Prey vs. Prey [Total Spoilers]

[Music] on a surface level there's a lot of similarity between doom three quake 4 and prey they share the same id Tech 4 engine they share the same basic aesthetic metal corridors with fleshy tumors busting out they share the same linear level by level progression but each one has a totally different structural approach to what often feels like the same set of building blocks doom 3 was a lonely horror focused title setting as Martian Space Marine against the demonic invasion quake 4 was a squad themed military campaign against the predatory straw aliens who use humans for parts prey is the story of a Cherokee Army veteran single-handedly defeating an alien invasion of Earth after they abduct him from the reservation bar he's in Dhoom 3 crafted claustrophobic environments designed to create constant anxiety and paranoia quake 4 made wandering set-piece levels mentis for a constant state of action prey creates bizarre love along navigation puzzles with portals gravity switching size shifting and even a secondary spirit world where obstacles might appear differently out of the entire family of games made using the it Tech 4 engine prey is the weirdest the most creative its design choices are unusual from the arsenal to the pace of combat to the overwhelming dedication to creating a really alien environment prey is more playful than experience and pretty much every aspect of its design its originality is one of the things that led to its being mostly forgotten it didn't have the franchise name power of the other games and it played a lot differently Vermont the player is exceptionally fragile we can only take a few hits before dying on the default difficulty and for another ammunition is scarce the game only has a few weapons and is consistently using scarcity to prompt you to switch between them it's much more pronounced than even in survival horror influence doom 3 but the easiest way to shake out the stylistic differences between these games is to look at how the games begin doom 3 has you spending about an hour winding down through a Martian research base populated for now listening to frightened whispers and foreshadowing what's the count quake 4 has a big cinematic planetfall sequence followed by immediate action as you look for what's left of your squad prey begins with its main character looking in the mirror of the bar bathroom screwing up the courage to ask his girlfriend to leave the reservation whim as they head back to the bar your grandfather gives you a dire warning no terrors to come but in the meantime you can play a fully interactive video poker and blackjack you can adjust the Duke box and change the track in the volume you can chat with Jen your girlfriend at the bar and then you can get a brief combat tutorial by beating up two bikers with a wrench when they get rowdy and insulting this is actually taken seriously by the game Tommy the main character could absolutely go to jail for it but then the green lights descend from the sky suck up the trucks in the parking lot tear the roof off the bar and pull everyone away from petty concerns like assault and battery the aliens have arrived the dark harvest has begun praising the masterpiece it's trying way too many things at once and they don't always land in a sensical way but I've got to admire praise willful creativity for a game of its particular pedigree doom 3 was technically oriented dedicated to showing off the engine that ran it tooling its gameplay the best favor of a technology quite 4 was a direct sequel to quake 2 ignoring the frenetic multiplayer for his gameplay of the third quake in favor of the most traditional gameplay of all the in tech for titles Prao is nothing to no one and proceeds to push the engine in entirely different directions in Doom 3 preferencing disorientation to fear in the atmosphere in the first hour of the game it introduces you to its portal mechanics in a way that's quietly unforgettable a crate tips over and then and an enemy pops out so you crawl into the portal and seamlessly appear in a room but a tiny rocky sphere in a glass box and other portal crates it's on the other side of the room and when he passed through that you appear on top of the sphere inside the glass box an alien guard walks in appearing to be stories tall notices you and then comes through the portal to hunt you down tiny style it's a very different kind of vibe than anything its peers would try its goofier and wilder or consider one of the game's most standout puzzles a series of cubes were all around assembling themselves into a larger hollow cube you become trapped inside as soon as you advance into a nearby portal to escape you have to change the gravity in the cube over and over swap in wall for ceiling and ceiling for floor this allows you to draw a power cube a track that winds all around the puzzle room it's like manipulating a locks tumbler while being inside the lock and this sort of straightforward non-combat puzzle is par for the course in praying about once a level usually much more often it throws some subtle and tricky obstacle in your path that requires no shootin whatsoever to engage with the point of them is to make the sphere the alien craft seem is genuinely alien and impossible as they can pray succeeds in that while walking is common occurrence in the game when the game isn't making mazes that wind all across the walls and ceilings they're having you fight out combat encounters wall hanging upside down in its best moments the combat feels like shooting your way through a glassy knock off MC Escher painting portals open up above below to the sides across the room tossing a handful of enemies at you at once and considering Tommy's surprising fragility responding quickly to that kind of all angles attack in an environment with so many weird and confusing angles is tricky and engaging at the same time the combat may be broadly familiar the level may be ultimately linear but the creative novelty of praise level design still shines through 11 years later it's not until a couple years later when puzzlers like the portal games hit the scene that you see this kind of exploratory aesthetic being expanded on and with the portal series the whole context and approach is just completely different perhaps the most charmingly distinct thing that prey does is with its arsenal and the pacing of combat often when games present you with alien weapons they don't really seem all that alien for every game like half-life opposing force that will give you guns that are squishy weird and unpredictable you get three games where alien means the same old assault rifles and shotguns but fancier and