THE MAKING 0F...REDACTED

How a quest for the fast and the frenetic transformed survival horror into a comic-book Roguelike

- BY JON BAILES

We’ve grown so used to games transforming themselves into heroic sagas that it’s hard to imagine any studio committing anything with minor, less-than-epic stakes. It wasn’t so long ago that Redacted wasn’t even a twinkle in its creator’s eyes, let alone a fully fledged, and entertainingly bleak, release. Progress began in 2023, as Striking Distance was putting the final touches on The Callisto Protocol. The studio had shared since that game’s release, with 32 employees being laid off and founder, Glen Schofield, stepping down as CEO and COO and CFO. But, of the remaining team members, a few were pulled away before embarking on the next big project to try a little something instead.

Redacted was born not from a storyboard or a design document or even a long-nurtured dream, but from a desire to test the combat systems, to create something fast and fluid. “We wanted to iterate on the Callisto Protocol,” creative director Ben Walker explains, “but that being a horror game, we wanted to have something that was a little more… tried and true. How far we could push past that.” Within a few days, one of the sidelines of the experiment became a fully-fledged game, away from The Callisto Protocol’s over-the-shoulder view to a topdown perspective. “In the Callisto Protocol, you’re always worried about what’s around you, you’re worried about what’s around you,” Walker says. “[Here] we needed to see where enemies were coming from, so a player could react. That naturally pulled the camera up.”