ANALYSIS: Prey - The Illusion of Choice

Prey makes a big deal out of the amount of choice it offers players. The marketing materials and the game itself use the phrase “Play Your Way” to describe the experience, which suggests that Prey is going to have that elusive ‘replayability’ that some players crave. I like games that force the player to make meaningful choices, however the key word is meaningful. Prey constantly offers players choices, but it would be generous to describe them as meaningful or even interesting. The choices in Prey typically revolve around exploration instead of moral dilemmas. For example, you’ll stumble across a locked door and have to pick one of six different ways to get inside. None of the choices I made in Prey mattered, but I could live with that if the game offered an engaging experience. It doesn’t, at least not for the entire game. I started off playing an interesting survival horror experience, which then became a poor first person shooter, and eventually morphed into a game of running away from enemies until you reach a loading screen. With Prey, Arkane wanted to give players choices, when what it should have been doing was making decisions. Namely, what kind of game does it want Prey to be. In the end, it’s a bit of everything and a lot of nothing. Before I go any further, it’s time for your obligatory spoiler warning. This is an analysis video, so I will be going over the entire story and discussing the ending in detail. If you like the look of Prey, then I recommend you play it before watching this video. There are time stamps in the description if you want to skip ahead. Which brings me to the review score. As always, I like to give the score I’ve awarded the game up front to save you wading through to the end of what I’m sure will be another long video. I’m giving Prey three stars out of five. For context, I don’t use half stars and I define a three star game as one that is okay. Not bad, not good. Just okay. If you’re a particular fan of the genre then you might want to play it, but otherwise you can probably skip it without losing any sleep. There’s a written review up on my website which is linked in the description. If you’re on the fence about buying the game, then the written review should help. It’s spoiler free. I said that you might want to play Prey if you’re a fan of the genre, but I haven’t said what that genre is. The description I saw bandied around the most was immersive sim, and that’s not a genre label I particularly like. What does ‘immersive sim’ even mean? Most first person games attempt to be immersive with varying degrees of success. I’d say Call Of Duty is an immersive sim, but that would be a silly label to apply to the game. After a couple of hours with Prey, I thought ‘survival horror’ was a better description. However, by the end of the game, I have to hold my hands up and admit that immersive sim might just be the best way to describe the game, solely because of the lack of other options. It’s not an RPG, it’s not an FPS, and once you get past those first few hours, it’s not a survival horror game either. Perhaps the difficulty with lumping Prey into a genre is why many reviewers opted to describe Prey by comparison to other games. This is actually a big deal. In video game reviews for most of the big publications, it’s typically a written or unwritten rule that you must not compare the game you’re reviewing to another game unless it’s a sequel and even then you can only compare it to other games in that series. Comparing games within a review is seen as a huge sin equal to or perhaps even worse than not living in San Francisco. As an aside, I’ve always thought the ‘no comparison’ rule was bullshit. I get the rationale. If you compare a game to another game then you risk alienating readers who don’t know what that other game is. It’s a relic of the days when people couldn’t watch a video of said game within three seconds of reading about it, and I’ve always thought it was a silly rule. Anyway, rant over. There are three games that did actually get mentioned quite often in comparison to Prey: System Shock 2, Bioshock, and Dishonored. None of these comparisons work all that well beyond a quick surface level analysis. System Shock 2 has a similar set up and story, but it plays completely differently with dice roll combat the most obvious contrast. Bioshock looks a lot like an underwater version of Prey. It has a similar art style and the plasmid powers look a lot like Prey’s alien neuromods. However, Bioshock is a relatively linear game. You don’t have much freedom in where you go and when, which to be fair is kind of the entire point of that game. For all its failings, Prey at least attempts to be more open in its structure. Which brings us to Dishonored. Dishonored is the game Prey most wants to imitate, but it fails in crucial ways that I’ll go into more detail on later. To sum up, don’t let people’s comparisons to other games sway you one way or the other. Prey is its own game. Although, to be fair, I am going to compare this game to Dishonored quite a bit at the end. I’m not going to touch on the original Prey from 2006, however I will put a link in the description for a great video by Noah Caldwell-Gervais where he compares the 2006 and 2017 versions. Before I get started, I just want to give a quick outline for how this video is structured. I’m going to start off talking about the story and some of the game’s lore until I reach a natural stopping point. Then I’ll discuss the systems in the game like combat, skill trees, and resource management. Then I’ll go through to the end of the story before rambling on about immersion and the illusion of choice. There are plenty of time stamps in the description, so you don’t have to watch it all in one go. You start the game by choosing between a male or female version of Morgan Yu. I chose the female Morgan, so I’ll be referring to her as female throughout. It doesn’t make any difference who you choose as far as I can tell. Morgan wakes up in her bed in the year 2032. You grab a handy little device that will be with your for the rest of the game and listen to a one-sided conversation with your brother, Alex. You’ve been selected to work aboard the illustrious space station Talos 1 and it’s time for your first day of training. Alex tells you to put on your suit and head up to the roof. You’ll have to get used to these one sided conversations, because Morgan is a silent protagonist. Presumably that’s to help with the whole ‘immersion’ thing, but I generally prefer my protagonists to talk, either with or without voice acting. You can look around your apartment and pick up nearly everything that isn’t nailed down. Some of the things you can pick up are materials that you can keep, but there’s a lot of random junk that serves no purpose. This is 100% nitpicking, but I don’t like being able to pick things up if we can’t use them in a meaningful way. It always ends up feeling like the developers are just giving me shiny new toys to play with in case I get bored. If I can’t use a coffee machine or a bar stool, then why let me pick it up? The game is full of these sorts of objects and you can never do anything with them. There’re books to read, although as is par for the course, you’re only really reading a few paragraphs. Generally, reading extracts of stories is not a good way to get across complicated lore or background and they end up being dumping grounds for terrible writing. That’s generally the case anyway. Some of the books in Prey are worth reading, so I recommend you at least skim read them if you can. They drip feed you with information about the history and state of affairs in the world without introducing a new noun on every line like some games do. Once you’re done exploring, you put on your spacesuit and head to the roof where there’s a chopper waiting. The helicopter takes you to the Transtar training facility via one of the best credit sequences I’ve seen in recent years. Once in the facility, you’re ushered through to a training room for what looks like a token tutorial section. It’s anything but. In the first room, you’re asked to move some boxes out of a circle. I rolled my eyes and got on with it. There’s no point complaining too much about tutorials; they have to be done. Prey is different. I failed the red box tutorial and moved into the next room. There I had to hide, except there was nothing in the room to hide behind, only a tiny chair. Again, there were some disappointed reactions from the people assessing me when I failed the assignment. In the next room, you’re asked to move over an obstacle and press a button. You fail miserably. Finally, you have to answer some questions. They start simple enough. Where would you like to go on holiday? How would you feel if you were sentenced to death? Not terribly difficult to answer. Then we get to what is commonly referred to as the trolly problem. In this case it’s a train, but the principle is the same. A train is bearing down on five people who will die if the train hits them. You can switch the tracks, but there is one person tied to the other track. What do you do? Most people would probably switch the track because one person dying is better than five. The point of the question is to go a little deeper than that. It’s easy to say in theory that you would switch the tracks to ultimately save four lives, but then your action causally leads to the death of one person. If you do nothing, then more people die, but at least you won’t have blood on your hands. Or, alternatively, what if you happen to know the one person tied to the second track, but the other five are strangers? Would you still do the logical thing? It’s not exactly a new question, but it does come into play later in the game, as do the follow ups--would you push an enormously fat man onto the tracks to save everyone’s lives, and would you yourself jump in front of the train to save everyone. You can probably see where the game might be going Now, slightly obvious questions aside, I loved this tutorial. It completely subverted expectations while introducing a mystery to proceedings. However, while I loved the tutorial, the key word is ‘loved.’ Past tense. About a third of the way into the game, I came to the realization that the tutorial could have been done a hell of a lot better and would have improved the game considerably. I’ll come back to that later. After the tutorial, you watch as one of the scientists is attacked by a black creature. Gas is released into the chamber and you drift into unconsciousness. You wake up in your bed and start the day as if nothing had ever happened. There’s no call from Alex this time. Instead you get a call from a woman called January who tells you to escape. You leave your apartment again and find that the technician that was working in the hall is now dead. You can’t go anywhere and the only thing you can pick up and use is a wrench. You grab the wrench and do the only thing left open to you--break the glass and get the big reveal. You were in a simulation on board Talos I the entire time. Oh, and it’s actually 2035, not 2032. The helicopter ride was part of the simulation, which you might have noticed if you were incredibly observant. Look at this part of the helicopter ride again. There’s a quick flicker where the city disappears and you see the real blue screen instead. This is a solid way to start the game and probably came as a cool surprise to about 37 people. Unfortunately, in this day and age, I can’t imagine there are all that many people who played the game and didn’t know this was coming. Prey now starts to open up and we’re introduced to the ‘play your way’ mechanics. By the time you make it to the lobby, you’ll know that there are multiple different ways to get through doors and that most of them will be so obvious you have to try to miss them. Let’s start with a computer you come across early on. You don’t know the password and you won’t be able to hack it yet. Fortunately the password is left on a sticky note attached to the computer. What does this tell you? It tells you that there’s not much need to hack computers because you’ll usually be able to find a password nearby. An identical situation pops up within the first hour. I appreciate that this is early in the game and that it won’t always be this easy, however I still believe this is a bad message to impart early on. The game is terrified about locking players out of content so it always makes the content accessible in multiple ways. The message isn’t that you’re going to need hacking skills to use password protected computers, it’s that hacking might save you a couple of minutes of hunting around an office, even though you were probably going to do that anyway while gathering resources. In case you played the first hour without realizing that you can “Play Your Way” a screen pops up that literally tells you to ‘play your way’. You have to get past a door. You can get the keycard or look around for an alternative route. The thing is… the keycard is laying right there on one of the nearby tables. I’d be amazed if anyone managed to find an alternative way past the door without first stumbling onto the keycard. Looking for a secret route requires exploring. If you explore, you’ll find the card. Either way, I don’t feel like I’m playing the game in two different ways. We don’t have any skills yet, so this introductions doesn’t help us make a decision about the sort of character we want to become. A better way, might have been to give the player their first skill point and let them chose a skill which will then open up one possible option and close another. For example, the player could be restricted to three choices. Increased strength, hacking, agility. If you chose strength you can pick up nearby objects and throw them at the door to break it open. If you choose hacking you can hack the keypad. If you choose agility you can jump higher and reach a vent. Particularly creative players could use strength to place a climbable object next to the vent if they really want to feel like a smartarse. I know this might sound like it’s restricting player choice, but it’s early in the game and this would show players that the skills they acquire will affect how they progress through the game. As it stands, you’re just going to stumble your way through without thinking much. Now, to reiterate, we’re essentially in a tutorial section here. The tutorial is supposed to hold your hand and show you the ropes. Unfortunately, the tutorial is teaching players bad habits. Even early on, the tutorial should make it clear that passwords and door keys won’t be easy to find. Later on, you find a joke email admonishing employees for lax password security, but acknowledging a problem doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. The tutorial introduces us to combat by having Morgan fight mimics with a wrench. You should also pick up the glue gun in the first two hours. I’ll talk more about combat later, but for now, I will say that the glue gun is a useful weapon, both for the options it opens up and the way it helps compensate for some of the inherent problems with combat in the game. The unofficial tutorial ends with our first neuromod. Morgan injects these devices into the area around her eye to gain a new skill point which can be used for everything from stat boosts to alien abilities. This image is quite dramatic, but it looks a little odd that the needles have already popped out as she raises it to her face. By this point, you’re probably wondering why the hell you’re injecting alien substances into your eyes. Fortunately the game provides you with a nice little lore dump shortly after. Prey takes place in an alternate reality where JFK survived the assassination attempt. As alternate reality ideas go, it’s about as novel as ‘what if someone killed Hitler before he came to power,’ but it’s not really important. In 1963, the Americans and Soviets agree to work on a space-based research facility named Kletka. This research facility will later become Talos I. Even taking into account that the Russians and Americans were working together, it seems a bit of a stretch to believe they could build a habitable space station in 1963, especially in such a short period of time. In 1964, the US buys the rights to Kletka and starts making substantial bioscience developments as part of Project Axiom. Project Axiom made rapid progress by working on the alien species known as the typhon which were discovered in the late fifties or early sixties by a Russian satalite. Material from the typhon was used to develop neuromods. While being injected around the eye might sound unpleasent, the rewards might just be worth it. By injecting the appropriate neuromod, you can learn a foreign language, become a classical pianist, or even understand how to play 4X games. By the 1980s, Project Axiom was put on hold due to geopolitical issues on Earth and later stopped completely after two scientists died onboard. In 2025, a private company known as Transtar purchases Kletka and tarts it up a bit. In 2030, Talos I is opened for business and serves as a monument to the private space industry. Back to the story. January tells you to go to your office where you watch a video you recorded previously for this very eventuality. A few years ago, Morgan started testing a new type of neuromod based on typhon organisms and tried mapping their neural pattern onto hers. The neuromods have to be removed before new ones can be added, however removing a neuromod causes memory loss. There’s a system in place to bring Morgan back up to speed between tests, but Alex has messed with that part causing Morgan to repeat the same day over and over again. Morgan figured out that something was wrong and reprogrammed the operator that is now known as January to effectively act as a back up. Morgan is about to tell you why Alex has been messing with your routine when the message gets cut off. To watch the rest of the message, you must fix the Looking Glass system which in turn requires you to access Dr. Calvino’s workshop. Once there, you restore the connection and head back to your office to watch the rest of the video. Morgan tells you that you have to destroy Talos 1 to make sure not even one single cell of Typhon material makes it back to Earth. You have to blow yourself up, along with everyone else on the station. Alex doesn’t agree. He’s too proud to accept failure, and presumably doesn’t want to die, so he will try to stop you. Your next quest is to get the two arming keys--one yours and one Alex’s--to blow up the station. If you think this seems to be moving along a bit quickly, then I have good and bad news. The good news is that you are still nowhere near the end of the game. There’s plenty more to do. The bad news is that you’re going to spend a long time just exploring the station with no real motivation other than a general desire to find the arming keys and kill yourself. There’s lots of backtracking and a few heavily contrived problems put in your way to add to the game’s length. This is a good time to stop talking about the story and start looking at what you actually do in the game. I keep mentioning neuromods, so let’s talk about them first. Instead of levelling up in the game through an XP bar, you’ll need to find neuromods to unlock skills. Early on, you can learn skills with just one neuromod, but the number you need quickly increases so that you’ll eventually need 8 neuromods to upgrade some skills to the final level. The neuromod skill tree is where you will create your character and decide how you are going to play the game. You’re presented with three different skill trees--scientist, engineer, and security. These descriptions do a piss poor job of describing what skills are in each group, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Security sounds like it would be about weapons--which it is--but it also includes stealth skills. Engineer includes things like repair, but hacking is shunted off into the scientist category. I spent a long time looking through all these skills when I spent my first few neuromods. Some skills are clearly meant to assist those who want to do direct combat and others help with stealth. You also get unexciting, but useful, skills that provide additional materials, increase inventory space, and help you repair turrets. The skills should be up on the screen now and lumped into four categories: combat; stealth; neutral; and indirect combat. The number next to each skill is the amount of neuromods you’ll need to unlock the full potential of the skill. The exact split is up for debate. I classify skills like enhanced health to be combat focus because typically if I’m playing stealth then I avoid direct combat and don’t need health. As you can see, while there aren’t a lot of what I label stealth skills, there is a large neuromod cost to unlocking the maximum stealth abilities. You can probably combine stealth and indirect combat skills because they both involve avoiding your character getting into gun fights. If you do that, it’s not far off from an even split between direct combat and stealth in terms of the options available to you when deciding where to allocate skill points. I wanted to play stealthily, so I used my neuromods to unlock leverage--which helps lifts objects that might be in the way--and the ability to walk without being heard. I wouldn’t recommend you take this approach. I always hesitate to use absolutes when talking about games. I never pretend to be the greatest gamer--in fact I think I’m fairly average--so generally when I say what you can and can’t do in games I’m talking about the average gamer. With that in mind, I’ll say the following: stealth is not a viable build in Prey. At the beginning, it’s deceptively easy to sneak around the levels and generally remain unseen by the game’s more troublesome enemies, however this doesn’t last long and you will eventually have to build into combat skills. I generally min max in games like this, however in Prey, I ended up spreading my Neuromods all over the place. As I mentioned, I started off investing a few points in stealth and then leverage to help sneak into a couple of rooms that I couldn’t otherwise get to. Quick aside here: you don’t need to invest all the way up to leverage 3. There wasn’t a single leverage 3 item that I couldn’t move by picking up a nearby leverage 1 item and throwing it at the bigger thing. I’m torn on whether I like this. It’s a pretty cool use of the game’s physics system and a good example of the Play Your Way mechanic. However, I’d be pissed if I spent loads of neuromods to get to level 3 and then found out I needn’t have bothered. Anyway, with my increased stealth and leverage, I was doing a lot of exploring and collecting which meant my inventory filled up. I used a neuromod to give myself a little more inventory space because I despise inventory management. All this exploration means you’re going to end up in lots of combat encounters with mimics. I started getting annoyed at my limited stamina so I boosted this a bit. Next up was a skill called necropasy. For some reason, you can’t pick up exotic materials from dead typhon until you’ve learned this skill and I was getting a bit annoyed at leaving it all behind so I invested some points here. I was still trying to play vaguely stealthy at this stage, so I learned to repair turrets to help deal with the phantoms. Combat became harder and harder