sometimes with lasers maybe prey only gives you a single human weapon a wrench beyond that you get a good half-dozen more weapons that have satisfyingly useful dual functions each is equally powerful besides the wrench you'll still be using every one of your weapons in the last stages of the game we'll probably true to ammunition for all of them in the final boss fight each gun is designed with a specific tactic and environment in mind in a linear shooter like this guns take on huge importance in constructing the feel of the game by making all the guns powerful all of them useful while at once facing the player fragile gives everything away be punchy feel constantly switching weapons out of tactical need or because of scarcity keeps things from getting monotonous sometimes have a habit of leaning on just a couple weapons that I enjoy in a shooter forgetting about the rest it takes a deliberate action on the developers part to get me to branch out prey accomplishes that naturally by making the guns part of the alien ecosystem and not just the primary means of blasting through it the most powerful rapid-fire gun you get is by slicing it off the hand of a gigantic enemy and it wriggles angrily in your grip as you hold it and fire it the simplest gun switches from semi-automatic for close range to a heat vision sniper mode that he can not only fire a few times before running out of weapon fire there's a gun that pulls its power from the walls of the sphere and different power outlets make the gun function differently from slow-moving red globs of damage to arcs of lightning that jump across the room an instant all of them incorporate some sort of organic element most of them are creatures of a--sort themselves all of them make a certain sort of sense for the environment this is the kind of deep design that brings the promise of the title to life you are nothing but a hunted animal and survival is a matter of besting the aliens on their own turf with their own tools and doom it didn't matter if you were in the bowels of hell you are still going to find some chain gun bullets this is totally different aesthetic and a wonderfully cohesive creative foundation for all the shooting you do even when your grandfather calls you to the spirit realm and things take a turn for the seriously peculiar the 2006 praise also a notable title for one of the most unexpected reasons it's one of the first triple-a titles to actively pursue the cooperation of actual Native Americans when incorporating them into a piece of fluff pop art the biggest most obvious complaint about native representation and games and pop media in general is that every Indian nation gets thrown together in one big swirling cliche that comes out either condemn natori or condescending on the surface pray seems like it's going to veer in that direction when grandfather starts spouting off his cryptic warnings at the bar dressed in his traditional regalia but there's two key storytelling details that do redeem pray even if the cheese of it is interactively baked into the production the first is that Tommy is a grounded character much more robust and real than the Space Marines of praise peers Tommy's got dreams and flaws and he reacts to events in a way that flows relatively naturally plus his voice by Native American voice talent Michael Gray eyes the second thing is that all the stuff in the game with Tommy's ghost Falcon the wisdom of the spirit world and his grandfather's ghost have the visual motifs that prey uses to characterize its Native American segments dreamlike as they are all of this is actually based specifically in Cherokee culture their symbols their mysticism all of the silly sci-fi stuff is obviously thrown in but pray was unusually progressive for the time by reaching out to the Cherokee and seeking help on making sure the native experience portrayed is at least grounded in something real and not just made-up wholesale based on the vague idea of what the first peoples are supposed to be like there's really only one guarantee against miss handling the inclusion of minority characters and that's actually speaking to and consulting with members of the minority you're including the game takes the whole thing rather seriously all things considered considered the primary character arc for Tommy has him starting off in that Oklahoma bathroom as a man with no face and no community and he ends the game as someone who saved the earth because he was willing to listen to his grandfather and use his spirituality is an actual in-game tool and weapon it's fun to see native culture extended into a sci-fi setting this way within praised fiction the aliens of the sphere have seeded earth as a pantry world to come and harvest when the time was right there have been smaller harvests in the past specifically the mass abduction and ingestion of the Anasazi cultures of the Four Corners area I'm traveling through the American West at the moment and the disappearance of the Anasazi people is a pervasive and deeply bizarre mystery historians and archaeologists haven't come up with anything better than go maybe there was an especially intense drought for why these cultures would abandon their Cliff Cities so completely in such an extremely short timeframe prey supposes that not only were they abducted but that they managed to persist within the sphere hiding in the walls and causing mischief where possible Tommi follows in their footsteps as cheesy as the gamified mysticism of prey is praised desire to have a native protagonist and put Earth's fate not in the hands of a stubbly white Space Marine but in those of a skeptical no-nonsense Cherokee mechanic is one more category of many where prey is willing to be more creative than the average corridor shooter mixing up native spirituality with a freewheeling Pope sci-fi aesthetic yields a unpredictable messy result however for example grandfather in DC's death that's a good one there's a big alien contraption that stabbing into captured humans tearing out organs draining blood and then melting away the rest in a hiss of steam you say it happened to a procession of strangers the machine taken mile to reset between victims then you pass around into another room and come back to the other side of the machine and there's an EC there's nothing you can do to spare him a totally brutal death and denisa faces it with a lot of dignity even as foot diameter needles gouge out his flesh later Tommy takes a terrible fall only to wake up and see NEC again in the spirit world unlike most shooters you don't have to reload your game you die you simply return here to the spirit world you can shoot a bow at lost spirits to absorb