At the Game Awards last night, a new game was announced titled The Callisto Protocol, with a very creepy trailer.

The trailer shows a man wake up in jail to a holographic message he can't decipher. Suddenly, his missing cellmate appears as a gross alien creature and slaughters him.

Zoom out and we see there are tons of rooms in this jail that have all gone to shit. It’s your fairly typically announcement, except that is begs to be seen as a spiritual successor to one of the best horror games of all time: Dead Space.

The direct callback to the visual elements of Dead Space, like the HP bar on the main character's back, the holographic imagery, and the final shot of a snowy isolated planet, all harken back to the gem of the Xbox 360/PS3 generation.

Even the alien-like creature that murders the cellmate looks just like a necromorph from the Dead Space series.

The Callisto Protocol is being developed by Striking Distance Studios, a studio led by former Dead Space and Call of Duty lead, Glen Schofield. The Callisto Protocol is set to release in 2022.

According to their website, The Callisto Protocol is "a single-player and story-driven survival horror game set in a prison colony on Jupiter’s moon Callisto.”

Under the lead of Glen Schofield, the game has clearly adopted much of what made Dead Space such a successful franchise. Dead Space hasn’t seen a release since Dead Space 3 in 2013, and as of right now, publisher EA hasn't said anything about a new Dead Space game being in the works.

Dead Space was arguably the best survival-horror game of its time, with genuinely terrifying settings mixed with intuitive gameplay. If you’ve played the original Dead Space, released back in 2008, you’ll have fond memories of slicing necromorphs' limbs off with he game's main weapon, the plasma cutter.

The part that sticks with me from Dead Space, and that cements it as one of the best horror games ever, are the sound effects. Here is a good compilation of some of the scariest moments the game has to offer.

Dead Space still has a die-hard fan base, and this new announcement had fans on Twitter pretty hyped. Someone even pointed out an Easter eggs most people might’ve missed:

#CallistoProtocol is in the same world as Dead Space maybe? Pic is from the trailer we saw at the 2020 Game Award. pic.twitter.com/wnvcpvBv82

— Cybermat (@GnR_Cybermat) December 11, 2020