to avoid, so I added some health benefits and then skills that boost materials created from scrap which in turn helps you make more ammo. More on that later. I knew I needed more skill in combat I invested neuromods in upgrading my weapons... and I think you get the point now. My skills were all over the place out of necessity, or at least it felt like it. Apart from the one decision at the beginning of the game, I never felt like I was choosing to play the game my way. I was simply trying to keep on top of the challenge. Because make no mistake, Prey is a hard game. I know that’s going to vary a lot between players, but it’s undeniably more challenging than other major titles. It doesn’t need to be as hard as it is but that’s a separate conversation, By this stage, I realized that my plan to play stealthily might not have been a great one and that was all but confirmed when a new batch of neuromod options appeared about ten hours into my playthrough. The skill tree I went over earlier only includes half of the options available, but you won’t know that when you start. You can also inject yourself with Typhon abilities like disguising yourself as a mug or even resurrecting dead bodies to fight on your behalf. You’re not shown these skills up front though. If I’d known I would unlock these abilities, I would have hoarded some of my neuromods. The problem with these new skills isn’t just that they come as a surprise. It’s that they shift the focus to combat in a big way. Here’s the table I made before showing the split of abilities into categories. And here’s a new table with the alien skills added in. I’m probably being generous in attributing remote manipulation to stealth because I never found much use for it. Really, the only new stealth ability you’ll care about is mimic, because it looks cool to disguise yourself as a coffee cup. The shift to a combat focus should serve as a warning for what is to come in the second half of the game and I pity anyone who decides to stick to human only skills. January implies that injecting alien neuromods will make you lose part of your humanity, but to me it felt like much more of a tactical decision. If you inject enough of them the turrets will detect you as alien and shoot on sight. I decided this was a risk worth taking, because most turrets I came across were already destroyed by phantoms anyway. Once I stocked up on some offensive alien skills, the combat became a lot more bearable. Firing shotguns into black blobs felt unsatisfying but there’s no frame of reference for alien skills such as pyschoshock or electrostatic burst and as such it doesn’t feel so frustrating to use. I mentioned earlier in the video that while I loved the tutorial when I played it, I ended up annoyed that Arkane didn’t do it completely differently. There are a hell of a lot of skills to pick from in Prey, but half of them are kept secret from you until you’ve already spent a large chunk of neuromods. The game also pretends that stealth is a valid way to play the game from start to finish, and it’s really not. If the tutorial had shown me what powers I would get to play with later in the game, I might not have wasted so many of my precious neuromods on stealth skills that I barely used. The weird thing is, the introduction of the story lends itself perfectly to a better tutorial. At the start of the game, Morgan is experimenting with alien neuromods. The neuromods are then stripped out and she loses her short term memory. Morgan is supposed to go through a short recap where she’s brought up to speed on her lost memories, however Alex is messing with that so she lives the same day again and again. This story could have been used to introduce players to a sample of the alien skills they would get later on in the game. Arkane doesn’t even need to think up an excuse for why the powers are later stripped away because that’s already part of the story. Let’s imagine that the game starts in the same way it already does, with Morgan waking up in her room and taking the helicopter ride to the training center. Once there, you do a test as before except the game tells you to use a skill--say mimic--and you pass with flying colors. The game then fades to black and suddenly you’re in another test chamber. You’ve skipped forward to test 5 and have no idea what just happened. You complete another test--let’s say psychoblast this time--and then skip to the end where you’re congratulated on completing all twenty tests. You as the player are left wondering why there are weird gaps in the timeline. You then wake up the next morning except you skip the helicopter ride and are suddenly on test four and then test fifteen. You could even black out in the middle of one of the tests. The idea is to give the player Morgan’s faulty memories and make them experience it instead of just being told about it. I know this isn’t entirely consistent with the current story. Morgan can’t remember anything when she wakes up in the morning, whereas the player will clearly still have memories of the tests they did the day before. I still think it’s an improvement just due to the way it lets you experiment with the skills before deciding which approach you’re going to take. A further change I’d make is to allow you to acquire alien neuromods from the start. There’s not much point in keeping them separate and the narrative link to them popping up is trivial at best. I mentioned that you’re going to be doing a lot of combat in Prey, so let’s see what that looks like. Your first experience with combat will see you armed with a wrench going up against a mimic. Mimics are creatures that can disguise themselves as small objects such as mugs or chairs, which creates the potential for some damn good jump scares. To the best of my knowledge, no one in the game knows how mimics are able to replicate nearby objects. One theory mentioned in the game is that the mimics aren’t disguising themselves as another object--they’re swapping with an object in a parallel dimension. I don’t think it makes much difference, but I thought I’d mention it. Mimics are challenging to fight for a number of reasons. The obvious difficulty is that mimics have the element of surprise which means you have to always be ready, surveying your surroundings for anything that looks out of place. The developers clearly intended to make the player scared of every object and I enjoyed the experience for the first few hours. Never knowing when a mimic might pop up adds a real element of tension to the game and it’s satisfying when you get the jump on them by noticing a trash can out of place or a duplicate coffee cup. In some rooms, every object that isn’t nailed down has a little post it note on it stating ‘This is not a mimic.’ You’re not the only one creeped out by these alien creatures. This effect drops off once you notice that there’s a music cue when you walk into a room with a mimic and they usually show themselves before hiding. Unfortunately, if you’re not able to get the jump on mimics, you’re going to have a rough time. They’re fast. They fly around much quicker than you can turn--although to be fair, there are doped up turtles that can turn quicker than you in this game. You end up swinging your wrench wildly until you run out of stamina--which doesn’t take long at the beginning of the game--and the mimics will nearly always get at least one hit on you. Most fights with mimics end up becoming battles of attrition where you accept you’re going to take a couple of hits but hope that you have more health than they do. Combat with the wrench is horrendous, but it’s a little harsh to judge a game by its default melee weapon so let’s have a look at what else is on offer. Prey offers you a degree of flexibility for what route you take when moving around the station, so there’s no guarantee you’ll find the weapons in the same order I did. That said, most players will stumble across the glue gun early on. It’s almost essential as a weapon and as a tool for exploration. Mimics move quickly and are hard to hit, so using the glue gun to temporarily freeze them in place should be the logical thing to do. Unfortunately, the quick moving mimics can be just as hard to hit with the glue gun as they are with the wrench. The glue gun also fires large blobs--for want of a better word--which have a tendency to attach to the first thing they brush against. If your aim is slightly off, the glue will stick to the edge of a desk or a pipe. Glue gun ammo is limited, so when you end up firing it all over the place only to miss the mimic with every shot, you’ll end up frustrated and just whacking it with a wrench anyway. You’re best off saving that glue gun ammo if you can, because it’s almost essential against the phantoms, which are the second enemy you’ll meet in the game. You can avoid some of the early phantoms, but at some point you’ll need to take them on. There are different types of phantom, but they can all move quickly and deal heavy damage. The glue gun might buy you time to hide or get a few shots in without them being able to retaliate. You’ll need more than just a wrench and a glue gun to get through the game. The familiar pistol and shotgun are going to be your main damage dealers and they show up just how slow and unresponsive the combat is in Prey. Swinging a wrench around is one thing, but any gamer who’s played a few first person shooters is going to have expectations for how these guns should feel to shoot. You might feel like these expectations are unfair given that Prey is not attempting to be Battlefield, but that’s besides the point. If a game is going to give you guns, it should make them fun to use. The lack of a zoom down sights option is a painful omission and aiming is ridiculously sluggish. I turned the sensitivity up but it didn’t help a great deal. There is also a stun gun and a bow that shoots foam projectiles which can be used to distract enemies. The Q-beam was the last gun I found, but it’s probably the most powerful. You have to keep the beam trained on the enemy until a bar fills up and they explode. You can’t be all that precise with the weapons, but you don’t need to be. I’m not sure which came first: the decision to have no aim down sights or to have enemies with no meaningful weak spots. Phantoms and other large enemies soak up a ridiculous amount of bullets and never so much as stagger when you unload four shotgun blasts at their midriffs. Of course, there’s a suitable lore reason for why the enemies are so boring, but all the lore in the world doesn’t change the fact that the fights are exactly that--boring. There’s no cover system, so fights just end up being battles of attrition. Who’s got the biggest health bar? In the case of the phantoms, probably not you. You’ll need to get the upper hand by freezing them in place first, and don’t even think about reloading once they’ve detected you. There are a few other cool gadgets that are worth mentioning. The recycling charges can be used to suck in and recycle materials that might be blocking a door, but they can also be used to kill enemies. I never had enough of them to make this a valid long-term tactic, but they did get me out of a few tight spots. There’s also devices that nullify typhon abilities or lures to get them out of the way and it’s all easily accessible on the weapon wheel. For about three to four hours, I put up with the combat limitations, because I didn’t see the game as predominantly combat focused. I had a great time sneaking around and jumping out of my seat when mimics appeared out of nowhere. I snuck past the phantoms and treated the game like a survival horror experience. If I absolutely had to fight, I placed some turrets and lured the enemies into their