their power refilling your bars for when you pop out into the material world again picking up exactly where you were when you die on one level this is an absurdly silly gamification of Cherokee motifs on another it creates a gameplay pace that's slightly unique from any other shooter I played it functionally takes longer to do the lost spirit minigame than it does to simply reload a saved game but doing it this way also never breaks the momentum of play in quite the same way that a game over and to reload does you just transitioned briefly to another place where you can prepare yourself to try again and then you're immediately right back at it with no gameplay loss - - reloading you move forward more relentlessly this way with deaths acting more like a quiet pool along the river's current letting you rest a brief moment before heading back into the rapids I loved it mechanically even if it's a pretty iffy use of thematic material but there's a lot about how the spirit world is included and pray if it simply is not explained including a big chunk of side plot that simply gets discarded in favor of the simpler concern of going after Jen namely somehow Tommy brought angry ghosts aboard the sphere the Dallas thing in the game is these ghosts who kill children and then assume their form seriously the game makes the point of showing a couple of abducted orphans get gruesomely slaughtered by the ghost at which points are angry spirits turn on you mechanically they're wildly annoying to fight creatively there's nothing about them as weird or wonderful as the environment or the by and it's just like someone said mm how about ghosts and everyone agreed why not the mercifully infrequent scenes with the child ghosts are as subtle as a haunted house at a County Fair you get a school bus with ghostly light shining out the windows precipitating a ghost ambush more memorable is how the game handles Jen in some ways she's a complete non character existing only to scream and fright and provide motivation but she's used in a way that's just classic horror sci fi on account of your ties with the spirit world the mother the alien at the heart of the sphere it takes an interest in you when the mother realizes that Jen is important to you which she begins to completely and deliberately [ __ ] with you she challenges you to climb a huge spire after a brutal succession of difficult levels the mother shows you how far you've progressed maybe a tenth of the way but she sportingly agrees to take you to the top of the tower where she's got something that she's pretty sure is going to break Tommy spirit for good the game has defied human-alien hybrids before this scene so you can probably guess what's coming like Sarge and doom tree you must kill a gigantic organic tank made out of someone you know it's not in and of itself very original what sells it is how delighted the mother is to create such a painful and bizarre situation for Tommy as a moment of triumph or the villain it's one that lands well despite the cheese praise strength is all tied up and means minut details of characterization and aesthetic the charm and surprise it would just showed screenshots of prey to someone mixed up with the tech for a family of games it would be hard to pick prey out of the lineup if you weren't already familiar but in the playing of it there's so many deeply personal hilariously quirky touches put in by human head Studios the prey begins to stand out more and more of a deeper you get into it the most emblematic thing I can think of when thinking about praise unique take on the alien abduction story is the choice to anchor the plot with art bell AM radio segments I don't know what the overlap is between fans of bells legendary coast to coast am show and mid-2000s PC shooter fans but this particular detail won me over on the game completely when I first turned 18 and started taking long road trips I often spent the 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. hour listening to bells deep excitable voice disgust alien abductions and visions body snatchings and more it was the absolute single best way to wile away why wait I'm in that situation I'll remember Bell's voice all my life on account of those night drives and here he is in this offbeat shooter taking calls from all around the US slowly putting together a picture of the invasion in progress one radio segment plays while a human escaped from his cage and wild with shock and trauma rocks nervously back and forth while Bell casually throw skepticism on the caller's account of lights in the sky up here far above art bell in the sleeping world the two of you know better coast to coast am grounds prey in the rural weird of the American West quicker and better than almost any other reference I can think of playing prey 11 years after it's released I'm shocked by how much I relate to these little human touches the first prey made me nostalgic for 2006 in an unexpectedly powerful way hitting me much stronger than it did the first time I played the game it's so much a part of its particular era in its references and then it's creative ambition the world has moved on since prey 2006 yet the game has stayed sharp on account of it's almost flippant devotion to its very specific vibe the end game gets even crazier with Tommy reaching the mother only to become her replacement following the revelation that the mother was once a human warrior like humming Tommy's tempted by the limitless power of the sphere but rejects it when Annie sees ghosts cancels him on the folly of it so Tommy pilots the whole damn thing into the Sun which would have been a pretty great ending but prey wants to loop itself it begins in the bar it features the bar again it's pieces jumbled up from the digestive tract of the alien ship and then it ends with Tommy unpacking boxes and a newly rebuilt barb a radio talks about the government's refusal to acknowledge that the invasion even occurred and then the leader of the space anasazi Eloise appears in a portal behind you she invites you through here at the end it's resolved Tommy is going to leave the reservation after all prey will continue fades in on the screen that is a hilariously generic bro rock track plays in the background of the credits of course now we know prey would not continue at least not in a way remotely associated with Damacy to wou DS interstellar exploits it wouldn't be until 2017 that another prey game would come out and then it would be a lately different developer with a completely different structural approach pray 2006 is corridor shooter through and through although creative in the details pray 2017 on the other hand is a deliberate attempt