Prey - A Critique of the Mind Game

[Music] I don't think prey has gotten a fair chance to impress people reviews have been mixed and not without their minor controversies but that's not what I'm talking about here the problem is a lot more fundamental than that it's all in the name so before I do the usual thing and spoil this entire game for you please be informed that a far more fitting name for prey would be Bioshock 3 or System Shock 3 I have played all of the Bioshock and for the purpose of making this video I went back and finished System Shock 2 for the first time not only do I think that prey is worthy of being in the same group as these games I also think it's better than all of them by a significant margin now I need to quickly qualify that statement a bit first I didn't play System Shock 2 at release so I can't tell how good it was relatively compared to praise release today secondly I don't love the Bioshock games I enjoyed them but they're not my favorite not even Bioshock 1 however they are a favorite for many many people they reviewed incredibly well and are high up on many people's top 10 lists chances are you like them more than I did which means you should theoretically also enjoy prey more than I did that's not to say the game is without any problems I'm not willing to overlook its flaws just because I think it hasn't been given a fair chance that wouldn't be right of me but I also don't want to ruin an experience for some of you since I think this game has been misunderstood or overlooked it's going to be compared to the first prey that came out a long time ago is it a reboot a spiritual sequel that an actual sequel get cancelled for this having played the original pray many many years ago I can only tell you that there is no connection between the games and that this sort of confusion has probably been fatal for the game success which is a bit troubling how much a name really matters because by my reckoning any game that does the Bioshock and day of sex formula this well should be a smash hit even with its flaws so in case you passed it over because you just thought it was a standard shooter or a horror name and you didn't realize it was like those other games then please be informed before you watch this video because this is where the spoiler start all good great let's begin the best thing that prey does is it swirl design than individual level design within that world and then giving you strong reasons to pay a lot of attention to it as you navigate each area I would love to be able to say that story is also one of praise major successes because it starts out very strong unfortunately I think the story has fallen victim to the same problem that much of the game suffers from a frantic rush to finish it when it needed a bit more time you play as Morgan you who is either male or female depending on your choice the only difference this makes is the voice actor for your character even though they're a silent protagonist which is yeah the story is a bit weird but this is part of why it starts so strong the game begins with you waking up in bed in your apartment to a song playing as an alarm you go through a morning routine guided by your brother you can take as long as you want to soak all of the details in your computer your work area for gadgets a conversation in the hallway and so on before you leave on a helicopter rides through one of the more memorable opening credits that I've seen in a game you then meet your brother face to face enter put through a series of tests these are simple tasks throw some boxes out of an area on the floor try to hide in a room jump over an obstacle and then answer some questions on a computer terminal I really like the sequence because it's a tutorial that manages to hide that patronizing teaching from experienced players because there's a bit of intrigue from those observing you many might not notice that this is a tutorial and think it's instead the beginning of the story something is clearly going wrong no matter how well or poorly you perform in these chambers something out of your control and maybe a little sinister natural intuitive way possible without thinking just go for it then sooner than you might expect this happens play an image I want you to take a good look at it in a moment I'm going to ask you what my coffee it's empty and then you're unconscious the game begins with you waking up in bed in your apartment to a song playing as an alarm you go through a morning routine wait what the tone is different this time something is wrong the objects in the room are in a different arrangement the computer has a warning email spammed instead of the ones that were there before the mechanic in the hallway is dead and next to her is a wrench you pick it up and if you're like me you will be drawn to smash through the window to the balcony where there was some things you couldn't get to before this is one of the coolest openings I've played in the game in quite some time it really grabbed my attention and I was ready to get lost in this twisted narrative if this was just the beginning where was this going to lead how were they going to build on this the looking-glass feature alone the technology that allows one seam to be displayed on top of another like a window instead of a video is really fun all on its own what were they going to do with it unfortunately this is the best of the story gets in this game in my opinion that might not be truly doing it justice because there are some parts of it that are worth some thought and attention and the exploration through the rest of the game is definitely worthwhile but in terms of the main narrative surrounding you and your actions it never gets any better than this opening well maybe it depends on how you view the ending don't let them do this Jesus Morgan has been stuck in this simulation for about three weeks living the same day over and over we'll get to how that works in just a second for now you go through the area surrounding your fake apartment fight some mimics and eventually discover that you're not even on earth you're on a space station that's closer to the moon in our planet a space station that has been overrun by these aliens called the Tyson your character is directly responsible for what has happened here you and your brother Alex you have been experimenting on the Tyson they're not the only sort of experiments that have been going on here but they're the most important because they resulted in neuro mods basically using the Tyson's organic matter as a base human experiences can be copied from one person and implanted in another so a gifted musician or a grandmaster at chess those abilities can be identified copied and then gifted to another person through these neural mods with the unsettling method of injecting them through your eye which is why some of the promotional footage for the game showed your character with a deep redness in the eye when looking in a mirror there are a few unforeseen problems with neuro mods but one that was fully understood was that they caused the erasure of memories when they're removed adding a new ability causes the brain to be remapped in such a severe way that has to revert to the state it was in before receiving the neuro mod so if you were to have the ability to play guitar injected in you right now and then three years later or so have it removed you would forget those three years completely you'd be back to where you were started only three years older and very confused and not knowing how to play guitar anymore this is how you were kept in the simulation of your apartment for three weeks your neuro mods were removed and each day you were sent a different set which was also removed afterwards you were being run through a series of tests for reasons that we'll get to much later they're a little intriguing but not all that exciting to be honest I'm sorry because the one please explain to me what's happening Sinan your goal is to either find a solution for the aliens rampaging through the station or find a way to leave it which is enough context to put all of that on hold for the time being and to focus on gameplay instead which is where prey is a lot more interest thing the space station is called talas one it is comprised of many different levels which you eventually have total freedom to move between at the beginning you can only access a few areas as the story progresses more floors of the station are open to you but you can almost always return to the others to explore or complete side quests the most surprising thing about all of this for me was that you can also go outside the station you can space walk around with controls that are initially quite awkward if you're willing to adjust they can become comfortable but they never felt good for some of the combat parts in zero-gravity there are five airlocks around the station that you need to open from the inside first so this doubles us something like an alternative fast travel just hop out an airlock and rocket your way up the station in a practice it doesn't quite fulfill that function though doing this a few times led me to realize the sections of Talas 1 are put together in the actual arrangement that you can see here there's the main lobby the hardware labs the long elevator bridge leading to the upper decks the Arboretum crew quarters and so on the exterior matches the interior which considering that the game didn't need to have the option to go outside at all struck me as an impressive commitment to world design significant thought went into the needs of the people that live here too and how they would work and get around to make it feel close to a place that could actually exist I don't know if a Space Station counts as world building if it does then this is some of the best I've seen in a game not only that but it's an interesting setting that offers a lot of freedom there are many areas you can explore early if you're willing to get creative with some of the movement mechanics the glue gun and climbing especially you also get the ability to glide early on which reminded me of the movement system in breadth of the Y above all things being able to grab onto ledges pull yourself up and then also jump with a glide to soften your fall at the end compounds to make exploring not only vertically focused but something that's so liberating you're not stuck looking at the same horizontal layers around you you're looking up to see what you can climb often rewarded with alternative routes and hidden supplies you're looking down to see where you can glide to or a quick way to get back to the main floor instead of taking the long way with the stairs over and over again which is the best way to explain how the level design in each of these areas maintains the quality that the entire space station has first there's the seam of each area despite being restricted to a single space station there was a surprising amount of variety and visual distinction in many places there are offices that look like they belong on earth then luxurious lounge areas a high-class cafeteria and an enclosed park at the peak of the station in contrast to this are the more pragmatic locations the Kolb labs of psychotronics and the industrial layers at the bottom that control the station's power water and oxygen supplies then there are sections that look close to what our actual space station in orbit looks like today parts of tellus one that couldn't be plastered over to hide that reality to make it appear normal the appropriately named gut section a wide maintenance tunnel that connects the whole