path. I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, as time went on it became much harder to play the game this way. Despite all the Play Your Way marketing, combat is essential and if you’re not properly equipped, you’re screwed. I ended up acquiring a few typhon abilities to make life easier on myself, although they weren’t much fun to use. Pyschoshock is probably the most useful and often takes off a huge chunk of health off enemies, however it does it without any kind of skill on the part of the player. You just press L2 and it hits the nearest typhon. Combat focus isn’t an alien skill, but it sure feels like one. You can slow down time to get a few quick hits in, although at the lower levels you will also move slower as well. It’s useful and fun to use when it’s fully upgraded. You can use other skills like mindjack and machine mind to turn enemy typhon and machines against each other although the combat is tedious to watch unfold and occasionally I just stepped in and finished off the fight. The last game I played where I turned enemies against each other was Horizon and it’s safe to say that watching robot dinosaurs fight is infinitely more enjoyable. This is another random aside--about the third one at this point--but I don’t know where else to talk about it. If you’re watching the video you might have noticed that Morgan sways from side to side a lot. I have a confession here: it took me a very long time to release that this was due to radiation sickness. That’s definitely on me, but there is an interesting set of coincidences for how I managed to miss this for so long. First of all, there are issues with input lag, sensitivity, and drifting on the PS4. The input lag improved after a patch but the default sensitivity is far too low and there’s definite drifting. Morgan would often slide to the side without any input from me. I looked this up online and saw that it was a fairly widespread problem. After a couple of hours, I increased the sensitivity a few notches because the default settings were infuriating. Shortly after, I noticed that Morgan would sway drastically from side to side as if the game were detecting tiny movements of my thumbs on the analog sticks. Knowing about the drifting issue, I assumed this was a bug, so I turned the sensitivity back down and it stopped. After a few more hours, the problem popped up again and I was at a loss for the cause. I guess with hindsight it should have been obvious that the problem was radiation poisoning, however radiation already slows down health regeneration and decreases your stamina, so it never occurred to me that there would also be a weird swaying effect. Anyway, I eventually figured it out, but I wanted to mention it in case you wondered why the hell I was swaying from side to side all the time in the video. Combat becomes a lot more bearable once you start using the alien skills, and I strongly recommend you do. If you pick and choose carefully, you’ll end up with a skill suitable for each enemy type. I understand why some players might want to stick to human skills, but you’re making like unnecessarily hard on yourself if you do. Before going back to the main story, let’s take a quick look at the side quests. For a good few hours you feel like you’re alone on Talos 1, but eventually you start bumping into other people and the station feels a touch more alive. The first person I came across was a volunteer called Aaron Ingram. Volunteer should be in inverted commas, because he’s actually a prisoner. Transtar uses prisoners for some of its experiments and Morgan is not innocent in all this. Ingram is guilty of all sorts of horrible offenses, although he professes his innocence. You can open a door and let a typhon in to kill him, or let Aaron go. The use of volunteers on Talos 1 hints at a dark underbelly to life on the station, but it’s treated much like any other side story instead of being given the thought it deserves. My first impressions of the side quests weren’t all that positive. Fetch quests are always a little tiresome, but they’re even more annoying when the reward is less ammo than you expended trying to find it. You often get a tiny bit of additional story or information about the crew, such as initials carved into a tree, however this sort of thing felt more akin to what you might find in an email and wasn’t enough to justify the effort I put into the quest. One side quest you can’t just ignore is a large typhon beast called the Nightmare that pops up to hunt you down at what appear to be random intervals. The first time this guy showed up I decided to hide from him and he never found me. I never even saw him. I shrugged and moved on, assuming that the side quest was done. It wasn’t. He showed up again and I killed him. Killing it isn’t enough though. The nightmare keeps returning and eventually it becomes a nuisance. It’s one of the more video gamey moments in Prey and should have been left out or at least more sparsely used. That’s the negative, however there’s plenty of positives when it comes to the side quests, particularly the way they end up integrating with the main story. In one quest, you wander into the kitchen area and find a telepath which has a few crew members under its control and the chef, Will Mitchell, is trapped in the kitchen. You can either kill the crew or set them free by killing the telepath or using the appropriate typhon power if you have it. You complete a quick fetch quest for the chef and then he agrees to let you into the freezer. He made it sound like an act of generosity, so I wandered right on in. Unfortunately he’s not the real Will Mitchell; he’s one of the prisoner slash volunteers who has escaped. He trapped me in the freezer and continued to taunt me for the rest of the game. I thought that was it for this side quest, but there’s more to it than that. In a separate quest, you meet up with Danielle Sho, a woman I’d already heard a lot about from emails and recorded conversations. Thanks to audiologs, I’d already heard her talking with her partner Abigail, but I also knew that Abigail was dead, because I’d stumbled across her body. An audiolog told me to bang on a window near the swimming pool to find Danielle. Sure enough, after banging on the window, Danielle shows up floating around in space. Danielle is low on oxygen. With her last breaths, she asks you to kill the imposter chef from the last side quest to get revenge for his murder of Abigail. This side quest also links in nicely with the main story because later on you need Danielle’s voice to open a door. If you ask, she’ll record a voice sample to save you hunting around for separate parts. Annoyingly, Danielle insists on staying outside the station until her air runs out and apparently there’s no way to save her. One side quest stood out above all others. Apparently. I can’t say with any degree of certainty how good the quest is because it bugged out on me and I couldn’t even start it. A couple of emails mention that Morgan used to date a woman called Mikhaila. I kept waiting to find her dead body but it never happened. Instead I bumped into her in the Coolant Monitoring Station. This is what should have happened next. Mikhaila is sick and you only have two hours to get her the meds she needs. I like the idea of throwing in time limits like this to add a sense of urgency. After giving her the meds, she asks you to look for her father. To no huge surprise, her father is dead and furthermore it was you who killed him via your experiments. You’re given the choice to tell Mikhaila what you did or delete the evidence. It sounds like a decent quest with one of the more thoughtful moral quandaries in the game. Unfortunately, when I showed up to meet Mikhaila for the first time, she had a red bar over her head which suggested she was hostile to me. She never actually attacked me, but I couldn’t talk to her either. I came back again later and she glitched out in the floor before appearing as a dead body. This is not an uncommon glitch by the sounds of it. I’ve seen it suggested that Mikhaila goes hostile to you if you use alien powers in her presence, but I never did that. After completing the game, I went back to an old save file and played for over three hours to get back to this quest. It was still glitched. This was with patch 1.04 installed. It might have been fixed since then, but I’m not sure. Prey deserves credit for implementing its side quests in a way that feels meaningful and elevates them above what is usually not much more than another fetch quest. There are a few more examples of side quests integrating with the main story, so let’s go back to the story and finish it off. When I left off with the story, Morgan had to find the two arming keys and blow up the station. Alex has destroyed his arming key, however fortunately there’s a fabrication plan in deep storage that you can use to make a new one. To get to deep storage you have to travel to the arboretum and that requires you to go through the Gravitational Utility Tunnel System, or GUTS for short. This is one long low gravity tunnel and it’s absolutely horrendous. This was definitely one of the least entertaining parts of the game for me. I know I said earlier that the low gravity stuff was quite enjoyable, but when you add in enemies it’s terrible. The combat is already unresponsive and clunky, so combine that with spinning around in low gravity and you have a mixture for disaster. I started off trying to make my way around the enemies, but that didn’t last long. Eventually, I ran out of ammo and had to power through which worked, but was hardly satisfying. Life didn’t get any easier when I made it to the arboretum. This was where I gave up trying to play stealthily. The arboretum has a lot of enemies, and some of them are basically impossible to avoid. There’s one spot with two phantoms prowling around by a door where you don’t have much choice but to get into direct combat unless you plan to just make a run for it to another loading screen. While you’re here, it’s worth fixing an elevator to create a shortcut back down to the lobby. The door to deep storage is locked, however a conveniently placed dead body and a recording device point the way forward. You need to find voice samples from Danielle Sho to open the door. This is the part of the game where it officially went wrong. Up until this point, I kept hoping the survival horror vibe from the first few hours might return. It didn’t. Backtracking makes up most of the second half of the game and it’s not a lot of fun. I mentioned earlier that you can just speak to Danielle to get the complete voice access code, however as is typical of my luck, I happened to get 80% of the voice samples before stumbling upon Danielle. It doesn’t really matter either way. Once you’re done, you go back to Deep Storage and get through the door. You’re not in deep storage for long when, Alex locks you in to try and prevent you blowing up the station. Being locked in doesn’t stop you hunting for the fabrication plan for Alex’s key which requires you to enter another low gravity area, find a hard drive, and connect it to the computer. After downloading the fabrication plan you can escape out an airlock and hunt for a way back into the ship. All of the airlocks have been locked, so to get back in you need to use the station’s computer to bring in one of the many pods that are floating around in space. One of the pods has a man called Dr Igwe trapped inside and the game strongly encourages you to bring his pod in as your way back into the station via the cargo bay. It’s not the only way back into the station, but you could be forgiven for thinking so due to the heavy hints in the game. Dr Igwe ends up being a pretty important character and was heavily involved