to revive the mechanics of System Shock 2 I'm not kidding slides of a PowerPoint presentation from early and pray 2017 s development specifically brings up the 1999 title this is even stranger when you consider that the first pray was in development from 1995 all the way through 2006 each pray has more or less had a torturously convoluted 11 year development cycle which perhaps had something to do with how willfully weird both games are and the first pray began life back when Quincy was a little more welcomed in a triple-a game pitch but the 2006 pray that came from it did more or less resemble this original idea the 2017 pray isn't even aesthetically linked to the original its drawing from references on the complete opposite side of the first person shooter family tree system shock and doom were the grandfather's of their respective subgenres and it is a hell of a thing to have both subgenres within a single franchise human had originally wanted to follow up the 2006 pray with a sequel where you played Tommy again a direct continuous sequel but then they shifted perspectives human heads pray to was originally supposed to be about a US Marshal aboard the airliner you saw crash in the first game he would somehow escape the sphere and wind up as a bounty hunter and a Blade Runner inspired alien city recently Eurogamer talked to human head development developers more specifically about what their original vision for the sequel was supposed to be what's amazing about that video is that the game that human head was making actually largely came to fruition under the new developer arcane just with all the details changed human heads pray was going to feature a gigantic complex urban environment that the player would have to continuously navigate performing primary and side activities it was already going to ditch the corridor shooter format our King's prey takes place exclusively aboard Vitello's 1 a Space Station orbiting the moon it's done in a bright mid-century modernism instead of an 80s cyberpunk style but the structural focus is the same human heads pray to was going to heavily rely on an amnesiac main care missing stretches of their past and only putting together cohesive picture of their situation at the very end of the game our canes pray did the same constantly pulling the rug out from under the player as they try to understand how tell us one rose and fell and a polygon article about the development process that led from Tommy walking out on his unopened bar and into deep space adventure all the way to Morgan use on trustworthy and work and wake-up call pen raphaël colantonio who was our Caine's lead designer for the game said quote the name is cool and there was a match for the high level concepts which eventually after some thought made sense it's just the types of games they made back then and the types of games that we make are so different it's hard to directly compare them other than theme end quote that's one of the things that makes the 2017 prey such a remarkable and unusual title it is thoroughly modern in its production but I struggled to think of a modern title so openly in dialogue with away games were made back then as far as gameplay is concerned prey in System Shock 2 our seamless if you played the 1999 space horror game you're ready for the slightly more paranoid and pensive to South 2017 space horror game and vice versa each has a gigantic complex complete area composed of interconnected levels each features dense individual levels with rooms walled off by skills and secrets accommodating several approaches for access into different areas each game has a mix of mundane and exotic weapons with expensive and rare ammunition making each combat encounter costly intense each game provides hidden routes through their sci-fi labyrinths each game relies on the players curiosity to uncover what's going on through the logs of those whose bodies now litter the hulls each game even features a tree of psionic powers whose uses monitored on a purple bar even pick up a wrench as your first weapon both games a nod towards either the Shock series or towards the 2006 prey what's cool about this explicit mechanical referencing of the System Shock series is that the Shock franchise was careening on an opposite trajectory around the time of 2006 praised release Bioshock took an axe to the complicated upgrade and inventory systems of System Shock leaning instead on the persistent Arsenal's more common to the corridor shooter family tree although the environment was still interconnected you didn't return to level is quite the same way in Bioshock like I did in System Shock 2 it didn't make full use of the whole environment in the same way rooms weren't gated behind skills like they used to be there weren't hidden layers to the levels it was a much more streamlined straightforward shock Bioshock 2 was a bit more complex in the environment but still leaned on the philosophy that the immediate interacted experience was more important than the more abstracted systems based exploration of its predecessors it was BioShock Infinite though that was the controversial one it had finally crossed from one side of the first-person family tree to the other although it was arena based and not identifiably a corridor shooter exactly it had more or less completely transitioned out of the system centric immersive sim sub-genre and over to the story driven shooter sub-genre the approach most developers seem to take at the time was that simplification broadened a potential audience arcane's 2017 prey is the first time I've seen a major release so blatantly push back the other direction it said genre swapper as much as BioShock Infinite but the exact opposite direction taking a name known for something linear and filling it to the absolute limit with complex interactive systems in the storytelling the one area where Bioshock professor does surpass System Shock is in the complexity of the art raptures Art Deco undersea skyscrapers are completely unforgettable the freedom of a game to use architectural and artistic disciplines like Art Deco or modernism and scales and context it would be impossible in the real world prohibitively expensive for movie set designers is really remarkable in contrast to other mediums a book can describe but for this kind of thing it's more impactful to be shown and for the player to see it at the careful and slow pace of the immersive Sims ok PSA's an aesthetic most of all so pray 2017 has the best of both shocks the grandeur and artistic playfulness of rapture with the mechanical complexity of navigating the von braun on top of all that is arcane's distinctively contemporary touch in the