station being the best example of the complex inner workings that most inhabitants don't see every day as they work on the station peeling that atmospherical layer away you have how you explore each of these locations this is where the other gameplay systems of Prey begin to get tangled into a big ball that's hard to separate it's difficult to nail down the one essential thing in this game that it's built around you can say that it's the nura mod upgrade system but on my third playthrough I finished the game on nightmare without using any you could say it's the combat system but it takes a bit of thought to realize how combat even functions and pray the loop of gathering objects and then recycling them might be a safer choice but if you use neuro mods you can undermine the value of that system but then I also just said that you don't really need there are mods and that's how my thought process goes looping between each one like that tangled ball bouncing along so let's try to address them all together most places and most problems have more than one way to deal with them for example if the way into an area is blocked off you could use a neural model ility that gives you extra strength to pick up the obstacle and move it or if you don't have that mod you could find some explosive canisters and use them to blast the blockage clear or you could throw a recycling charge to condense whatever is in the way or you could use a mimic ability to turn into a or something to bounce your way through the opening or you could go around to another entrance and hack your way through the security lock or you could use your glue gun to make a set of stairs on the wall to smash through a window or open a hatch to crawl through or you could use your toy crossbow to shoot the unlock button on a computer terminal or you could I think you get the idea for other kinds of problems you have the same sort of options you should also know that by going through that list I have spoiled much of the game some of them may seem obvious when pointed out but when you're first playing many of the options you have available can be overwhelming or you might not realize some of the functionality that they have using recycling charges to clear blocked doorways being a good example I think this is tied directly with exploration and gathering because everything you pick up can be broken down by the recycling machines it's a cool feature actually all the stuff gets shot through this laser and pooped out into little cubes you can collect like it's one of those rigged claw machines at arcades only this time you're always a winner the more resources you find obviously the more options you have neural mods at the beginning of the game are the best reward for exploring these are praised version of an experience system one that's also eventually tied to combat because you can pick up alien materials from the corpses and with a neuro mod schematic start to craft these yourself so in a way each alien gives you some experience points you just need to go refine them at the recycling machine first neuro mods are hidden all over the station but you also need other materials to craft them metal synthetic there's also organic for some other things too so you are heavily incentivized to pillage each location for everything that you can carry and to make regular trips to the nearest recycling machine early on this can cause a bit of a feedback loop you gain a new ability which unlocks access to new areas which then gives you more resources for a new ability which unlocks access to another area with more resources and so on the more creative and observant you are the more you'll be able to find and collect with as few of these abilities as possible during my no neuro mod run I was able to access a large chunk of the station with recycling charges some clever climbing and the glue gun it was areas terminals and safes that required hacking that locked me out more than anything some of them have codes you can find around station but a fair chunk of them can only be unlocked through the hacking minigame so with scavenging being so important I think you can see how exploration and studying each level is encouraged you want to have as many resources as possible not just for finding neural mods but also crafting ammunition for your weapons a lot of work went into making these levels tons of Secrets and rewards for players willing to climb around and look for things that aren't lying out in plain sight it's a twisted ly wonderful feature then that the mimics are capable of disguising themselves as those very same items that you want to pick up in terms of gameplay this might be the best thing that prey does this concept that the act of looting and acquiring items is tied to an enemy and danger mimics can take the form of any small to medium sized object even med kits that you can pick up and I love the tension this made me feel on my first playthrough eventually I learned the rules of how MINIX works the subtle movement objects have or the little ticking noise they emit like they're bombs ready to go off but before that I had to question a lot of items that I was about to pick up early on this prevented the game from being too cleanly split into two halves clearing the level of enemies and then going on to safely loot everything I was always a little on edge early on because something could be a mimic having said that once you're used to this it loses some of its charms I wish that the concept could have been expanded on somehow to take that idea to make a game mechanic out of inspecting and picking things up maybe some of the mix don't reveal themselves unless you hit them but that the objects you want to pick up also break from a hit if they're real there could be minor differences you could learn and identify so you have to judge when it's a mimic or not if you're bad at recognizing what's a mimic then you could be wasting resources that you could pick up by breaking everything and if you get good at it then you don't take damage by hitting them first it might not be a great idea though since it can be resolved through saves coming but then so can other things it's also the only one I've gotten that might be why it wasn't built on further there isn't really that much you can do with this system later on the game does devolve into those two phases as well since you find the ability to scan objects to see they're mimics once you've cleared out an area you are safe to loot it without being bothered until you leave and come back through a load screen enemies don't respawn in a direct way it's more like a new set of aliens has wandered into the area while you were gone some people might not like that but I thought it was mostly great sometimes big enemy spawning in places I had already cleared out was a bit annoying but having a fresh set of mimics Worman was fantastic remember at the beginning when we woke up in the apartment for the second time and some of the stuff was in different places the new mimics are like that you start to question anything that's out of place was that lamp on the floor before was that garbage can in that position could you imagine the subtle psychological horror that someone could inflict on you if they did that in your home without you knowing about it how much it would [ __ ] with you a few mimics can be noticed like that - which i think is wonderful you can go into an office and see that there are one too many chairs you can figure it out just like that or you can feel paranoid when something else you were certain was an alien turns out to be benign like you go over and you're like there's no way that was on the table earlier and then you hit it and it turns out that it was there you were wrong like there's a mind game being played on you having brought up the Knicks it's likely best to go into combat now which is also deeply linked with gathering crafting and neuro mods the biggest problem combat has is also right there in those links some people including myself when I first played might not understand the type of game that they're playing or to put it another way prey isn't really a first-person shooter I mean of course you are in a first-person perspective you are also shooting things I know how stupid it sounds but Jean earth can be stupid sometimes if Skyrim a first-person shooter because it has that same perspective and magic spells and arrows to shoot I don't many would say that sits nor does pray in my opinion but for different reasons I went through a really long example a few minutes ago about how many options you can have to solve problems how to gain access to a room combat and pray is sort of like that but it can be summarized into other parts - such as planning and tactics character building and stats and then execution the issue with these three stages is that many players are going to go rabid for the third one myself included it's a shooter there are enemies I'm just going to go in and shoot them while dodging their hits until they're dead I'm going to play it like it's doom if you've played the game and tried to smack the very first phantom with your wrench you know how much of a bad idea that is it just doesn't work please understand that the fighting is more complicated than this there is a certain amount of skill and finesse required to succeed in combat and we'll get to that shortly but I think the best way to describe fighting and praise with this sentence it's all about bringing the right tool for the job as long as you know how to use it for mimics this means hitting them with the wrench but where the game gets a bit cruel is that it doesn't make it clear how much more effective the wrench is if you hold the attack button down to gather your strengths for a second not only does this do more damage but it can stun some enemies so you can get in even more hits most curious of all about this feature is that using the weapon this way doesn't cost more stamina only time to charge the Shrike I've seen some people span the attack button on Linux with very little success which can quickly lead to no stamina and a mimic still trying to eat you this can make encounters with them very frustrating because they're small targets that dart around a lot and that's doubly bad because they're also the most common enemy type that you'll be fighting but if you charge your strikes you have to wait just a little bit which makes connecting with your wrench feel much better especially since it nudges you into stopping and waiting for a good opening instead of just trying to hit them as fast and often as possible at least that's how it did for me it feels a lot less mindless than swinging away as fast as you can if we take that example and run it through our list you have figuring out that a mimic is nearby and knowing which weapon is best which is linked with your build and upgrades if you've invested a lot in Tison abilities for example then going with the wrench might not be the best option then you have executing that plan by aiming your shots well and moving out of the way then the next counter-attacks or locking it down before it has a chance seems simple enough right well unfortunately the mimic is probably the cleanest enemy in the game to show this first off it's worth noting that some options are more powerful than others with only a few exceptions the shotgun is capable of chewing through any enemy in the game same for the nura mod that allows you to slow time down for only your enemies you can break combat through using some of these things and for some that might be the best way to play however this