in the final act of the story. It’s a little odd that this part is optional, but I’ll talk about that more later. Now that you’re in the cargo bay, you can meet up with Sarah Elazar and the surviving members of the crew who have been hanging out this entire time. You need to get through one specific door with a whole load of typhons on the other side, but Sarah won’t give you the key code until you’ve placed a load of turrets outside the door to give everyone a decent chance of survival. It wasn’t until I went back to the video footage to make this video that I realized this was technically an optional side quest. The game presents this task in a way that makes it sound like placing turrets is mandatory but I think you can hack your way through if you want. You do have flexibility in how you get the turrets. You can either find them lying around and repair them, or fabricate some new ones. The typhon aren’t all that tough to defeat once you’ve placed the turrets, although I still managed to make a mess of it the first time. Sarah walked right into my line of fire and they all turned against me. Seemed a little harsh. Once you’ve dealt with that problem, Alex calls you up and asks to meet. There’s now a weird orange glowing substance known as Coral floating around Talos 1. If you touch this stuff it will restore your psi which is the consumable pool for using typhon powers. Alex is a no show, but you get to watch another video from yourself explaining what the hell is going on. You see Morgan use some cool powers and then acknowledge that she’s going to lose them soon when her memory gets stripped. Morgan explains that she thinks the Typhon have an external neural framework and she’s given Alex a way to shut it down. Morgan is convinced this device will work and she doesn’t like the idea of blowing everything up. Alex has been telling you this entire time that you’ll change your mind when you find out the truth and to be fair, he has a point. Morgan is clearly the one who’s passionate about carrying the project forward. You also should know by this point that Morgan has been conducting experiments on people on the ship. You’re not the self-sacrificing hero you thought you were. The constant memory stripping has changed Morgan, but Alex is still prepared to leave the final choice with you. He promises to give you the arming key if you promise to scan the typhon coral and at least consider using the nullwave device to take down the typhon. At this point, it’s probably worth mentioning that January isn’t the only operator Morgan programmed over the last few months. There’s also an operator called December who encourages you to jump in an escape pod and leave. You can also find a broken operator called October, which suggests there’s a November somewhere although I never found it. Anyway, Morgan heads back out into space to scan the Coral with the nullwave device. This is another horrible section with plenty of combat in space to drain any ammo you might have been clinging on to. After scanning the coral, you discover that this neural network can communicate and consists of the psyche of all the humans that died on the ship. This is where the game should have come to a close. You have all the information you’re going to get to make the final decision and you’re probably at least 20 hours in. There’s one more twist in the tail, and it’s completely unnecessary. All this time, there’s actually been a nearby military base and Transtar have ordered a military commander callled Dahl to relieve Alex and Morgan of their positions on the ship. Dahl brings a bunch of military operators with him and these things are a huge pain in the arse to deal with. They’re everywhere, and seriously, if you’re still doing the stealth thing, then fair play, because I was all into combat at this point. Even with a maxed out shotgun and neuromods in combat skills, the military operators still took multiple hits to take out. They go down a lot quicker with the disrupter gun, but I started running past them after a while and just taking the damage. Your immediate quest is to access Dahl’s shuttle. Once on board you listen to your own father give the command to kill everyone on Talos 1 including you and Alex. Dahl cuts off the air supply in the cargo bay endangering all the crew down there and you only have 15 minutes to solve the problem. A load more side quests pop up, once again gently suggesting that you do things a certain way. For example, Dahl is sending military operators after you so you can disable your tracking bracelet. Igwe pops up over the radio and asks you to take Dahl alive. You have to meet Igwe in your office first for no apparent reason, which just increases the amount of backtracking you're doing. Dahl is easy enough to knock out with the disrupter gun and the air supply is easily fixed. Igwe then strips Dahl’s memories so that he doesn’t know why he’s on the station. Dahl will then use his shuttle to take the rest of the crew off the station. You can blow the shuttle up if you think it’s too risky for people to make it back to Earth, assuming that’s where they’re going. Once Dahl is out of the picture one way or another, you can meet up with Alex for real this time. Prey gives you a decent amount of freedom here. You can straight up just kill Alex and steal his arming key if you want. Assuming you let him talk, he tells you about his desire to take the limelight away from the Transtar Board of Directors. He has evidence that shows the coral is broadcasting a neural signal--a secret message to the stars--and he wants to find out what the message is and who is listening. He gives you a fabrication plan for a nullwave device that will eliminate all the typhon and allow the ship to survive. The second you take the plan, a massive typhon thing called the Apex attacks Talos 1. The Apex messes with the gravity onboard and starts working its way into the ship. It also does a hell of a lot of damage if you get too close. Alex loses consciousness, but you can save him by dragging him into a nearby safe room and closing the door. We are now finally at the end of the game. You can either arm the self-destruct system or create and activate the nullwave device. I’ll talk more about the merits of this actual choice later. Whichever one you choose, you’re going to have to do a fair bit of backtracking. The large typhon thing will bug you wherever you go, but I just kept running and ignoring everything I possibly could. I wish I could tell you this was due to my excitement to see the end, however it was much more about my apathy for the game’s combat. Let’s talk about the self-destruct ending first. You slog through more enemies to arm the device and then return to your office to activate it. Alex is there and will make one more attempt to change your mind, but January zaps him unconscious. As she points out, it doesn’t really matter because everyone’s going to die anyway. Before the station explodes you hear Dahl talking to January as he boards the shuttle and leaves. In my version, Dahl had crew members on board with him, so I’m not sure why January didn’t try to stop him leaving given she’s so concerned about the risk of typhon material getting back to Earth. There’s a post credit sequence, however it’s identical to the post credit sequence you get when you do the other ending, so I’ll just talk about it then. If you choose to activate the nullwave device, you have to kill January because she locks you out of the system. Once that’s done, you place the device and activate it, killing all typhon on the station and the surrounding area. Now we get to the post-credit scene. It’s the twist. The big reveal. The moment that recontextualizes the entire game you just played and makes you dwell on your own morality and what it really means to be human. That’s probably how it’s described in the design document anyway. Let’s have a look at how it actually plays out. You wake up sat in a chair with Alex and four operators talking about you. You can’t move your head much, however you can just about see that your hands are black. Alex asks the operators--who are all named after people you know from the game--what they thought of Morgan’s performance and they go through one by one talking about how you did. These responses are all going to vary a bit depending on your playthrough, but here’s the summary from mine. Igwe commended me for saving him, even though it was the obvious thing to do, and then talks about my use of typhon powers. His language is so vague that I can’t tell if he’s criticizing me for this or not. Sarah commends Morgan for helping out in the cargo bay, even though that section was basically mandatory. Danielle is pleased you found her, but then talks vaguely about how you didn’t kill the imposter chef for her. Again, the language is so vague as to be essentially meaningless. Finally, my ex-girlfriend casually mentions how I didn’t save her, but isn’t at all bothered by it. I wasn’t given the opportunity to point out that I would have saved her if she hadn’t bugged the fuck out on me. Strangely, I also got criticized for killing Alex even though I didn’t. I don’t understand this comment. I did kill Alex on a different save file, but I’m fairly certain the game isn’t picking up on that. It’s probably something obvious that I’ve missed--feel free to explain this bit in the comments if you understand this reference. Alex then explains what the hell is going on. You’re not Morgan at all. You’re a typhon. Alex implanted Morgan’s memories in your head and made you relive them as a simulation. The typhon have already taken over Earth and it’s in a bad way. Alex explains that after years of trying to put typhon powers into humans, they finally decided to do it the other way around. This was a test to see how typhons would react. Would they behave like a real human? Can your character be a bridge between the species? You’re given one final choice. Alex offers you his hand and you can either shake his hand or kill him. Either way, the game ends for real at this point. This last decision is so silly that I’m going to assume it’s just a joke and not get too hung up about it. So that’s it. It was all a simulation. There’s no way I can let that ending go by without discussing it in a bit more detail. Let’s deal with the obvious stuff first. Having the big twist be ‘you were in a simulation all along’ is not an acceptable ending. Is there a reason for the simulation story? Yes. Does it technically make sense? Yes. Is it a satisfying way to end 30 hours of a game that constantly hammered home the importance of the choices you had to make? Of course not. Finding out you were in a simulation, is the 21st century equivalent of a book ending with the protagonist waking up from a dream. It’s bullshit and cheap. In fact, and I don’t use this word lightly when talking about games, it’s lazy. Let’s move on. The most obvious questions raised by the ending are what happened to Earth and to Morgan? The most likely scenario is probably that all those neuromods the people of Earth have been injecting somehow led to the spread of the Typhon. Or perhaps the real Morgan made it back to Earth but by that point she was jacked up to the nines with typhon powers and that led other typhon to Earth for an invasion. I don’t think Morgan is dead. I think she’s the opposite to your character now. You are a typhon whose only memories belong to Morgan. You think you’re human. Morgan is actually a human, but I suspect she’s been taken over by typhon. The next game--assuming there is one--will likely pit you up against this phantom Morgan. That’s about all I have for theories because the game gives you very little to work with. In terms of the actual story, first I think it’s