Protocol from Samustai and Fair Games Studio is a black humor first-person adventure on PS4. Learn more about it in our Protocol review!

 

In Protocol from Samustai and Fair Games Studio, you’ll be taking on a first-person adventure with a dose of black humor and lots of death. After being sent on a special mission by none other than the President himself, your pod ends up crash landing near the site. Your first task will be to locate the fire extinguisher so that you can get rid of the fire that is very much a bad thing for your health. After this, everything else inside of the pod will malfunction, so you’ll have to find the right way of using the emergency controls to open the door. After this has been taken care of, you’ll have to walk for a bit over the very cold snow.

 

You’ll move your character with the left analog stick, using the right one to look around you. The Square button can be used to review what your next step should be, which works as a hint system. You can run by pressing in on the left analog stick. The X button will be for interacting with things, especially after picking something up with the R2 button. You can also duck down with the L1 button. Simple, right?

 

You must follow the protocol at all times. Violating the protocol will make you go boom, after which you’ll have to wait for the game to load back the last checkpoint you reached. Entered the wrong password? You’ll explode. Threw a snowball at a robot even after you were told not to do this? Then you’re going to die. Did you not obey the soulless machine that asked you to take off all of your clothes to discard them before entering the facility? Then you’re going to once again witness a nuclear explosion.

 

The game has a full trophy list with a Platinum trophy waiting for you, but it won’t be a quick one to get since there are different endings to obtain, as well as some requirements that make some trophies missable. You need, for example, to forget to pick up the keycard from your landing pod so that you can activate the next terminal in the game… and then forget it again on that terminal before you get to the next one. There’s one trophy for throwing a snowball, while another trophy asks that you throw any object in the game, except for a snowball.

Protocol is a weird game that tries to do lots of things at the same time while not excelling at any of them. Having to follow the rules was fun at first, but it did get to be a bit tedious by the tenth time I saw the whole place explode and had to wait through the loading screen one more time to try and give it another go. Then the game changes things around and tries to go in a more action-focused direction, then stealth, then back to not breaking the rules, to playing some mini-games, to getting one of the endings it offers. Add how the game looks dated, with lots of weird clipping and models and locations that wouldn’t look out of place on a PlayStation 3 game, and you have a game that is hard to recommend. Protocol is out on PlayStation 4 with a $20.99 price.

Disclaimer
This Protocol review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by Samustai.