isn't as simple as it sounds to solve every encounter because aside from the wrench every action that deals damage in prey is going to use some sort of resource you need to find bullets and batteries for your weapons usually you craft them yourself from items you find aside powers also use side points which usually can't be replenished for free neuro mods and increased damage and recycling yields n become very important if a basic pistol shot only deal say eight damaged and that is the low return on how many resources it took you to craft that bullet if you take neuro mods that boost your damage and the gunsmith line that allows you to upgrade your weapon even more then each bullet is now a much more effective use of your scavenged materials same goes for the mods that increase your inventory space since it allows you to carry so much more back to the recycling machine and then you get more resources to use on crafting things this is what I meant by the system's being tangled together some neuro mods can lessen the importance of scavenging because it makes your weapons so much more efficient I don't know if this is a good thing or not since players who realize this early on will have a much easier time as the game progresses it might be tempting to invest in more hacking mods or some of the healing ones early on when boosting your raw damage will lead to having so many more resources since you'll spend fewer of them on ammunition for the whole game which will lead to having more to spend on making more neuro mods for more options afterwards this could be seen as a learning curve or a trap however the game is still possible to beat on the hardest difficulty setting without using a single neuro mod I did three pray throughs of this game my first time was on normal I didn't use any of the Tison based neuro mods because it seemed like a bad idea in terms of the game's story and I was having a good time with basic weapons and abilities my second time I went on nightmare installed many types and mods and killed every NPC that I came across I promised general mooncake my third run I also went on nightmare and didn't install any neuro mods at all this made the game more tedious than difficult and I don't mean the combat the biggest problem I had was the lack of inventory space i needed to recycle a lot of items for ammunition to compensate for my load damage because i couldn't use any mods to boost it I also had to rely on the wrench for many more fights and carry more grenades for some of the tougher enemies this took up a much of my already limited inventory so early on I had to make many trips back to the recycler for only a few items each run in some parts that made the game more exciting since I had to think of solutions to problems that mods previously solved but it also made the game feel a bit empty since I missed out on opening a lot of safes offices and computer terminals the game may be possible like this but it's definitely not the best way to play I also think doing it on nightmare wasn't really necessary I couldn't find any stats for the difficulty modes in this game so I had to go in and tinker with it a bit on some enemies to find out for myself by fighting the same mimic and phantom on each difficulty mode I've concluded that the game had simple modifiers for damage dealt and received so no matter if I was on easy normal hard or nightmare this mimic always had 30 health and this phantom always had 100 health the difference was on normal and hard I was dealing 10 damage with a basic strike with my wrench but on easy that was bumped to 11 damage and on nightmare it was lowered to 8 damage so a 10% damage bonus on easy a 20% damage reduction on nightmare funnily enough this answered a question I was going to bring up in this video there's a secret weapon you can find halfway through the game that's an upgrade to your basic pistol the problem was it was showing numbers that didn't make sense when I found it I upgraded it to deal 9 damage yet it was showing here to deal 10 damage when unmodified so I had made it worse by modifying it somehow what was really happening was that the nightmare difficulty debuff was affecting the numbers here that was part of the modification and the reason why it didn't make sense at least that's what I think you can see the same thing with the wrench when you're on easy mode damage received works in the same way on easy you take half the damage that you do on normal on hard it's increased by 40% on nightmare its 60% higher that may seem like a lot but the only significant difference here is between the easiest and hardest modes and even then the way combat works in this game means these modifiers don't mean all that much I'll confess the real reason I went to all of the trouble of figuring this out was because I didn't feel like the game was any different at all on the hardest mode when compared to normal and that I was suspicious it didn't change anything at all but it does right 60 percent should be a lot it is a lot so why did I feel that way very few enemies allow you to reliably avoid their attacks even the basic mimics can scurry out of sight and slash at you before you can turn to follow them phantoms show this even better since they zip around like they're vampires in True Blood often they will race away then come back and hit you before you've had a chance to react not that the game even has a proper defensive option to use if you did notice same goes for their projectile blast this has a charged time to let you know it's coming but sometimes they use this and the racket - together so you have no way of knowing when it's going to come at you most projectiles also have an area of effect that triggers around them that is larger than the graphic itself meaning it blows up like it's a landmine that you got to close to so it's really hard to dodge them most of the time you can see a similar thing in the larger enemies prey only has 5 arguably 6 enemy types each with their own variations again sort of like the enemies and breasts of the wild of all things phantoms can be active with fire lightning invisibility or some sort of dark energy mimics can be the usual type greater mimics or infused by those phantoms there are also robotic sentries that can be corrupted either a turret or the flying ones that can spew fire or an electric shock also if you use too many of the types of neural mods then the turrets will recognize the alien matter inside of you and attack you like you're one of the aliens even if they're not corrupted which i think is a really cool detail in the game then there are the larger mini-boss type enemies these are all the same hovering sort of blocky blobs that have minions do the fighting for them one hacks any turret or robot in the area another hacks people in the same way to turn them into bombs that explode if you get too close and the third creates an energy shield and spawns smaller blobs that Russian any source of movement to burst open the last enemy type is an event quest level boss the nightmare more dinosaurs and - can spawn when you enter some levels in order to hunt you and you can see the same problem as the phantom here with how it can move a lot faster than you and attack without any sort of Telegraph if you stay far away from it you can sometimes dodge to the projectiles it creates to follow you but reliably avoiding its melee attacks felt like I was exploiting the fight through the terrain around me rather than actually beating it some of these enemies have attacks you can learn and avoid the pattern I saw with the flame Tysons and the techno paths were damage zones that spawn on your position that you need to run to avoid once you realize that this is happening this can be a fun mechanic to remember and sprint away from but the first person camera may limit your ability to even understand why you're dying at first especially since the flame Tyson is in the medical center in the first major area of the game it can feel like it's killing you just by looking at you hard enough same for the techno path which for most players will be introduced in a cramped area with two other robots guarding it this may function as a mini boss at this point in the game but this area is so small you're likely going to die from the ball of lightning it can someone without understanding what it's doing for a long time the theme of many of these enemies is simply to stay away from them the telepath is another example has an ability that had no warning that I could see which simply does a massive amount of unavoidable damage in a huge ring around itself really huge if you find this guy in space outside the station this is what I mean when I say prey isn't the first-person shooter you can bash your head against these encounters and brute force your way through with weapon upgrades but I think the intended way to go about these fights is similar to thinking about how to overcome the obstacles you find in each level the telepath can't do that big explosion of damage if you throw a null wave grenade at it the techno path can't do any of its abilities at all if you keep its unlocked with the disrupt something you can fire and then switch to your rent your shotgun for some free hits same for robot enemies these weapons can knock them over and prevent them from fighting back you can sneak up on phantoms knock them out and then switch to a shotgun blast to finish them off when you're out of stamina or the glue gun to freeze them while you're standing every gains for the last hit with the wrench meanwhile the elemental phantoms radiate a damage or that prevents you from doing that but they also don't dart around as often so you can better shoot at them from afar the old tactic won't work and you need a different one instead this is closer to a puzzle approach rather than a fight which is why the difficulty settings changed almost nothing for me once you've solved each enemy being able to kill them in one or two fewer hits or dying a little faster doesn't really matter you're going to keep them incapacitated or ambush them from full health to dead which is something you're strongly nudged into figuring out when you begin to scan enemies and can view their weaknesses in a list again this is of course assuming you're not breaking the game with some of the more powerful mods the combat focus one especially which is simply another way of looking at the puzzle and finding an alternative solution as far as I'm concerned I wouldn't call this combat system great but if you realize this it can be a good fit with the more slow-paced resource gathering which fuels all of your options but I can imagine someone trying to jump around larger enemies with their shotgun which only works if you've heavily invested in damage and health neural mods it's a shame that there weren't more ways to avoid damage and some more variety in both enemies and weapons to fight them there are other balance issues as well if you're willing to put the legwork in to use the medical and engineer BOTS to recover health and armor for the whole game Deus Ex and System Shock 2 have the same problem I vividly remember being on a first-name basis with the little medical drone in the shipping container on the Liberty Island level in Deus Ex since I could risk mailing every enemy to save on ammunition before returning to this little guy to heal up for free every single time same for the medical beds in System Shock 2 which can heal you to full for a pittance I didn't use Ingle healthkit during my first run of that game because of that and same goes for prey I didn't use any of