The Callisto Protocol, despite serving as something of a spiritual successor to Dead Space, has become its own beast in terms of hype.

The space-horror looks exciting in its own merit, bringing over a lot of the spooks and gore that made its inspiration so popular, but as the original Dead Space is set for a grand remake early next year, fans have become prepared to see the original and its child, carrying the flag towards the future, battle it out for critical supremacy.

The Callisto Protocol has only a few months left until its big day, and claims of crunch have appeared - but the head of the company leading the game has claimed that it's all out of love.

The Callisto Protocol Is Crunching, But Glen Schofield Defends It

Veteran developer Glen Schofield, who has come to head up Striking Distance Studios in their development of The Callisto Protocol, has taken to Twitter to claim that work on the game has produced a pretty bleak working environment, but that the team is going ahead with it out of their love of the game.

In a now-deleted Tweet, Schofield detailed the grim working conditions in the company, but backed it up with claims that it's all voluntary.

"I only talk about the game during an event," he says. "We r working 6-7 days a week, nobody's forcing us. Exhaustion, tired, Covid but we're working. Bugs, glitches, perf fixes. 1 last pass thru audio. 12-15 hr days. This is gaming. Hard work. Lunch, dinner working. U do it cause ya luv it."

It was deleted pretty sharpish, but in that time, the tweet caught a lot of flak - and for good reason.

Enjoyment Is Irrelevant - Crunch In Gaming Shouldn't Be Celebrated

Of course, these claims of a crunch that developers are willingly engaged in could be a dramatic misrepresentation of what's actually going on behind the scenes at The Callisto Protocol, but even presuming they are, to assert that this is the new normal in the gaming industry is an incredibly grim way to present how video games are made.

Despite being so allegedly passionate about the game, working with COVID and through intense exhaustion after 15-hour days is an abysmal presentation of Striking Distance Studios' working conditions.

Something seems to be wrong behind the scenes on the game, and perhaps we'll get some more insight into the current crunch of the game soon - but until then, we can only hope that the situation changes for The Callisto Protocol's development team. You can have fun making a game for 15 hours a day, but you're still working for 15 hours a day.