important to assume that what happened in the simulation did actually happen in the real world, at least up until the final decision and maybe a few of the choices on who to save and kill. It’s impossible to critique a story if every plot hole and qwirk can be waved away as part of the whole ‘it’s a simulation’ thing. It’s tempting to think about what is real and what isn’t. The whole bit at the beginning about Morgan losing her memories is incredibly convenient. The entire experiment doesn’t really work if you as the typhon have all of Morgan’s memories. Real Morgan’s amnesia is crucial to the simulation which wouldn’t have worked without it. Does that mean the memory loss is a lie to help the typhon accept being a blank slate? Or is it just one hell of a coincidence? Real Morgan had to be losing her memory and having her memory stored or none of this works. Speaking of which, Morgan tells you that she loses her memories when the neuromods are removed. I got they impression they were permanently lost. If they can be put back into the typhon then why couldn’t they be put back into Morgan? Like I said, the story really falls apart if you start questioning what is real and what is just part of the simulation. Beginning a story with amnesia is already a bit of a cheap tactic by itself, but combining amnesia at the start and then a simulation at the end just doesn’t work. At its heart, Prey is a relatively simple story of an alien lifeform taking over a ship, and the attempts by humans to either get off the ship or blow it up. There’s nothing wrong with that as a premise. Unfortunately, I don’t think Arkane nailed the execution. That’s not to say it’s terrible. Far from it. It’s okay. I’m largely apathetic towards the entire thing to be honest. I spent 30 hours on Talos 1 and read most of the emails and books in the game. Somehow I still don’t feel like I know much about how the typhon invaded and took over the ship. I guess it doesn’t really matter, but it would have been nice to piece together the full story throughout the game. On this note, sorting the emails and books into chronological order in your data tab would have been helpful. Instead, they’re all listed in the order found and therefore trying to make them into a cohesive whole is exhausting. A minor niggle is that Talos 1 felt largely empty until I suddenly found a group of survivors who I then barely interacted with again after opening a door for them. Morgan can’t talk, so you can’t discuss your plan or interact with them in any way. Given the limited amount of interaction, I have to wonder whether the game would have been any worse off with no other people on board Talos 1 at all? Maybe Alex as the last survivor and that’s it. A few plot holes seemed to have crept in which bugged me more than is probably reasonable or fair. First, there’s the whole situation with Dahl. I’m pretty sure he came from a nearby military base called Argus, but it’s not entirely clear. Dahl is supposed to collect all the research data on board the station which conjures up images of him sticking in a USB stick and downloading data like every Hollywood movie I’ve watched in the last ten years. I fail to believe Transtar would leave all that data on Talos 1 with no backup when they’re investigating an alien race. If Transtar wants to stop the typhon infestation spreading to Earth then letting Dahl board Talos 1 and then leave is probably not the greatest idea. On the subject of spreading the infestation to Earth, if they have a nullwave device that kills all typhon, can’t they use that on Earth? I’m assuming the nullwave device is real and not just part of the simulation, because that would be as annoying as hell. Overall, I get the impression that Prey doesn’t know what it wants to be. It sure as hell starts off as a survival horror game, however it ends in a chaotic mess of pulpy science fiction with the introduction of Dahl and that big typhon thing showing up out of nowhere. Like I said, simulation bullshit aside, I don’t hate the story. Let’s be honest, there are far worse ones in video games. It’s the execution I take issue with. Prey should either have been a 10 hour survival horror space adventure or a science fiction first person action game with much better combat. Instead it spreads the story out over closer to 20 hours by adding in lots of backtracking, and forces you to do combat when it doesn’t have the systems in place to make that fun. It’s a noble effort, but largely an unsuccessful one. Prey’s story is straightforward and not particularly memorable, however I’d wager most people aren’t playing Prey for a detailed narrative. It’s all about immersion and player choice. I’ll discuss choice at the end, but now would be a good time to see how well Prey lives up to that God awful immersion sim title. Prey nails the feeling that you are on board an actual space station thanks to cohesive level design that more than makes up for an uninspiring visual style. I don’t particularly like the 1950s art deco vibe. It’s been done to death at this point and shows a lack of imagination. It would have been much more challenging to come up with a modern theme that looked like something you might expect in space in the 2030s. You’d expect there to be minimal clutter and a cramped environment. The problem with this, of course, is that it runs the risk of looking incredibly bland and dull. That’s why Arkane went with the look they chose--it’s simply easier to create a visually stimulating set of levels by adopting this style. It requires a fair bit of explanation in the story though. For example, why are there books on a space station instead of tablets? The technology is clearly there judging by the computers. The luxurious furniture and equipment is the result of Transtar making the space station as appealing as possible to the world’s top scientists. That’s not completely unforeseeable. Companies like Google and Facebook have offices that look more like adult playgrounds than places of work. At a stretch, the fabrication machine can explain why there are coffee machines and bar stools, but how did the bigger objects get there. There are grand staircases and light fittings that don’t look like they’ve been 3D printed from an Ikea schematic. There is a space elevator on Earth although one company has a monopoly on it, so I imagine it’s an expensive way to transport a sofa let alone entire staircases. Anyway, the visual style isn’t to my taste, but it is at least consistent. Each area looks fit for purpose, while also being clearly designed in the same image. I don’t find the visuals particularly immersive, but the level design more than makes up for it. From the moment you first break the glass and leave your fake apartment, you feel like the levels are part of one entire ship. Yes, there are painfully long loading screens to deal with, however the geography of the station feels correct and that’s confirmed when you float out of an airlock. It’s hard not to be impressed when you spin around to look at the station and realize that it does all fit together with all the areas where you expect to find them. Loading zones stop you from truly appreciating this interconnectivity, but I did have a new found appreciation for the level design after seeing it all laid out like this. This exterior section is also the game’s fast travel system and as fast travel systems go, this is a pretty clever one. It’s not a particularly fast one mind you. To travel from one area to another, you have to first hope that the area you’re in has an airlock and then that the area you want to go to also has an airlock. Even if that’s the case, you then have to endure two loading screens. There are many cases when it’s probably quicker to stay on the station, although then of course you risk getting into combat and expending precious resources. Eventually that becomes a risk outside the station as well, but for a while you can treat it as a relaxing zone to move around in. The immersive sim label also applies to Prey’s storytelling which is done largely through one-sided conversations which complement information provided through emails and audiologs. I know it’s a popular opinion that silent protagonists help with immersion, but I prefer protagonists to interact with other characters in some way, even if there isn’t any voice acting. While the operator January plays a key role in the story, it still feels like she was created entirely to impart exposition at you. When done right, this style of storytelling can work, but it’s harder to get right than get wrong. Half Life famously has a silent protagonist and the constant radio calls in Bioshock are certainly worth it when you reach the twist at the end of the story. In Prey, the constant radio calls just get too much. On more than one occasion, I would be listening to an audio log when suddenly January would pop up and start talking over it, and then when she’s finished, Alex would call and talk at me for a few minutes. Then Sarah Elezar joins in and suddenly you don’t feel like you’re alone on the station anymore even though it’s eerily quiet. It’s like the station was busy but there’s been a sighting of Taylor Swift on the supply deck so everyone’s run there to to check it out. The conversations, if you can call them that, with Alex and January directly advance the plot, but if you want background information about Talos 1 or the people who lived on the space station then you’ll need to read the emails and listen to the audiologs. The audiologs do a good job of fleshing out characters that you would otherwise know nothing about. Probably the most notable side character is Danielle Sho. If it weren’t for the audiologs, you wouldn’t much care when you find her hanging around outside the spaceship mourning the loss of her partner. Instead, you can listen to her hanging out with her girlfriend as they record cheesy audiologs for their future selves to listen to. It means something when you later find Abigail’s dead body and have to watch as Danielle drifts alone in space. On the less positive side, there are plenty of audiologs that are solely designed to serve as mini tutorials in case the player can’t figure something out. For example, there’s an audiolog telling you how to bring in a container which pops up at just the right time. Unfortunately, the vast majority of emails fall into a similar category. Most computers have a couple of emails to read but they’re often little more than thinly veiled excuses to give the player key codes for doors or safes, or perhaps the location of a gun or ammo stash. Very few of the emails flesh out the world or characters, with the dungeons and dragons references perhaps the most memorable. You wouldn’t expect corporate emails to be treasure troves of character building information, however this is how Arkane has chosen to tell the story, and therefore the emails need to do more to build up the world and those who inhabit it. All the audiologs and emails in the world, don’t replace actually seeing characters living their lives on board the ships and therefore video footage or flashbacks would have been far more effective in making Talos 1 feel real and having us empathise with the few characters we meet. Flashbacks would fit with the story. They could be faulty parts of Morgan’s memory that got injected along with the necessary parts for the simulation. Security camera footage is another option, although it wouldn’t be as effective. One thing that can’t be understated when it comes to immersion is the system for recycling scrap and fabricating supplies. During the early hours, when you’re carefully walking down corridors, twitching at every shadow and jumping at every sound, you’ll have to carefully manage your supplies because