these med kits or suit repair kits I ran back to a helper but instead which I was often doing anyway to get to a recycler to unload my inventory which might be the best time to speak about some other sloppy and questionable decisions this game has which I believe are a symptom of rushing to meet a release deadline my guess is that some of those instant damage attacks may also be a result of that since they don't quite feel right no matter what kind of combat system the game was meant to have as always it's very difficult to judge what's a bug and what's just a bad feature or something that's unfinished the best example of this in prey is how the screen flickers and becomes dim during combat sometimes this effect is very gentle and adds a bit of tension or atmosphere to a fight other times it gets so dark or so rapid that I found it and genuinely hard to see what was happening like the game suddenly became a rave especially one against simple mimics sometimes it feels like this effect is being tripled because of a glitch other enemies have similar problems that come across as poorly thought-out features there's a fear mechanic for some enemies that makes your camera go wild in random directions you can prevent this by opening your inventory and drinking alcohol but I'm not willing to slow down combat just for that or stockpile booze just in case I run into these monsters maybe that's my own fault and I'm being unreasonable but at the very least this supports the view that prey has a more puzzle-like approach to combat for some things that are definitely bugs you have visual flickering some missing models and the enemies occasionally dashing themselves right off the map these are minor though and don't spoil too much they didn't happen that often as I played another minor bug made hilariously into a big deal because of the type of game prey is are objects not sitting right when they're placed on top of other surfaces this is a common issue in games but it's a massive deal in prey because these vibrating items appear like mimics when they're just glitches it's funny looking at it now but in the game it can be very annoying some of the more major bugs prevented access to some areas sometimes the keypad will bug out and the unhhhh interactable even if i had the key card that was paired with it even restarting the game wouldn't fix this so for this whole price through I couldn't get into this closet to see what was in it a similar problem was with invisible walls spawning over doorways which I believe is tied to hit detection on glue-gun piles remaining even after they were destroyed but I'm not sure I'm lucky that these problems only ever blocked me off from unimportant areas and I know that because on other places I was able to get into them the bug didn't happen every single time NPCs will often speak over each other or you will get phone calls that you cannot decline that speak over important audio logs that you might have just been listening to everyone your family you must be great are you approaching the crew facilities both of these are incredibly frustrating like you accidentally open two YouTube videos at once and show how much polish the game is lacking a similar problem was with the audio logs that only autoplay sometimes I'm lucky I thought to look for a hotkey to play the most recent audio log I found because navigating the menu so much is terrible it was definitely designed for a gamepad and not a keyboard and mouse which is a real shame while we have the inventory open I feel the need to gripe about items not automatically stacking when you pick them up or far worse that some of the Tison organs you can loot from corpses won't add to a stack already in your inventory so you have to open it up drop a one slot item then pick up the organ and then pick up the item you just dropped after the automatically stacks once it gets into your inventory I really wish I understood how a problem like that in a game where almost every player is going to be constantly hitting the limit on their inventory made it into the final release of the game there are four levels of hacking both in difficulty and the knurl mod that matches them yet because of the way the allotted time increases with each node you have to hack the level two hacks end up being the most difficult by quite a lot I always had a ton of time left over in level three and four hacks compared to the level two because the numbers weren't properly considered a better way of doing this might have been you can always try to hack terminals but each neuro mod upgrade grants you more time instead of it being a check to see if you're able to begin the at all but the biggest issue I had is present right from the start the game's UI and its insistence on holding your hand now some people dislike this sort of thing because they find it insulting to their intelligence I sometimes agree but I also think that this is an incredibly difficult thing to judge an example being that I am certain there will be at least one person who watches this video who didn't like all of the UI tutorial hints and yet wishes that the game had made it more clear how important it is to hold down your attack button for some of your end strikes I've been dismissive of some tutorial sections in the past the one in Fallout 3 comes immediately to mind my opinion has matured a bit on them now but I still think that prey goes too far with it because these pop-ups and notifications persist throughout the entire game for me this is about preventing freedom and discovery let me explore things on my own include details that prod you into figuring things out more like the scanner information for a way that being done directly but still something that you're making happen yourself not the game just intervening worse than all of this however is that all of these notifications get in the way and slow you down the noise that accompanies them is quite loud and jarring compared to the moodiness present in the rest of the game I was always afraid to start moving so soon after completing an objective since I knew all of the notifications would have to play and could interrupt conversations or block my view of things or even disrupt combat if I was moving quickly to the next area what's strange about this problem is that the game has quite a few puzzles and details that require you to be paying attention they're not spoon-fed to you you could argue the story is the biggest one of all that it requires quite a lot of thought outside of all of the information that's more plainly delivered to you two puzzles that come to mind or the way you get the code to the first safe in the game you can notice that it was written on this board but later erased if you remember this and recognize when this scene is repeated later you can look through the looking-glass screen during a recording to see the code before it was erased and returned to the safe to open it the same goes for another puzzle in the hardware labs you can notice a specially named flask in one of the workshops you can also find some emails that can get you thinking that it might be used for something the secret can be revealed through another looking-glass recording if you're willing to watch the whole thing there's a couple more discoveries like this through the game if you're willing to pay attention and look around I'm not saying that these are supremely stimulating puzzles or anything only that they require some amount of perceptive ability and thinking by the player in comparison to so much of the rest of the game that holds your hand same goes for exploring the outside of the station and repairing some of the rooms that are broken or remembering prior areas that were blocked before and you should return with the appropriate upgrade later speaking of that however let's address a few issues about praise world and level design some of these points may not be truly fair to criticize but it would be dishonest of me if I ignored them first of those something I think most people will agree with unless you're a huge fan of backtracking through levels with very little to do some of the places you and Locke threw abilities are very far from the most traveled routes in the game the most extreme of these is the derelict shuttle floating quite far from the station this is guarded by a Weaver which isn't the easiest enemy to kill in space inside are some corpses and some loot but part of it is locked unless you've invested heavily in a particular line of neural mods with this example we can see a number of problems when I realized that I would have to come back here later on and travel all the way to the shuttle again I let out a very heavy sighing question if I would even bother of course i ended up doing it and the reward wasn't really worth it which makes me have to ask is that a good thing or not you may have just had an instinctive reaction to that question but I suggest thinking about it a bit more locked areas like these which require a specific upgrade should theoretically have the best loop in order to make the trouble worth it and to reward the player for investing in their character to the end of a progress line especially in a case like this where many players won't even notice or be able to access this area and yet right there with what I just said you can see how it should go the other way putting valuable items in a place like this means most players will miss out or in many cases be almost forced to take a specific upgrade and do all of this backtracking if it truly is that valuable it's a strange conflict when you really think about it and I'm not sure what's correct only that I hated having to waste time to come back here afterwards and I probably would have still hated it even if there were 20 neuromas here's a big reward in fact I may have hated it even more if that was the case as I said though there are a number of problems the three main points I want to address here are the progression system how praise loot isn't as exciting as it could be and that the world design suffers a bit from what I'm going to assume is a hardware limitation I could be wrong on that though like the points earlier on combat these three are all tied together there are only a few things that are really exciting to find and prey neural mods are the obvious one then there are weapon kits and uprights for your suit these are minor modifications that are like stickers that add little perks like resistance to certain damage types stuff like that they would likely be talent trees in most other games outside of gameplay are audio logs which most people enjoy listening to at the very least these are good to find if you're invested in the story frustrated I have months they're just gone outside of that there isn't much that makes you think oh cool I just found this early on weapons fill that role but you quickly have a full set and there's only really one alternative weapon to find in the game there are also stashes of materials especially storage rooms full of Tyson biomatter but that also leads to another problem you can craft a neural mods and weapon kids which dilutes the excitement of finding them in the wild so to speak it still always good to find them but about halfway through the game there's never anything really thrilling to find on the gameplay loop side of things I don't think pray would have benefited from a diablo style weapon system or something like that in fact i think that going that route can bog a game down the most recent example being all of the clutter at suneo but maybe larger weapon modifications could have had a