presentation emphasizing the human lives of the living and dead aboard Talos 1 over their deaths telling a story about Green and humanity where it could just be about dark corridors and scary monsters more straightforwardly and easily 20-17 prays just as creative as the 2006 one just in completely different directions so what were the high-level concepts the colantonio thought linked the 2006 spray with the 2017 one obviously I can't speak for colantonio but I can speak for myself I think there's three chief ways the two titles resonated with each other despite their massive divergence and style substance and structure the first is the weapons not so much in the design and look of the weapons the new preys are all human-made and human centric they won't get any bile on you at all while you're shooting them but what is consistent is how useful each tool remains from when you pick them up all the way through the end game what's consistent is how ammunition scarcity drives the player to get as creative as possible with each weapon in the arsenal while prey 2006 had an arsenal that was organic in Bray 2017 has one that's clinical both are deeply tied to the environment that defines the weapons in instead of the creepley creepy-crawly carbines of the sphere everything in prey 2017 has kind of a whiz-bang prototype feel assembled in a lab from available parts and not remotely ready for mass production the guns are even environmentally useful the glue gun is the most iconic in fun of the game it goopes a creature in place long enough for you to run away or deal with it but more it's sticky puffballs can be used to make stairs and ledges enabling a player to move vertically in the environment a lot of unusual ways and bypassing freeways that are blocked by tests of skill or takes a recycler charge it's a grenade that pulls everything in its last radius towards a tiny point shreds it and then regurgitates it as materials using the nano fabrication machines using a clutch of these weird little grenades I turned the most powerful monster in the game into usable redeemable materials but even use these grenades navigationally as well literally recycling objects too heavy to move that might be blocking doorways the disrupter pistol on the other hand is a weak little thing but it's the only way to save the lives of mind-controlled humans by incapacitating them before they can run at you there's a bananer fkin with no combat value at all that can be used to remotely open doors the Q beam causes human and alien alike to melt into green puddles on the ground all of these weapons and tools are hugely likable hugely useful tools of destruction and you end up finding situations that call for every single individual tool nothing is useless nothing is wasted not even the nerf gun another point of commonality among praise is the use of confusion and disorientation as a driving force in the game the 2006 spray is all about spatial disorientation with its constant playfulness with the level design the 2017 prey is much more about mental disorientation the plot opens with Morgan waking up in a brightly lit earth apartment but it's a total illusion you're in a soundstage on Talos 1 you've been living this day over and over again you're a memory being reset every time one of the many experimental neuro mods are developing they're taking in or out you don't know yourself you don't know where you are you don't know the truth behind the neuro mods yet the answers to all those questions mutate and shift is the plot rolls round plus the monsters themselves are meant to instill more distrust and more dread the mimic says they're called imitate two things everyday objects and people they kill people the mimics are bad at their walkin shadows boiling and strange but objects the MINIX can perfectly imitate the very first time you see a mimic in the game it pretends to be a man's coffee cup before mercilessly attacking him but before it does there's a moment of brow furrowing worry on the scientist part wait is this his coffee it's that moment where you know that something is off but you haven't put your finger on it yet that makes our Keynes prey most interesting of all you know one of the most influential science fiction TV shows the past few years is black mirror vignette series that's notable for taking some facet of modern technology or media and then spinning it off in its darkest possible direction what's really remarkable about it is how cuttingly immediated fields I'm sure this might lead to it ageing poorly but it articulates a series of modern fears that older sci-fi didn't see coming the 2017 prey has a huge resonance with black nears vibe like a good episode it's got a twist on the twist that recontextualizes the whole early experience like a good episode it's danger and paranoia are tied to a modern trend whose consequences are just becoming clearer in years past it was the government who did the nefarious science the air of the space program the atom bomb it was scientific progress with a federal budget and a national you can see an echo of big government as a scientific villain in half-life which is at its core an extremely traditional sci-fi setup then there's the rise in the 80's and 90's of the corporation is the villain but it's always a big nefarious conglomerate dark industrial a cyberpunk dream of what oppression in the future will look like the trans star corporation in prey is notably different for one they're not really portrayed very cynically a great deal of prey is learning the stories of the individuals who lived and worked on Talos 1 and very few of them would fit the boilerplate definition of a bad person they have Dungeons & Dragons groups they fall in love they make stop action movies in their cabins they have friendly rivalries and close friendships they all believe in what they're doing pushing the frontiers of science their offices are spacious and beautiful with no sign of the tortured cubicle drone motifs that evil corporations in the sci-fi of decades past might include Transtar is a corporation with the ethics of the modern startup they treat their employees well they care about aesthetics and beauty they care about branding they're also sacrificing prisoners to inhuman shapes of shooting monsters from the depths of space so that they can harvest the very useful materials inside the monsters bodies but you know they're pretty good to work for altogether this exotic material Typhon material led to the development of the neuro mod which allows the injection of skills and attributes directly into the eyeball learn piano levitate tales anything and everything to make you smart and powerful and