you’ll encounter more and more rivals. These colorful characters are like Dead Rising’s psychopaths: normal people pushed to the brink as they try to reach the only remaining escape hatch. Suddenly, Redacted becomes a race. Up to three of these rivals try to escape at the same time, and they’ll mess with you as much as you mess with them. You have cooldown abilities to slow them down, but each rival will sometimes act as a mini-boss or even remotely change the next encounter.

This is by far the coolest feature of Redacted. When three rivals face off against you, the pressure is on. You have to choose who to slow down and when. We’ve all had Hades, Enter the Gungeon or The Binding of Isaac where we feel safe. You can wait and use your overpowered build to slowly creep forward and conserve health. In the best possible way, Redacted’s rival mechanic blows that fuse out of the airlock.

I like a good sense of friction in my video games, and Redacted’s rival feature has that in spades. It’s a gloss over an otherwise solid but familiar experience that requires you to learn their quirks and find files on them to reduce their effectiveness in combat.

In each Redacted run, you play as a different Guardian. Their name appears at the beginning and you quickly send them to what will most likely be their untimely death at the hands of the grotesque and infested inmates. It’s a roguelike, so death is normal. But Redacted has a different idea. If you manage to return to the point of your last death, you can choose to reanimate that guard’s corpse and fight him as a boss. Their build is exactly the same as you did last time, and defeating them nets you a number of additional rewards.

Not only does this provide a sense of permanence after each race, but it also creates a really interesting relationship with how you treat your builds. I made an incredibly overpowered ranged build, died on the first boss, and then had to fight my old self on my next turn. Being on the receiving end of that character was a tense moment, but it also completely changed my perspective on the build I had just made. I had to change my strategy and my own progress in a previous round quickly became a hindrance.

Between rivals and the reanimated corpses of your failed races, Redacted has plenty of distinctive ideas. At this point, it could play like any number of similar games, but it’s the long-term decision-making that really sets it apart.

You can pick up Redacted on Steam right now.