place or a few new weapon types added late in the game or more upgrades like the jetpack that are simply added to your character as a fun addition to everything else you've already collected suit chipsets are mostly boring in fact the only memorable ones are the stamina upgrade the jetpack upgrade and the ability to scan for mimics which arguably also ruins your enjoyment of trying to figure out where they are for yourself the reason why these standout is that they aren't simple number tweaks and that they also change more than one thing the jetpack upgrade allows you to travel much faster in space but also gives you more airtime when used inside the station the stamina upgrade allows you to sprint more from place to place and also helps during combat when using the wrench it's possible there were some other chipsets like this that I missed but to be brutally honest most of these were so boring that I sometimes didn't even check to see what they did until hours after I picked them up to link this with neural mods there's another reason why it gets less exciting to find these as the game goes on it takes many more than just one neural mod to get most of the later tiers of upgrades you also start finding packs of neuro mods to compensate for this a bit which leaves me sort of puzzled I'm hesitant to say this but I do have to wonder if this was simply something they copied from System Shock 2 where the number of cyber modules needed for later tiers also begins to rapidly increase on paper this makes sense because it allows players the freedom to invest in a lot of the early mods and acquire a lot of low-level options while investing heavily in certain packs but there are so many neural mods and prey thanks to crafting that you can typically get everything that you want the only areas you'll be lacking are some of the later types and powers that only really help with damage anyway which you'll likely want to pick only one or two of or the Human Weapon equivalent since you rarely have to use multiple damage options and even fight if anything this could be seen as another trap in progression since some of these options will be redundant and you'll want more hacking repair inventory slots or health upgrades instead same goes for the leverage abilities to move heavy things which can be done with the plentiful amount of recycler grenades you'll find in the world which frees up a bunch of neuro mods for more worthwhile choices the core of the problem here is that finding neuro mods became less exciting as time went on the upgrades weren't always worth it after filling out the fundamental ones to access each area and that the game couldn't be built around the assumption that players had these tools because they may have chosen a different progression path or ignored neuro mods completely so here's where a broad judgment call has to be made did prey benefit from this freedom or would it have been better with something closer to a Metroidvania the only options the developers knew for certain that every player would have for getting around where the glue gun the jetpack and at least a few weapons and you can see this limitation reflected in every area that has multiple paths if it's part of the main storyline then there will always be a way to get somewhere either by looking closely around for a vent to climb through somewhere to glide around or a wall to make some stairs with the glue gun always this is the baseline that the levels are built around so players can't get stuck and even most of the optional areas follow this to the glue gun is a really cool weapon I like that it's effective in combat without dealing damage directly it's an unusual twist like that building your own stairs or climbing points up elevator shafts is also strangely satisfying like you're breaking the game and it's impressive that these glue clumps persistent areas even after you leave and come back a long time later you can also learn to use it to put out fires or plug broken pipes which you have to realize yourself through experimentation studying the environment or paying attention to audio logs this was a great versatile tool that every player has access to so my thought process from there is that maybe some of the neural mods should have also been things that you find in the world and a different system could have been used instead upgrades and abilities that you acquire just like those in a Metroidvania so that later levels could be built safely with the knowledge that every we'll have some sort of hacking ability or repair ability or increase jump height or puzzles involving the mimic transformation I know that this ruins a lot of the games story I also know that it changes price ignition I'm not trying to say that the game as it is now should be altered only that it's worth considering if the open-ended nature of price progression system is really superior to upgrade sound in each main area so levels can become more complicated or maybe a mix of the two could have been better the game already does that and it could have been done more this would have also offered more ways to put rewards for exploration around the station inventory slots would have been a great one to start with instead of tying it to neural mods basically a more advanced way to upgrade the suit you're wearing outside of chipsets it would have also been a way to explain some of these upgrades since I don't see how injecting experiences through your eyeball could ever increase a physical limitation like how high you can jump or help you lift drastically heavier things it also doesn't make sense that you would need multiple neuro mods for one thing either unless there's some sort of unspoken limit on how much information each mod can hold so abilities had to be broken up into multiple pieces how would it even work the last thing I want to point out here is how much the game's world is hurt by all of the loading screens between areas this might not be fair to criticize the game for I have no idea if it's even possible to make levels that are as complex as praise without the load screen separating each one but it's still something that brought the experience down for me in more ways than one the obvious thing to gripe about here is that load times are boring they interrupt the game you're forced to wait they're not excessively long so they are tolerable although I do think it's strange you have to wait for an animation to finish and press a button to finalize the load I don't know what they were thinking there the issue is made worse though because of how often you'll be returning to previous areas not just for when you unlock a new ability but also when the main mission sends you through the whole length of the station a few times or returning to the hub in your office to speak with some NPCs for me knowing that I have to sit through 2 or 3 load screens to go outside the station to fix the problem really killed my motivation to leave the area find an airlock go through it get to the place I need to go and then go back through the airlock it also makes the world feel disconnected even though it's put together quite well which is a reason why I was surprised and it mostly makes sense when you go outside the station and view the different parts but the real loss here is that it makes the routes between each level feel so rigid each of the sections on pallets one are brimming with hidden routes and alternative ways to access most areas yet when it comes time to go from one level to another your options are limited to just one or two there could have been a similar large-scale network of hidden paths between levels that could reward exploration or accessing previously blocked areas this could have made backtracking more interesting since these alternative paths could have opened up as the player gains new abilities so they're not constantly retreading the same routes however these problems could also be caused by the game's story and the progression path that you're set to at the start because despite the eventual freedom you can find later on you're kept quite confined at the beginning this could be why the open-ended upgrade system may hurt a bit because it's not matched in the same way by the world there are gated checkpoints that you have to reach before some places unlock which could have also been smoothly matched with some mandatory upgrades just like how the jetpack works already in the game the story you're following through these areas starts out strong and then quickly becomes background noise an excuse to go on many fetch quests and to explore each part of the station once you arrive at these parts you have some wonderful environmental storytelling to take in as well as some mostly well acted voice logs and emails to read about what life was like on the station almost every area also has a choice to make which is thankfully not broadcast to you with very clear right or wrong decisions at least for the most part it isn't this is a full step above many choices tunes in games but it still has some stumbles here and there like this Morgan did you hesitate at all I'm sure he wasn't a good man but could you have done otherwise given the opportunity the typing can only kill and destroy but you're human you have a choice but see how quickly I slip past so much of the story there and went right for the choices because that's how empty most of the main story is after this gripping opening your actions become you go to your office in via video oh no the video system got turned off somehow go somewhere else to turn the system back on now go back to your office to finish watching the video now the elevator is broken go through another part of the station to get to the upper levels oh no a door is locked go find some audio logs so you can fabricate the necessary speech patterns to open it oh no now another door is locked blow yourself out the airlock oh no now all the doors are locked go to the engine room to reset the station so they open see what I mean the end goal of the game is interesting as is the setting and some of the choices you make along the way but the main story is so boring that I wish they hadn't bothered and I truly mean that I wish that the game had let you go anywhere from the beginning and let you discover all of these choices and scenarios in each part of the station on your own as you decided to go to each place because that's what 90% of praised main storyline already is a trail of breadcrumbs to keep you moving to new areas so you have some direction to find these choices which is something that could have still been provided to you with some more broad goals without sacrificing your ability to go anywhere on the station with the way that the Tison infestation continues to grow over time this could even be factored into a difficulty curve since most levels go through phases and become populated with more difficult monsters the station could have reacted and changed slightly depending on where you go first or last this is something that prey already does I want to make something clear here because I sometimes get comments saying that I must hate linearity I think that a directed polished linear experience will often be far superior to a vague open one but like everything it needs to be done well I look at prey and see a bunch of work that went into the main mission and see how much better the game would have been if they just hadn't done it considering how strong the opening is and how many interesting details are in the game outside of the main story it makes me wonder if something else was originally planned and that