interesting and all you need is money to buy the neuro mod they unlocked the human potential by shooting bits of alien biomass into the brain even if things hadn't gone wrong in the traditional running and screaming sense it would have created new layers of human inequality further divisions between the rich and poor more it involves literally sacrificing the undesirables to monsters so that the monsters can breed all the likeable people you learn about over the course of the game particularly yourself are complicit in these crimes on the surface trance tar is an open and ethical employer they treat employees with great dignity and respect employ top talent from around the world appear from a public relations standpoint to be flawless and yet tell us one is no rapture hiding it's creative talent away from the world because the world wouldn't understand it's the shining star on top of humanity's Christmas tree the best scientist working in interests of the richest people and your brother Alex frequently talks idealistically about humanity's future and how important it is to preserve the work being done but finality as a whole would never really benefit cruelty to many is done in the name of convenience for the fuze today it's small examples uber using advanced software to hide from regulators and shortchanges drivers or Facebook using algorithms to identify low self-esteem individuals for targeted advertisements but if something like the typhoon ever was discovered would it be sour old men and heavily decorated army uniforms arguing over its use or would it be selfish young geniuses and jeans and button-up shirts there's so much excellent flavor text in the game but my favorite is an excerpt of an article about the space elevator humans could build more than one elevator and trigger a golden age of exploration but the company that controls the space elevator has shut down every competitor to keep their prices high human progress as prey sees it it's not a march to the top for all humanity it's a race to see who can get to the future first because they will surely be able to sell tickets all the Schmucks suddenly stuck is living in the past behind them the game is so much more about these themes than the Typhon themselves the Typhon are beautifully designed genuinely unsettling and truly alien but it's the human element that has the focus in prey that's why the Typhon are so perfect an enemy they literally fade into the background while you're exploring you have to take it room by room and each room has a purpose and a story sometimes the story is complicated like where you learn how the Typhon are made and sometimes it's simple like oh I used a neuro mod to make me a better hacker and now I can reach the storeroom I couldn't get into an hour though and gather materials I need not to die arcane stakes it's Studios reputation on the complexity of their level design and Dishonored 1 & 2 the levels were absolutely massive and tremendously intricate but not strictly interconnected once they left a level you didn't come back this is our Kane's opportunity to make a single environment with 30 hours or more of exploration to be done pray is structurally a hugely traditional game it's an extension of what they were doing with dishonored - with an even more deliberately backwards looking design except it's refined by storytelling techniques that are identifiably our teams namely using action as the sole means of characterizing depth agonist that was Dishonored incredible hook Corvo attano could either be a good man clearing his name or the monster of vengeance that everyone thinks that he is all dependent on how the player behaves mechanically if they make the gameplay effort as the player to create more compassionate outcomes pray does the same in a way if it's a little more subtle without being so explicitly part of a mechanical structure as was in Dishonored you have the option to help people or ignore them or even kill them no one is so important that they can't die and keeping everyone alive is a lot of extra work yet the climax is almost entirely centered around how you solve these conundrums and if you care about the humans of Talos one or not there's even a whole chunk of ending dependent on if you refuse to kill a late-game villain a company fixer from trans Tara shows up to kill everyone aboard the station and erase evidence of the company's misdoings you can incapacitate him rely on someone else you saved to drag him across the station and remove his neural modest this causes amnesia for him like it did for you he recognizes you as an executive when he comes out of the fog and will help evacuate everyone left alive but the shuttle he came in honest if you don't give him the Mindwipe however no one goes home unless of course you discover the secret escape pod of your brothers and then maybe just you can but if you want to leave behind all those people to die go for it prey doesn't just give you multiple solutions for navigation exploration combat there's always another ethical solution as well and none of its so obvious as bioshock's little sisters pray 2017 is bold enough to let the player choose without a prompt to give them the option to act without immediately casting judgment if they don't in all ways this is the distillation of what works best about the shot games meaningful human choices coupled with fiendishly subtle environments Morgan's key code to his office is zero four or five one the developer in joke signifies that a game is generally based around these values first featured in the original system shocked deus ex references zero four five one both dishonored have zero four or five one even bioshock infinite prominently featured the reference infinite has one single interactive lock and that's the code for it four five one zero four five one was as relevant to the bioshock infinite as an appendix a purposeless vestige flood went before but the 2017 prey is like a cloned mammoth the real deal whole and alive and impressively huge it's only real flaws at the end game unfolds at an awkwardly fast-paced throwing combat encounters a view much quicker than you explore new areas draining out your ammunition and resources and leading to a kind of inventory driven difficulty hike in the game's last two hours the combat and prey is honestly the least engaging part about it the gun variety is phenomenal but frays tendency to repopulate areas with tougher enemies when you re exploring them after you've already scavenged what you can for most the level tanks the mechanical pacing as time goes on things get worse and worse on the station and meanwhile you keep having these visions of a room with Alex