Prey

The developers at Arkane Studios are apparently very fond of the style of game pioneered by Looking Glass studios. Even the phrase “Looking Glass” is plastered all over their newest release, Prey, which might as well be called a spiritual successor to Looking Glass’s 1999 effort System Shock 2. Arkane’s first game, Dishonored, was the same thing to Looking Glass’s Thief series. Some might be compelled to compare Prey to Irrational’s Bioshock, but this is true only in visual aesthetics – seriously, the Talos I space station could just be called “Rapture in space”. Everything else that Prey shares with Bioshock, it also shares with System Shock 2. If you are a fan of any of these games, then Prey should be high on your priority list because it does the thing that made Looking Glass’s name very, very well.

If you’re not sure what “that thing” is, it’s basically a style of first person shooter/RPG that places its focus on exploring an environment littered with details that flesh out an environment and setting. It’s heavy on atmosphere and immersion – everything has a place that is meant to make sense within the world. This is differentiated from something like Half-Life 2 by the level design. Where Half-Life 2 is a very linear experience where you go through an area, kill everything, and move on, Prey is almost an open world game. There are several different areas in Prey, all of them interconnected in a few different ways, and all of them huge and full of passageways and rooms, both apparent and hidden. As long as you can access it, you can go to any area any time you want, though at the beginning of the game the vast majority of areas are locked to you.

Exploring these areas is Prey’s greatest strength. Arkane have done a fantastic job of building up a world, better than any of the Bioshocks and definitely better than Dishonored. Areas are littered with books, notes, and audio logs, all of which feel more interconnected and meaningful with the narrative. Characters mention each other in emails and those audio logs, they had rivalries and friendships and motivations and narratives. There’s a great sense of stuff happening here on the space station Talos I, both before and after the catastrophe that resulted in most crewmember’s deaths. Beyond the worldbuilding stuff, Talos I is also filled with items you can pick up and use – alcohol, junk food, old banana peels, ammo, guns, an unconventional variety of grenades, and skill points – here called “neuromods”. Anything you pick up can be placed into a recycler, turned into one of four different basic elements, and then taken to a fabricator, where – if you have the schematic – you can turn it into anything else, which you’ll need to do quite often because Prey has some pretty tough enemies.

Prey is one of those “play it your way” games, where you can either be a stealthy guy who avoids killing by any means necessary or you can be sociopathic Rambo and kill everyone and everything without remorse, or you can be anyone in between. I was in between, like I imagine most people will be, but I leaned heavily towards the action guy side of things. There are plenty of options for approaching combat in Prey. You can do like I did and put every point you can into getting more damage out of your pistol and shotgun, you can instead focus on putting points into the Gloo Gun and Wrench Damage and just kill things with melee, or you could focus almost entirely on Typhon abilities. Do you think the enemy’s powers look cool? Great, Prey allows you to scan them Metroid Prime-style and then you can put neuromods towards their abilities. I discovered all of these Typhon abilities throughout the game – it’s not hard to do so, actually – but never put any points into any of them. There are six different skill trees in this game and I put all of my points into the three “human” tech trees instead of the Typhon ones, and the characters talking to me at the end of the game noticed that. By the end of the game, I could sprint very fast for a very long time, walk and sneak without making noise, jump several times higher than default, sneak attack things for 200% damage, and do 150% extra damage with the pistol and shotgun.

But the skill trees have two problems that should be noted. Some abilities are downright useless or barely useless and I really wish there was one that made it easier to get organic and mineral materials, both of which are needed for almost everything you need to fabricate and both of which I found myself running short on at the end because resources are practically finite (though it’s worth mentioning that my action guy shotgun pistol antics were way more of a resource hog than I realized). The other is that you can easily complete the game focusing only on the human skill trees, but you don’t get access to the Typhon trees until a few hours in and there are some skills in the human tree that affect the Typhon tree (if you want more energy used to cast Typhon abilities, for instance, then you’re going to need to invest points in the human tree). Also, the reason I avoided Typhon abilities in the first place is because the security turrets that litter the station will start attacking you if you do so – I have heard that this can be easily circumvented with some hacking (a human skill), but it sounded like an annoyance that I didn’t want to deal with. For what it’s worth, some part of me does want to play through the game again and focus way more on Typhon abilities just to see how else I can play the game.

The final complaint I have about the gameplay is that every area spawns tougher enemies when you return to them. Once you start encountering Etheric Phantoms and Greater Mimic, every area starts having those. This means that you should do as much as you possibly can in every area the first time around. There’s a very late-game enemy type that I found very annoying and resistant to my attacks – I hope you’ve done every side thing you want to by the time these guys show up because if you haven’t, you’re probably just going to want to dash through every area to get to your destination as fast as possible. These guys would be fine as a temporary annoyance that you have to deactivate or something, but no, they’re there and bothersome from the time they show up to the end of the game. You can stack boxes in front of their dispensers and then kill all of them, but even that sounds like a tough and aggravating chore. Fortunately, they’re only in the game for the final two or three hours and they’re easy to run past.

The game’s story is a sore point for me. Dishonored had some pretty good worldbuilding in it but the actual plot on top of all that was lackluster and here, it’s the same. Prey’s plot kicks off exceptionally well, with a flashy intro and some great bad music and some broken windows that reveal that everything was a simulation – but then the plot says “go get this MacGuffin” and then the meat of the game consists of you going through diversions to get to that MacGuffin. Then the plot kicks in for the last few hours and rushes through everything relevant, so very little of it has any impact. It’s still fine, but you’re not going to find anything particularly revelatory or worth discussing around the watercooler, especially if you’ve played System Shock 2 or Bioshock. What really makes the story a sore point is something that happens after the credits. For one, the thing that caps off the entire story’s plot takes place after the credits, which is a completely baffling decision. For two, the game’s big reveal is unsatisfying and leaves a sort of bad taste in my mouth. I knew something about it beforehand – the game gives you a handful of hints and there’s at least one very explicit hint that you can get if you follow a certain sidequest – and it says something good about the worldbuilding that I was still pretty invested in what was going on. Still, that after credits reveal flushes everything about the world down the toilet.

Don’t let that ruin the game for you, though. It’s still very good, there’s still a lot of great stuff in here, and as I said above, some part of me wants to run through it again and see how well it plays when I focus on, say, stealth and Typhon abilities over more generic action guy pistols and shotguns. It’s a lot of fun to play, it’s a lot of fun to explore, and there are a lot of interesting characters and great moments that make Prey worth your time and money. I'm looking forward to whatever they do next. Now, if only I can get Dishonored 2 to run decently on my computer...

Time Played - 20 hours
Platform - PC, mostly with a controller, PC port is pretty good and mouse and keyboard controls are well-supported