what's in the game now was rushed together when they realized they didn't have enough time for the original idea let's go back to the beginning and look at how much work went into this each day Morgan spent here was faked but praised developers also committed to fully realizing how that would function this starts out early on with the scuff marks on the floor from the constant rearrangement of the fake walls while Morgan is in the elevator which of course isn't moving anywhere it's just shaking to give you that impression while the rooms change outside I noticed these marks on my first playthrough I didn't make the leap to think the room was changing but it did make me pause and feel slightly off a feeling that continued when I reached the test chambers and a feeling that persisted throughout the whole game after I smashed this glass because I was ready to smash another wall hours later and find out that even Telus one wasn't what it appeared to be which turns out to be exactly right lying Jesus work went into the helicopter room the big screen the supply room and even some other ways in and out of the fake apartment all of this for the opening the reason the researchers are getting exasperated with you at the beginning is that you're meant to have a type of neural mod installed to try out that's what the just do whatever feels natural do the first thing that pops into your head means despite how easy these tests are you're meant to use a kinetic blast or levitation to move the boxes you're probably meant to use the teleports across the room and most telling the room with absolutely nothing to hide in is meant to trigger your usage of the mimic ability to become the chair the only other object in there otherwise their request makes no sense there is nowhere to hide the question there at the end is to monitor changes in Morgan's personality in theory these answers should always be the same since it's the same Morgan with the same memory wipe each day the idea that changes can and do still happen is an unsettling one and ends up being a major part of the story as I'm typing this and reading it for the video it sounds pretty good and yet after this the game becomes fetch quests in space and the more interesting parts or situations mostly isolated to each part of the station that you find them in like whether or not you execute a prisoner and psychotronics whether you save a corrupt mechanic in an escape pod one that has caused the deaths of so many others by not investigating the faults in the other pods a decision that's made more difficult because there's someone else in the pod with him that's innocent choosing to save groups of mind control people or letting them die as you take out the alien or even if you'll be able to figure out how to save them at all there are quite a few choices like this and more than a few stories that you can discover through emails and audio logs about the people who lived on the station it's a simple thing but seeing an email early on in the game and then many hours later finding that person's office and reading the same email again sent from their terminal may tell us one feel a lot more real this sort of thing happened many times as I played I think the tracking bracelets and security terminals that allow you to find the corpses of everyone or to encourage that feeling that everyone who worked here had some sort of minor story about what they were trying to do and how they ended up dead most games don't put that level of work in one of the most powerful moments for me was when I first got outside the station and decided to check out the orbiting billboard I saw earlier on there was the corpse of a guy there that had died in the middle of uploading something I finished his work and as I drifted away got to see the slow unveiling of a new message flash on the screen this is something that I made happen for myself and the creeping oh [ __ ] realization of what it said stuck with me this is what I mean by the potential of letting the player free to wander and discover for themselves instead of being stuck on the rigid path of the story wants him to be on the only parts of the main quest that came close to this involved Alex in January Alex's Morgan's brother and is absent for the majority of the game he speaks to you through your phone when he really should just come out and talk to you directly even when you go to his office and are right above his safe room he refuses to meet you because the game was so unwilling to give players total freedom to roam around tell us one early that they knew that they had to keep Alex away from players who would kill him on sight and ruin that progression I think Alex is an interesting character and voiced incredibly well by Benedict Wow eventually he still has some opportunities to shine but it's a shame our King felt the need to keep him locked away and unimportant for almost the whole game the same can't be said about January and his brothers or sisters depending on whether you choose to be a man or a woman at the start the simulation at the beginning that you played through was not the first one Morgan had been subjected to it was not the first trial for alien neural mods he or she had gone through it and then being released at least two times before now I think it might even be four or five times from what I've gathered from emails and audio logs each time the test concluded a different version of Morgan came out because the memories lost from each experiment are unrecoverable the original Morgan was quite cold and committed to the tests involving the - mimics can only reproduce by feeding on a consciousness which means that for every new mimic created a human had to be sacrificed to them from what I understand this was done exclusively with Russian prisoners who were lied to that they were volunteering for some sort of experiment in space as an alternative to their punishment on earth since neuro mods are created through - material and Tyson's can only be created through feeding on humans that means every neural mod is also ground-up and refined human matter as well as alien that's being injected along with a human's experience and ability when a neuro mod is used combine that with the memory loss which got Morgan into this horrible state to begin with and you can begin to understand why there are some strong reasons to avoid using neuro mods completely not to mention some of the other problems people had with reporting memory loss before they even took the neuro mod out I have never moved to the noodle hood yet today I could not find my way to the hardware labs while the first Morgan was willing to see humans be sacrificed for progress and even the morals of himself and his brother those that came after him were not alex was troubled by this and eventually things got so bad that he decided that Morgan should be kept in the simulation for longer than they agreed to while he figured out a way to deal with him because the new Morgan's kept wanting to shut the experiments down enter January December and I believe in October or in the member robot that we never find Morgan created these as a fail-safe to help the next versions of himself deal with what's happening on tell us one at first you only meet January who is the previous version of Morgan who believed the best course of action was the blow of the station then you meet December who believed the best idea was to escape and presumably expose what they were doing to the people on earth if you keep going back you have the original Morgan who wanted to develop a weapon that could destroy all of the types of material with a stationwide null wave pulse just in case things got out of hand this is one of two parts of the main story that are really interesting to think about because at first it may seem that January is the most valid perspective to follow he's the first one who speaks to you he's the one that helps you the most and he even shows you a video of you yourself confirming everything that he's saying however this happens only because the previous Morgan had the most time to develop this robot and create these plans there are other videos too other audio logs and other robots then there's also the current iteration you what do you think about it all what do you want to do about it once you realize that January is only one of many prior personalities of Morgan's things become a lot more unstable and harder to judge and closer to chaos what he says sounds reasonable the station is a dangerous disgrace and needs to be wiped out to save Earth from being exposed to the Tyson but what's really the best choice here there are other decisions like this in the game whether or not you blow up a shuttle that left tell us one before it reaches Earth with no way to tell if they're carrying mimics of the surface or not whether or not you try to save survivors on the station and find a way for them to escape even if you choose to blow up the station in the end unfortunately the main quest doesn't live up to this potential because there are only three choices you either destroy the station arm the null ways device to try to destroy only the Tyson or you simply find an escape pod and leave without doing either something that can finish the game early and ruin the surprise waiting for you at the end which is probably something I spent way too much time dancing around by now so let's get to it we fail this isn't the one the big twisting prey comes after some shockingly bad ending cinematics these are so abrupt that I think most will be relieved that the real ending comes after the credits if you have them played the game I think you're going to have a very strong negative reaction to what I'm about to show you so please try to temper that because things are a bit more complicated than it was all just a dream you're not gonna like what I have to say next everything you have done has been a simulation based on the real Morgan use actions alex is captured of anthem and injected human abilities into it just like they were putting Tyson abilities into humans you have been playing as that Tyson believing you're a person as you make choices through Tallis 1 you're now judged on your performance to see if you are empathetic enough to relate to humans instead of being a Tyson that only wants to kill the Typhon are actually more complex than that but let's go with it for this part of the story told you you wouldn't like it now setting aside the it was all the dream reaction for just a second the sequence where the game passes his judgement on you is pretty cool you may have made some good or bad decisions that you didn't even know the game would be paying attention to this is especially potent with decisions that are hidden within decisions you can choose to let some NPCs die specifically Sarah al azhar and her people in the cargo hold dr. away in a container outside the station and Mikaela who is dying above the station power plan if you saved these people then there are even more choices that branch out from that decision whether you help Mikaela discover what happened to her father who was a Russian prisoner that Morgan sacrificed to create more mimics and whether you let her have the information if you find it or destroy it and lie to her then you have whether you save al azhar and her people a second time later on eegh way also asks you to retrieve something from his room for him but he also has important roles to play in the decisions presented to you by Mikayla and Eleazar all of which would be different depending on who you did or did not save the game judges you at the