and of somewhere mysterious leap in space in a general sort of way the twist is depressingly predictable as soon as you break out of your simulated apartment both my friend midi who was also playing the game and i said to each other not going to be a simulation within a simulation is it well it is but after thinking it over i'm actually fundamentally very satisfied with how this ending ties everything prayed together essentially have to direct choices for the end game which vary slightly depending on decisions you've made like making the shuttle ready for escape or not either blow up the station and the giant - mother organism that's wrapped itself rounded or use a device of Morgan's own creation that uses the Typhon neural network to electrocute all the type in at once preserving the station if you blow it up that's it you go home or die one of the other if you preserve it Alex gives a postscript about how the work will continue and everyone will look back on them as the ones who finally grasped immortality and then credits but all the good stuff is in the surprise post credits wrap up the whole idea behind neuro mods that the typhoon could be used to make humans into something more but that something was increasingly just the Typhon maybe a multiplying creature didn't leave the station but Transtar sold the world a product where they directly injected aliens into their eyeballs they brought the tithe onto earth already in a thousand tiny doses and destroyed it the world's been long over in the Typhon neural network weaves between the abandoned skyscrapers Alex knew is still alive trying to fix the mistake he made as best he can and what he's done is reserved reverse his work he's abandoned trying to augment humanity with the Typhon now he's trying to augment the Typhon with humanity euro Typhon what you've seen is a simulation of the moment where everything went downhill what's being measured is your empathy why the Typhon are animals they don't hate they don't scheme it's debated in emails and documents and audio logs whether or not they even perceive humans as alive exactly alex is trying to turn that around by making a Typhon thinks it's human will it act in a human matter what manner will it demonstrate empathy the whole game long you've been graded on your moral performance secretly behind the scenes even get a breakdown of your more minut choices from robot fussing but simile is the character as you may or may not have killed if you've acted violently and anti socially they put you down if you've acted like a human Alex reaches out his hand and offers to treat you as one even if you kill him inside the sympathia simulation alex says I might have killed me too considering who I was back then destroying the earth humbles a guy I guess but you have a last-minute choice you can take his hand or you can pass judgment and kill them all all this focus on the particulars of the characters lives had two purposes in this hidden frame one is that it shows dynamically that all of these people were truly human flawed and blind in ways brilliant and perceptive and others were you moved by them even knowing what they all did that's the other purpose building a case of evidence against humanity these were the luminaries they were the best and the brightest and they suck deeply and committed serious crimes do they deserve judgment the player chooses which tone which judgment humanity receives forgiveness or an accounting for our wrong in the simulation that Alex crafted for his Typhon subject was as much a confession as a lesson here is humanity and microcosms our ambitions our failures what comes next mechanically prays engaging because of its backwards ambition because of its powerful belief that simplification does not equate to a larger audience Meredith Lee though praised engaging because it taps so directly into a pulsing vein of cultural Anees as we move into the future will we be able to balance the wonders we achieve with what we can reasonably ask forgiveness for thanks for watching this video and all the other videos I do are made possible by people donating to the on patreon I'd like to thank by name some of the people who are currently donating $10 month or more to make these videos possible people like Ashley rain aircraft McKinnon Josh Farkas Morton scanning sang goostin Brian dunes NK jemisin q ax hey Chuck David Carlton Spiro Sedaris Chris K on Evan Hill Brian Koppelman Dewey Amir Aguilar Josh Masha Flyer gallic Neil's box from ER Matthew Mason Brendan vote Dirk warble Chris larkey John Paul harsh Michael Coonan Martin Carson Tyler Dow Z Charles Favreau crowd Leeson laughs Alice brine Ock Fergus Foley Cameron Jackson Tom Vickers Daniel pining matin Nate Williamson Antonio Joseph Duvall a the third ken marsh Divya Foust Andrew tax the Yangzhou Coby Howard even Francisco Santana Argos Swift Jonathan holder sorcerer Dave Koz on bar booty Michael metal is ski free morpheme rich store Noah Duggan's Caliph's Brett llamo Casa de I cannot fly Harley McEvoy Sharif Kazemi Wesleyan ray Sawyer sudhana a Janelle Bray sign an earful Thomas Witte gives Collin Daniel mower miry the Germans Nava Rob Hackett eastex Nathaniel garish Bradley Smith Ryan Van Dyke Michael at well Cheryl devera Boulder Carlson Andrew Schiphol Cameron booth Stephen criminals Jacob Robertson Devin Fitzpatrick Alexander heavens Laurie Raimi Paula keen Coleman Steven putt you play Harrington Phillips max Wellington Preston Allen Brad car Matthew Jason T Barnes alakazoo lotto pro of course Steven Garrett Dave Jack Dawson how Hooton will Edwards Robert Glover Jeannette news Austin Green Jonas Martinson William Davis carl-henric Carol Henderson Jack carving low Wargrave Sebastian karani lil Dobbins Luke Murphy which Tom painter Oscar Spangenberg Thomas Paris Niles be McDonald Kim winsome Devin Vernon Mike downing Jeffrey Newton ties Arabic areum's Tim Darnay Jodi Warren Kimmel - Medal of Connor matheus Kallstrom Scott Miller Tim moon a 18a k47 Andre Brega Gare Joe Hewson Hercules Johnson sy Alexander Dimitrios Peter reduce key Chris Wright Alexander a photo Diller Jesse Wilkinson Matthew Sutton Ricardo game de la reine Eva Anderson Dana stoop key argh Anthony Bardot Kevin Shelb andreas Larsen Jared Meier Andrew Andrew Steele Thunder O'Brien nobody Brian Hill Lars breakin Igor Babiak Justin Hughes Alex for Connie Kumar envision KCT Olli Alexander Lyster world war two freak Julius Dean Eli Burke mass Dennis Clark Jake Brennan Nicole Hamilton Milky Way resident will Hooton Zoey cheek Eddie Burton markus persson Christian Decker onsen Gabriel Nichols Ranjha Bay comfy hat Cassie and Luke Murphy thanks very much and I appreciate quite a bit