you will always be in danger of running out. I found myself short of all types of ammo, health kits, suit repair kits, and spare parts. I picked up everything I could and even that wasn’t enough. Part of the problem is that by exploring, you encounter mimics which make you use up precious health and ammo, so whatever you find is just replacing what you lost. Even when you do get fully stocked up, you might hit a stretch where you don’t find any replacement ammo or health packs for some time and be on death’s door with no way out. This is where the recycling and fabrication machines come in. All the junk you pick up can be dropped in the recycling machine and turned into materials. Those materials can then be shoved in the fabrication machine and used to make most of the consumable items you’ll need in the game assuming you have the fabrication plan for that item. You can even make weapons, although you’ll likely find the weapon before the fabrication plan anyway. Perhaps most surprisingly, you can develop more neuromods and you’ll likely end up with an abundance with them by the end of the game. Having two separate machines for all this felt like an unnecessary extra step, but the recycler only takes a few seconds to use and it does make more sense to feed blocks of pure material to the fabrication machine instead of random bits of scrap. It is annoying when the machines aren’t together though. While they usually come as a pair, there are many occasions when you’ll find a recycler without a fabrication machine and vice-versa. This is a real pain in the arse and means you’ll either have to backtrack to find the other machine, or venture forward and hope you’ll come across one soon. There’s a good chance you won’t find another one soon because there’s not a tonne of these machines lying around. I once found myself with only 25% health and no ammo or medkits. The only fabrication machine nearby required me to get past three large enemies, all of whom seemed to spot me on sight the second I entered the room. I ended up running for a door that I knew would trigger a loading screen, then going back into the same room and just about making it to the fabrication machine without being spotted. It wasn’t a great deal of fun. This shortage of resources suits the game well for a few hours, maybe as many as five or six. I usually hate resource management, but if there’s one genre it works for it’s survival horror. The problem of course, is that Prey doesn’t stay a survival horror game for very long. Combat becomes unavoidable and when you have to start gunning down rooms full of phantoms with your pistol and shotgun, you’re going to constantly run out of ammo. This all makes the game quite challenging. Even when you have all the resources you need, you won’t breeze through the enemies and when you can’t use your gun or weapon of choice, you’re going to struggle. Prey isn’t easy and I’m not sure how I feel about that. The challenge to stay out of sight is one thing, but the amount of damage you take in combat is a touch ridiculous, and combined with potential shortages of resources you can end up getting yourself into situations that feel almost impossible to escape from. I’m not entirely sure the game needed to be this difficult. The combat isn’t tight enough for the challenge to feel fair like your typical Bloodborne or Dark Souls experience. The more enemies become unavoidable, the more the game frustrates and not in a way I found particularly enjoyable. Many enemies could have been removed without it negatively affecting the experience. Corrupted operators are probably the best example and I never want to see one of those military operators ever again. Balancing difficulty and immersion isn’t easy. On the one hand, being intimidated by the game’s more challenging enemies is important to keep you immersed. However, save scumming is immersion breaking and I definitely found myself slipping into that every now and again. Overall, Prey does a decent job of living up to the immersion sim label for half of the game when things are kept simple. It’s the second half of the game when things start petering out. When the game shifts from sneaking around to all out combat, Prey starts to feel like a generic and somewhat dated attempt to copy Bioshock almost ten years after that game’s release. I simply couldn’t stay immersed for the entire 30 hour experience, and as that immersion dropped off, so did my enjoyment. I’ve been pretty harsh on Prey so far, but most of the game is okay. A few improvements to the combat and a tighter story would have improved the game no end, but ultimately my problems with the game run a little deeper. My main gripe is with the heavily advertised Play Your Way system. Play Your Way largely focuses on gameplay options in the game, however it can also apply to the moral choices you’ll be presented with during the course of the game. Let’s look at the gameplay first. I’ve already touched on this, but to summarize, the game presents itself as having lots of options for how to progress and sometimes it genuinely lives up to that. If you want to get into a room you could try hacking the panel, or looking for the keycard, or climbing through a vent, or shooting the button to unlock the door, or even turning into a coffee cup and rolling through a gap. When it comes to getting into places, you do have an almost unrivaled amount of freedom. However, you still need to get into the room and you know that no matter what choices you’ve made there will always be a way into the room. The choice of whether you hack the panel or climb through a vent isn’t so exciting that you’ll want to replay the game again to experience doing it differently. Not to mention, all these decisions are usually blindingly obvious. 50% of the time, I already had the keycard for the door, so none of the other options even came into play. I didn’t have the mimic skill early on, so transforming into a coffee cup was out of the question and not all doors can be hacked. However, the developers refuse to not block off any content, so you know there will be a way in regardless of your build. Usually it’s a maintenance panel that can be moved, or a large object that needs shunting out of the way to reveal a secret path. Sneaking into locked rooms is satisfying the first two or three times, but that satisfaction quickly disappears when you realize it’s almost impossible to fail. As far as exploration goes, your choices simply do not matter, and as a result, nothing feels satisfying. One of the most common examples I see referenced for Prey’s flexibility in how you play revolves around use of the glue gun. By shooting glue at the wall, you can form makeshift staircases to get to places you’re not supposed to go. Or at least, to places the game pretends you’re not supposed to go. Early on, I used the glue gun to build a glue staircase to get to a balcony that had a disruptor gun to pick up. I felt quite smug for a few seconds, until I looked around the room and realized that I had done exactly what the game wanted me to do. There was clear signposting to tell you that you should try and build your own staircase, so it was fairly obvious. Prey gives you options for how to navigate its world, but only because it’s taken away the options to begin with. It felt like a staircase had been stripped out of the room just so players could make their own path. The jumping mechanics are also horrendous by the way, so expect to spend a lot of time falling off blobs of glue. Now, to be completely fair, this is near the beginning of the game, so this is arguably a tutorial of sorts. However, it happened later in the game as well. Once, I was taking a secret route through some maintenance tunnels and I had to make it up to a ledge that I couldn’t reach. A couple of well placed glue blobs can be used to get there, however the ledge feels artificially high to begin with. Yes, I had to use the glue gun to reach the ledge, but was I really playing my own way? I felt like I was playing the developer’s way. In addition to exploration, you’re allowed to choose the way you deal with the phantoms. You can avoid them, take them on directly, or lead them into traps. As I’ve already discussed, I started off playing Prey as a survival horror game and I had a great time. The longer the game went on, the more I switched my focus to direct combat. This was partly due to a lack of stealthy neuromod options, but also because of the sheer number of enemies. Even if you clear out an area, the enemies will respawn, usually in larger numbers depending on where you are in the story. And then there are examples like the part in the story where you are encouraged by Sarah to place turrets before opening a door. In case you missed the hint, the game throws up a couple of side quests to tell you you need turrets, but it gives you options for how to get them. You can find some lying around nearby and reprogram them, or you can turn the power on and use the fabrication machine. The game is making it very clear that you have a choice, because as players we’re increasingly programmed to value choice, even if that choice is meaningless. I can’t imagine anyone is going to replay the game and be all excited when the get back to this section due to the ability to find the turrets in a different way. This choice is not really about providing different ways to play. It’s about making sure you don’t get locked out of any content. The game is worried that you might not be able to reprogram the turrets, or that you might not have enough materials to fabricate new ones. This further reinforces my belief that Arkane doesn’t have the confidence to punish and reward players for their choices. Just like how you will always be able to get into a room, no matter what skills you’ve picked, you will always be able to place some turrets by the door if you want to. Obviously you don’t have to play the game the way I did, but the more I think about it, the more I’m sure that most people will have played the game this way. Now, I know that’s a silly thing to say on a YouTube video. I’m going to get a bunch of comments from people saying that they didn’t play it the same way, and that’s fine, but I’m convinced there’s some truth in this statement. Early in the game, you’re given the tools to take on mimics, but you’re going to struggle against the phantoms. Playing stealthily is the only sensible choice here. There’s an abundance of ways to avoid phantoms, so you have to actively decide to go up against them. The lobby area is a good example. You can move around the entire area without being seen so long as you stick to the top floor. I honestly can’t imagine many players going all glue guns blazing in the early hours. The more you play, the harder you’ll find it to stick to this stealthy approach. It’s easy to avoid a couple of phantoms on the ground floor by sticking to the roof, but when there are weavers and telepaths floating around, it becomes a lot harder to be stealthy, both in terms of the skill and patience required. One of the more baffling things I’ve seen people say about Prey is that it offers a lot of replayability because you can play entirely using human powers and then again using alien powers. That’s true enough, but by ignoring the alien skill tree, you’d be deliberately ignoring a large chunk of the content that makes the combat bearable. It’d be like saying Rise of the Tomb Raider has replayability because you can play it only using the bow and arrow and then a second time using guns. Or perhaps playing Need For Speed, but only turning left. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I don’t think there’s a good reason to avoid the alien powers. The game tries to pretend it’s a morale choice, but it’s really not. Finally, while Prey gives you multiple ways to solve problems, it often gives you the solution as a side quest. These side quests automatically become active quests, so it’s easy to assume that an optional side quest is a main quest. I’d have preferred Arkane to have a little more faith in players and let them find out solutions, or at least make it clear that there is more than one way to solve the problem. While you can play Prey however you like, I’d wager that at least two thirds of people will play it in a similar way. Start off slow and avoid enemies, then start taking enemies on, then get bored and start running past enemies. The more interesting discussion revolves around Prey’s moral choices. Let’s talk about that big decision at the end of the game. The decision about whether or not to blow up the station and kill everyone or to activate the nullwave. I can see how this might sound like an intriguing moral choice. Do you take the selfish route and activate the nullwave, or do you play the selfless hero and blow up the station? This only works as a cool moral choice because of the amount of information withheld from the player. Why is using the nullwave a risky move? Surely if everyone stays on the station then there’s no risk of the typhon making it to Earth? Can Alex and Morgan work on a way to defeat the typhon while on board the ship? January tries to convince Morgan that blowing up the station is the sensible choice, but it sounds stupid. Sure, you kill all the typhon, but there’s every chance they could come back, especially once the coral neural network is active. If Earth is already in trouble because people have been injecting typhon material into themselves, then Alex and Morgan might be Earth’s best chance of redemption. Killing yourself isn’t heroic; it’s stupid. Or is it? I don’t know, because I don’t have anywhere near enough information. The self destruct solution also makes a mess of the side quests. As January points out, why bother saving people if you’re going to use the self-destruct anyway? If I was role-playing as a character who had decided to use the self-destruct then I wouldn’t give a crap about saving people. What’s the point? I’d just be wasting time. I could even go on a killing spree for shits and giggles. Call it target practice. But then at the end, I’d be judged as an arsehole. The final insult is that neither choice is bad and you get an identical ending anyway, because of the whole simulation bullshit. The only ‘bad’ ending, is taking the escape pod and leaving early. I like that you can do this, but it’s clearly a failure state and you’ll want to reload a save game to play the rest of the game. Even the scene where the operators judge you at the end is underwhelming. So long as you complete a couple of side quests, you’ll get praise and be told that the experiment was a success. I’ve looked at the trophies for Prey and at the time of writing it looks like the vast majority of players who’ve completed the game achieved the gold trophy for having high empathy and I’d imagine most of them did it without even thinking about it all that much. The side quests attempt to test your morality. Do you kill the imposter cook for example? It doesn’t matter much either way. I didn’t, but only because I couldn’t find him and I’d lost interest in the side quests due to the bug on the Mikhaila quest. I got praised for showing restraint anyway. I also got praised for saving Igwe, but it looked like the only logical solution at the time. I didn’t care about him--I just needed to bring in a piece of cargo to get back into the ship. I’d have had gone out of my way not to rescue him. Then there’s the neuromods. When you first get the opportunity to use alien powers, you’re warned that turrets might detect you as an alien and fire. You’re also warned about the dangers of injecting yourself with a foreign substance. This is made out to be a big deal, but it’s really not. All we get is a brief mention at the end that by injecting yourself with typhon powers, maybe you were trying to become more like your true self. That’s it. I’ve made it most of the way through this video without making comparisons to other games, but I can’t talk about the moral choices in Prey without talking about Dishonored, a game also developed by Arkane. Dishonored does a much better job of implementing meaningful moral choice throughout the game and in a way that impacts the ending. I played through the original Dishonored twice, doing a stealth and no kill playthrough and then a deadly playthrough where I killed everything with a pulse, either biological or mechanical. Both approaches were viable options. Stealth was more challenging, but it was always possible. I never felt like the game was nudging me towards combat. When I had skill points to spend, there were plenty of stealth choices available, including things like the ability to pause time. Even at the end of the game, there were skills I hadn’t had the opportunity to acquire and wanted to use. There are also plenty of combat skills available, so if you want to kill everything you can, and you can get bloody creative with it as well. If you search YouTube, you’ll find videos of people pausing time, taking over enemy bodies, and moving them in front of bullets and loads of other flashy stuff as well. The actual combat has similar problems to Prey in that you’re often just swinging wildly, but my God, there are so many more entertaining ways to kill people in Dishonored. You can also utilize combat and maintain a no kill playthrough thanks to all the non-lethal takedown options. Exploration in Dishonored felt a lot more satisfying, but that’s in part down to the environment. Dishonored’s open townscapes offer more opportunities to create your own path by moving around rooftops and sneaking through windows. It’s not Prey’s fault that it’s set on a space station, but that does limit the freedom of movement. That’s how the gameplay differs, but it’s the moral choices where Dishonored really shows Prey how it should be done. A non-lethal playthrough is clearly considered the good ending whereas murdering lots of people gets you a bad ending. The impact is even felt before the ending. If you kill people, the streets will start to swarm with rats and there will be plague victims everywhere to make life more difficult. Let’s compare this to Prey. In Prey, you have a game that is clearly not intended to be played stealthily the entire way though. Only a small percentage of the skills are appropriate for stealth builds so you’ll quickly be looking to dump neuromods elsewhere. Some skills from Dishonored would have been welcome here, such as the ability to freeze time. You can slow time in Prey, but time slows for you as well as your enemies and it’s called “Combat Focus” so it’s clearly intended for combat. The combat itself doesn’t feel anywhere near as satisfying. You can’t pickpocket a phantom, or choke them unconscious. You either have to shoot them until they’re dead or run past them. As for moral choices… I’m not sure there are any. I’ve explained why I don’t like the ending choice, but it’s the lack of impact during the main game that is most obviously missing. Nothing changes based on your decisions. You could ignore all the side quests and the game wouldn’t feel any different. You could kill everyone. You could save everyone. What changes? You get some extra story material from a few characters, but the end result is always the same. I discussed a section of the game where you are encouraged to set up turrets to defend a door. If you don’t set up turrets then the NPCs can presumably die, but I don’t see how this would have made any difference to the game. I never saw any of those characters again. They had no impact on the story other than hanging around waiting to be saved and then disappearing. The tutorial posed a variation of the trolly problem that suggested a difficult moral choice would pop up at some point. The reference to pushing the fat man onto the tracks to save other’s lives is presumably a reference to Alex, although I never got the opportunity to sacrifice him in any meaningful way. I have to assume that using self-destruct is the logical decision which is the equivalent to changing the tracks, but it’s not the tough decision I anticipated from that introduction. The game set up a big decision but never delivered. To be clear, I think Dishonored’s morality system--or chaos system as it’s called in the game--is flawed and far from perfect. I’m only praising it here because I think it’s leaps and bounds above the morality in Prey. With Prey, I hoped Arkane would have learned from Dishonored and improved on a system that was a little too black and white for my taste. Instead they’ve taken a huge step back and we’re just left with white. There’s part of a good game in Prey, but it’s hidden inside a mediocre experience. I’ve praised the early hours of Prey for the survival horror vibe I got from it. I should point out that I appear to be in the minority for preferring the first part of Prey. Most people describe the game as starting slowly and then opening up and becoming more interesting. That’s not the game I played. The more time I spent with Prey, the more mundane it became. It simply doesn’t offer anything new or interesting. In the end, it feels like Prey was developed by three different teams. One wanted to create a spiritual sequel to System Shock 2 with the story and setting. Another wanted to recreate the atmosphere and visual style of Bioshock, while the final team tried to add the morality and freedom of Dishonored. The collective whole is as disjointed as you’d expect from that description. It’s a shame, because you can’t deny the effort Arkane put into developing this game. I’m of the opinion that no major developers are lazy. I’ve been critical of Mass Effect: Andromeda, but you can’t produce a game like that if you’re lazy. Every big game requires hard work. Arkane went above and beyond in trying to develop a believable space station and a sandbox environment for players to explore. I happen to think they made a bit of a hash of it, but I admire the attempt. Part of the problem is presumably the way Arkane split its development team in two after the original Dishonored. One team made Dishonored 2 and the other made Prey. It’s a shame, because more influence from Dishonored would have made Prey a much better experience. I’ve linked a Gamespot video in the comments which goes into more detail on the development of this game and it’s well worth a watch. And that brings me to the end of this video. As always, if you liked the video hit the like button and maybe consider subscribing and sharing. If you hit the bell icon next to the subscribe button then you’ll be notified whenever I post a new video, which isn’t all that often. You’ll get two notifications a month at most. The next game I’m going to play is What Remains of Edith Finch, but it’s too early to know if I’ll do a video on that yet. I also need to tackle Persona 5 at some point but don’t expect a video on that monstrousity anytime soon. Feel free to leave suggestions or questions in the comments and I’ll respond if I can. Thanks for listening.

Channel: Chris Davis

Views: 202,197

Keywords: Prey ps4 review, prey critique, prey analysis, prey story explained, prey story summary, prey story analysis, prey spoiler discussion, prey spoilercast, prey detailed review, prey in depth analysis, prey story criticism, prey story details, arkane studios prey, video game analysis, video game critiques, prey ps4 analysis, prey ps4 critique, prey story discussion

Id: fjBDVT4k5OQ

Length: 75min 45sec (4545 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2017