end for these decisions which i think is really interesting it made me want to go back and try to do different things even - you killed or how many mind-controlled humans you saved is a part of it the goal of the simulation is to create a Tyson ambassador that can communicate the needs of the surviving humans since Earth has been infested no matter what Morgan may have done it didn't work at the risk of getting ahead of myself it's worth considering that even this isn't something you should take at face value it was a reconstruction based on Morgan's memories this is the wall today the decisions that matter the most involve the NPCs that you find on the station which is why it's so fitting that they end up being the voices of the robots that judge you there are some flaws with this though for example if you leave on an escape pod the simulation ends immediately with failure the same really should happen if you demonstrate that your feral bloodthirsty - that uses mostly those powers and kills everything then they see even if they're not a threat especially Alex the first chance you get since you would see himself being killed as a great reason to not trust the - when the simulation was over since he's overseeing the experiment and would witness that but for that sort of reaction to be present in a way that's still satisfying there would need to be some sort of continuation of the story after this point or an artificial way that ends the game if you murder someone without giving away the ending like the escape pod does what surprised me on my second and third playthroughs were how many things the game does react to for instance you can kill January on sight and go the rest of the game without his advice I think the game is both improved and we can played like this you get to make more decisions on your own but you miss out on some of his better lines and some background information on the areas you visit if January is not killed then he kills the other robot December since he sees himself as the most recent robot helper and therefore the most valid if you kill January 1st and December survives and continues to direct you to find a way to leave the station there aren't nearly as many lines for the December robot but that the developers accounted for this choice at all is impressive likewise for the events of the third act of the game although it's likely you won't appreciate it your first time through praise quite a long game that due to a lot of backtracking in the main story overstays its welcome a little bit you end up going to Alex's office multiple times only to be interrupted by something and sent elsewhere the worst of all of these is if you follow the January path since you'll end up going down to the engine room then back up then outside the station then back up again then back down to the engine room again then all the way back up to the top and not exagerating even saying it out loud sounds ridiculous right now so please try to understand that I'm not being contradictory when I say that I both enjoyed the arrival of Walter doll but also wish that the game was done already instead of throwing another problem without introducing any new areas to visit doll is a mercenary hired by Morgan and Alex's parents to clean up their mess on palace 1 which is a twisted family betrayal that isn't explored nearly as much as it could or should have been especially if doll had shown up much earlier in the plot he arrives at the station via shuttle and brings with him a robot helper that hacks all of Talas 1 he begins printing military-grade robots to move through all the levels killing any type in and also any survivors including you and your brother there's a giant plot hole here that I can't ignore doll service bot did not physically change any of the hardware on the station which means that these dispensers which you have been using yourself the whole game we're always capable of creating these high-grade combat drones ones that are surprisingly difficult to kill and as you can see are more than a match for cutting through the Tyson I do not understand why Alex or Eleazar didn't have this capability ready to react to any aliens that escaped confinement considering how easy it was to get the machines pumping them out by doll who wasn't even really that familiar with the station there's also a plot hole in the Arboretum when you approach the greenhouse and someone yells at you to come in and help them escape because they're locked in and when you do finally get in the button to open the door that this guy was trapped next to was right there and he could have just opened the door and let himself out when he was crying at you for help you I don't that one's that one's really weird plot holes aside there is an impressive amount of different options and reactions you have here depending on how many people you've killed that will either start taunting and insulting you over the phone or he'll congratulate you on doing most of his job for him because you've killed so many people he'll ask you to hunt down some of the final ones and then offer to meet you in order to bring you back to your parents which is of course a lie but it's still a way the game reacts to what you've done if you saved Eleazar S group then doll tries to bait you into fighting him first with an ambush in the lobby on the station the same technology you used earlier to create a synthetic voice to get through a sealed door is used against you to simulate the voice of a dead man in the medical center if you were paying attention to his name when you explored it way earlier you can dismiss this distress call and not fall for the trap the second way he baits you is by turning the air supply off to the cargo hold where the survivors are still hiding on top of this if you saved eat way he will propose knocking doll unconscious instead of killing him so you can remove his neural mods making him forget his mission and act as an ally instead of an enemy but you can ignore this suggestion and still kill him if you choose to incapacitate him you can purge the oxygen control area to knock him out or you can use the disruptor gun or you can choose to ignore the whole scenario and use the location of doll security bought from his shuttle to block his access from palace 1 and save the survivors that way the oxygen comes back on after you do that if you do this then doll rides the elevator to the top of the station to try to kill Alex where you can then choose to kill him knock him out and the same for Alex himself if you choose the disruptor gun then the game has even planned to react to the big aliens arrival right after this by further tasking you with getting dolls and conscious body safely to the nearest medical office so a robot can transport him down to the neuroma division to remove his mods do you see how many choices there are that was actually really difficult to go through there are more - whether you saved Mikaela and her presence on the shuttle at the end even the prisoner you can choose the save and psychotronics can be here if you cleared enough of the Tison so he doesn't die in that area after you set him free unfortunately not every choices is well executed or expanded on thoroughly enough classics what do you do you want to come into ditches one of the most initially interesting parts of the game was the chef in the crew quarters this is a little under halfway through the game this story unfolds the instant you enter the area and hear him half guiding half taunting you over the speaker system you can continue to do tasks he gives you while you collect audio logs to create the fake voice to open that door across the station there's something both great and terrible about this encounter firstly you should know that the chef is a fake the real one is dead and this guy is an escaped prisoner from psychotronics he sends you on seemingly pointless missions which I didn't understand them until my second playthrough the first thing he wants is for you to go to his room and bring him a cooking award since he's an impostor he shouldn't care right it wasn't until I was really paying attention to his lines here about how the lights are flickering and the station is hurting just ignore it and keep going that I realized that the chef knows about the lightning typhoon near the room it has sent you into a trap my first time I just assumed it was a coincidence this enemy was here you can also hear him talk aloud afterward wondering if you're still alive or not clearly he's a little bit nuts what is when you come back let M you in what there are several chances to realize the chef is an impersonator on top of this first are the audio logs with the real chef he has a different voice in a different portrait then there's the photograph in his room with his face scratched off and at least one email confirming that Morgan and the chef already knew each other so this should be a pretty cool encounter there are lots of clues to find and the mystery of what the chef's endgame is after he tries to kill you by locking you in the freezer he sets traps for you all over the station which is also a neat twist on the idea studying your environment for dangers there are two major problems here however the first is that this cat-and-mouse routine through the station leads to an anti-climax I don't know if you always find the chef in the same place but for me I stumbled upon him in the skate pod and simply backed away from the recycler charged trappy set off which killed him instead of me there was no grand explanation or involve story about what this guy has been plotting you just find him and he dies very disappointing after such a strong introduction although it's possible I may have missed an alternate path that resolve some of these issues the arguably even bigger problem is that you cannot confront the chef with any of the clues even if you notice that something is off about this guy the game won't let you interrogate him or accuse him of being fake you either need to go along with it and wait for him to attack or you need to presume he's out to kill you on top of being a fake Gordon Ramsay and hit him first this is an issue in many stories in the videogames and is probably worth discussing another time I understand that this simply can't be solved with a dialog box saying hey are you really who you say you are since that option itself would reveal the truth to players who didn't notice because there's no trigger for acknowledging these clues which I definitely think is the superior way to do it instead of an intractable prompt which is also a clue and of itself it's difficult to have the game realize that you've seen through the deception and want to make an accusation it hurts this encounter because my only option is to pretend to be fooled or to attack first and never find out what was going on this could be explained away like several other issues by the game being a simulation a game within a game with its own limitations I don't buy that since it seems like just excuse to me but I do wonder if some people will accept it it's a way to explain other little problems - like how the NPC's you save somehow get around the station unscathed when you're constantly being harassed by Tyson especially for dr. gray who has no combat abilities whatsoever who manages to get to the neuro mod division to remove dolls mods interestingly enough there is a plot hole that's explained away by this the absence of any sort of hacking or repairing skill on Morgan at the start you can clearly see in his apartment that even before receiving any neuro mods at all