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 199,632

Keywords: Prey, Arkane, Human Head, Prey 2, Critique, Review, Retrospective

Id: bINxL__VitI

Length: 43min 56sec (2636 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/LolaRuns]

That moral choice system (that you probably don't even notice because it's not telegraphed) from the newer Prey sounds fascinating.

[u/CharmingAssimilation]

Great video, Noah doesn't disappoint.

One thing I found interesting was his interpretation of the Spoiler

[u/[deleted]]

Love the dudes content but his production values are below zero. Dozens of videos and he still hasn't figured out how to record without having white noise constantly in the background.

[u/[deleted]]

does anyone know if it is still possible to buy that game online somewhere? the 2006 version of course

[u/ContributorX_PJ64]

Another great video from Noah. I do feel he misinterpreted a few small elements, such as how the Neuromods work -- the needles actually bypass the eye. But overall it was a great look at the two games.

I do notice that the Q-Beam has fat capacitor-style things on top that strongly resemble one of the guns from Prey 2006. Thought that was interesting.

[u/ToxicToothpaste]

The original Prey could have been a classic. It had so many unique things going for it - cool, alien weapons, wall walking, portals, they even put effort into making a relatable main character. Unfortunately, it had a fatal flaw, the same flaw every FPS from that era had: It was a corridor shooter. God, am I glad we moved away from that trend. I always wondered why developers even bothered adding a third dimension when they weren't using it in the level design anyway.

The linearity in prey is especially galling to me because of the lost potential. Walking on the ceiling is cool, so are the portals, but no matter how much the game tries to disorient you, it doesn't disguise the linearity. In the end, its just another corridor. If they had just opened up the levels, letting the player make their own way just a bit, I would have adored it.

[u/Indetermination]

Noah is exceptionally good at articulating the things that a game succeeds in, which is nice in a youtube world where people will literally nitpick their favourite game for 90 minutes.

[u/galaxxus]

A lot of people aren't really talking about this video. Comments seem to be all about why one game is shit compared to the other.

Noah doesn't bash either game in this video. He's praising both and is explaining why he like them so much.

[u/team56th]

The same production quality complaints do come up every single time, and I say this as a reaction to that all the time, but yeah. It does not matter whether Noah doesn't care about production quality, or whether it is a stylistic choice. Whatever the hell it is, I pay my due every month because he is fucking anachronistic.

He is a classic journalist or researcher by heart who writes, rather than speaks or shoots a video. He just happens to read them in an audio form, puts video clips on them, and uploads them on YouTube. Not being able to find a place to put his writings on, he just uses contemporary format to make his writings find a way, which somehow caught on. (It also actually gave him a chance to publish in a more traditional way.) To him YouTube is no different than paper, he does not care about videos really.

And you know what, that's hilarious in a way. Guy speaks like news anchors of 60s, constantly quotes novels of mid-late 20th century, lives like hippies of 60s and 70s, writes as long as old college professors in liberal arts department, and does that on a 21th century video distribution service. This anachronism is almost fascinating, like, what is this guy doing?

I don't know if that makes sense, but it is sort of like how Destiny became a hit. That game does things that a modern game should not do, but that ended up forming something very distinctive, and people stayed. NCG is most definitely not for everyone, but what he is and what his writings are form something unmistakable. As a self-proclaimed fan of his videos and writings I just want him to keep "being NCG" and maintain the enjoyable writing quality. Video production quality could get better, sure, but I feel that has nothing to do with what makes him an eccentric yet reputable game critic.