that he was an accomplished engineer there's a ton of work he was doing and he was even able to make the January and December robots after losing his neural mods and his memory we also know from Alex's comments that Morgan has been hacking into computers for decades and yet he's incapable of doing even the most basic versions of these things when you're in control because it's a typhoon in a simulation it even explains why the player doesn't have all of Morgan's prior memories either however once you open the door to that line of thought it's hard to close it again and the end result is a feeling of deep uncertainty about the story about what's intentional what was planned and what was rushed together or what I'm reading into that really isn't there at all the only thing that matters is how you treat the people that are still alive once you learn that prey is a simulation it's easy to dismiss it if you think about Alex for a bit though and assume that this ending scene is real then things can become a lot more interesting the key words in the phrase spoken at the end is that it was a reconstruction that was based on Morgan's memories it's not a faithful entirely accurate representation of true events of course how could it be when they're judging you on your decisions Alex is a lot more at stake here than simply seeing if a line of communication can be opened with the Tison earth is lost and they're desperate for a solution it makes zero sense to think that Alex would not alter the simulation in significant ways to make the humans appear more sympathetic when I went through the game a second and third time I was struck by how little respect the employees had for Alex and Morgan you they are painted as borderline incompetent and maybe even a little evil Alex admits that he broke Morgan's arm when they were kids over some deleted save files for a game and then there are numerous emails and audio logs show how ruthless he was with his staff that they were underpaid rebellious were scheming against him and even forced into neural mod removals to keep teams in the dark about what was really going on let that one sink in all on its own forced neural mod removal robbing people of months or even years of their lives against their will the picture so vividly painted was of the majority of talyn's employees having no idea that the typin were being used in such a way or that they even existed at all most that do find out rejected outright from the extreme end with suicide to organize plots to get the truth to news outlets back on earth the station is teeming with the stories of Alex being questioned undermined and hated by almost every major character that you come across we were almost set to arrest your brother when the attack happened nothing like the reasonable person he is when you speak with him directly or the cautiously optomistic calm presence in the ending scene like a man acting the part of one on the road to redemption a few of the audio calls you receive don't match his actions running the station either especially the one where he seems to show some understanding about the aliens and even an affinity for them I find it very hard to believe that most of the people on Telus one would be unaware of what was really going on just like I also find it hard to believe that so many of them were plotting against their employers the conclusion I want to come to is that alex has made himself and his brother into scapegoats and changed the simulated version of the station to make the Tyson believe that it was only a small minority of humans that were treating their race like a science experiment that most people when they discovered the truth rejected the whole thing and would have treated them better instead that there's something worthwhile in our race and our planet and that we shouldn't be held accountable for the actions of only a few that they should please please please empathize with us and try to help you're human you have a choice shouldn't be a problem for you says you're not an alien where I stumble is that there's no way to confirm this in the game aside from the choice to reject Alex and kill him instead and maybe that's enough if you think about it why would there be clues within a simulation because Alex would have been thorough enough to do a really good job to convince you maybe the real mind game and prey is realizing that you are being treated like a puppy despite all that being trained and conditioned to grow up to be an obedient little dog and that may be the horrific choice at the end is the right one for once that you should reject the manipulation and punish them instead I would have loved to be able to break out of the simulation on subsequent runs find flaws and cracks and escape in some way after realizing what was happening but maybe that's asking for too much especially given how many choices there are already over all I think prey as a story starts out strong spends too much of its middle portion wasting time to also finish strong even if it does give you a lot of things to think about it strange to realize that the side quests are still overshadowed by a weak main quest since the expectation after the opening would be a continuation of that quality as for gameplay combat and exploration I think pray is well worth experiencing yourself if you're a fan of these types of games even despite some of its shortcomings and a more puzzle-like approach to combat which admittedly some people might really enjoy but another big reason to play ties back to System Shock 2 a supposed classic that's often exalted for doing everything well pray has so many similarities that you'll probably get a much better understanding of what System Shock 2 was at release and you would playing it today because it hasn't aged all that well although a little better than you'd expect especially compared to System Shock 1 you can see how blatant some of the influences were on pray from the gravity shaft elevators on many levels to the almost exact same way the wrenches swung from above and to the side there's hacking repair cyber modules to neural mods a voice telling you what to do for most of the game vending machines for supplies a lot of audio logs environmental storytelling a setting in space a resource based system and I could really just keep going the games are really really similar System Shock 2 is by no means a flawless masterpiece and like some of the other shot games it falls apart at the end albeit in a more hilarious blaze of glory than the others in my opinion it is actually really worth it to play System Shock 2 just to see how bad the ending is in that game and how it does not fit the atmosphere of anything that came before it it's it's really weird and baffling I really recommend it prey is also far from perfect but so are many games released I know it's been heavily critical of it in this video but I hope if the game happens past you by that I've shown at least some of what it does well because it all comes back to the name for me and while we'll never know if this is truly why it didn't sell well that it should have been called something far more shocking instead [Music] okay so before you leave there are a couple of things I like to say the first one is that I am long overdue to make another recommendation so I am pleased to introduce many of you to a channel that goes by the name of turbo button I should also disclose up front that John is a friend of mine and I speak to him a few times a week I don't know why though is a bit of a goober turbo buttons videos cover a wide range of topics on game design similar to what game makers toolkit does I think he's made about 25 of them now on so many different games and subjects that I'm certain at least a few of them will jump out if you check out his video list there should be something area that you played at least two of my favorites of his or an in-depth look at an early level and tropical freeze which I think has been criminally under watch for how good that is and his video comparison of super metroid a metroid prime which is probably my favorite thing that he's done you can really feel how knowledgeable and passionate he is about the series as he goes through the transition between 2d to 3d he also somehow manages to avoid falling into the trap of focusing on which one is better and instead creates a wonderful discussion on how the core ideas of the series work in each game in their respective dimensions he also has a video on breasts of the wild if you want something a bit more new and popular in trendy so yeah everyone great channel not a good name for trying to find him on Google check him out on the YouTube maybe you should leave him a bunch of comments saying do a video on no man's sky so he has to play it that would really make me happy now that I've said that while we're here I also want to talk a bit about what happened to my channel last month I think that it's important that we acknowledge it this video was the first script I've written and recorded since the Lion The Witcher and the patreon went up I already had to eat a Finch video close to finish when it went live this YouTube thing was already my job before that but it was made a hell of a lot more secure last month by the outpouring of people pledging support for more videos it went from a few hundred pledges to well over a thousand many of them are scrolling as credits on the screen right now there's no way for me to properly say thank you for any of this other than to keep trying to make more content hopefully the new videos will continue to be worth your time and in the case of patrons the funding that allows them to be made with the increased income we've started looking at ways to do some streaming and have set in motion some plans to move so I can record audio more reliably for future videos I was also able to upgrade my recording equipment and I've been taking a few more chances on these steam releases to find games I could make videos on I don't know when streaming will become a regular thing just yet but it will be announced ahead of time on Twitter if you're interested in watching that I've also already begun production on videos that I won't release until I begin playing The Witcher games which is partly why this video on prey wasn't released in July and it was also pretty long thank you once again for allowing me to make these videos for you I never imagined the channel could ever come this far even after Nolan Skye has continually defied our expectations a video on Halle Knight should be next and I hope you enjoy it there was a brilliant game and I'm really looking forward to talking about it and thank you to miracle of sound for letting me use the song replica about praying the outro there should be a link in the description if you want to hear the whole thing it's pretty good

Channel: Joseph Anderson

Views: 2,742,563

Rating: 4.8602071 out of 5

Keywords: prey, bethesda, arkane, video game, review, criticism, critique, analysis, prey 2006, prey 2017, deus ex, system shock, system shock 2, bioshock, bioshock infinite

Id: KS0NtNxlX-s

Length: 85min 37sec (5137 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Well this guy just earned my sub. Really cool to hear him analyze a game I love in such length. And Prey really is a criminally overlooked game. I wish Bethesda hadn't completely fucked its marketing.

[u/ignavusaur]

I really enjoyed him talking about how Prey has a puzzle nature to its combat, he really laid out well why some people find difficult even on easy while knowledgeable player may find it easy even on nightmare.