Just beat Prey and boy did I enjoy it!

I adored the combat, atmosphere, expansive playstyles, mystery surrounding the story, etc. It has a weird mixture of System Shock 2 and Dishonored that I really feel works well.

The beginning of the game is absolutely brutal up until you start getting Typhon abilities. You go from having to stealth around, setting up every encounter with Phantoms just to survive, to sprinting extremely fast, slinging out explosive blasts, psychic shocks, flame pillars, and so on. It really excels at giving you this daunting enemy which has a huge advantage, to you having the enemy's same abilities that have been killing you over the course of the game, putting you on even footing. My only complaint here is that there aren't really that many weapons. A pistol, shotgun, and laser are really your main means of killing a Typhon outside of the abilities. One or two more weapons would have been a great addition.

The story is pretty good aside from what feels like a rushed, and very sudden, ending. It doesn't rely on some huge boss encounter to top things off which I can appreciate because it's not that type of game. There are some genuinely difficult choices to make that transcend "good" or "bad," oftentimes resulting in you having to choose whether someone should die or not. My favorite example was when I went onto Talos's bridge and saw a computer screen displaying a shuttle only 6 minutes from entering Earth's atmosphere launched from Talos right as shit started going sideways. An audio log nearby shows an officer's deliberation over destroying the shuttle potentially contaminated with Typhon remotely but being cut off by something before she can make a decision. I opted to blow up the shuttle myself but I had to think about it for a while.

I'm really glad I played the game a bit after release. Aside from a few bugs and one or two slightly framey areas, the game ran flawlessly at max settings on my 1080 machine. The arboretum and power plant had the most frame drops but after fully updating the computer's drivers, most of those issues disappeared. I know the game had a lot of issues on release, but it seems like they've been smoothed out for the most part.

If you're looking for a good System Shock 2 esque game and have a pretty good PC, I'd highly recommend this game.

Prey is my biggest surprise this year. I just can't get enough of this fuckin game. It's my favorite spiritual successor to the System Shock/Deus Ex model yet.

Amen, brother! keep singing those Prey praises!

Though I had issues with the combat and story I think Prey is fantastic. It was on my personal list last year and I'm interested to see if it shows up on the community GOTY list or not.

I'm heading towards the end of the game, and I'm also loving it. Funny though, the combat was brutal for me until I got the shotgun and upgraded it a bit. Haven't used any Typhon mods. Just rolling through as a human shooting Phantoms at close range.

About halfway through. Human only powers which I think I'm starting to regret.

@marcsman said:

I beat it with human only powers. Improving your firearms and tools skill lets you make short work of adversaries easily. But I think you can adopt two alien powers without turrets attacking you. So if you want to mimic into a coffee cup to get through that jammed door, you can.

Does the game's story acknowledge that you are going "Typhon-free" or no?

Praise, praise! Along with Dishonored, Arkane are making some of the most fun first person sandbox style games around. Prey is one of the years greatest games that no one played and it’s a real shame it didn’t even get a mention in GOTY talks but I realize no one from the crew enjoys those sort of games.

I loved Prey, i couldn't put it down. I was tempted to start it again but with how many amazing games came out last year it was hard to justify it.

Something I didn't mention in my first post: the exploration and traversal!

A huge part of the game is trying to figure out the best way to get from point A to B. Flying through space to get to airlocks is fantastic, but you also intuitively figure out how to get to those places through the station's interior as well. Want to get to the cargo bay? You could run through the entire station (I think) or you could go through GUTS, OR you could fly in through the cargo bay door you use to get in originally. Want to get to the Talos lobby? There are like three or four different ways to get in there. While the easiest way is probably via the elevator you unlock about a third of the way through the game, you can also go through the Hardware Labs, Neuromods Division, or Psychotronics. It feels like you're exploring an actual space station, learning its layout so you can more efficiently run around it.

Gosh, what a great game.

Prey is a good ass video game. Glad you enjoyed it duder. I feel like a lot of people slept on it last year and it got lost among the avalanche of awesome releases.

There is definitely an acknowledgement of whether or not you went down the typhon route a little, a lot or none at all. To tell you anymore would spoil a great moment though.

Yea, it was an amazing game and my 2nd favorite game from last year after AC Origins. Arkane are the absolute best at making immersive sims and believable worlds right now. It's a shame their games don't sell well

I also beat it with human only powers. I actually found it a lot of fun sprinting up to an enemy and blasting them in the face with my shotgun. I didn't feel like I was missing out on any part of the game by not going into the alien powers. Actually, I thought it was kind of odd that you can beat the game without investing in the alien powers at all, but you'd be hard pressed to finish it without putting anything into human powers.

I do plan on playing through Prey at least once more with a greater focus on alien powers.

Well, I always buy them. Arkane is a studio that puts out smart games. But like Dishonored 2, I only got say 1/2-2/3d's through. Not defeated by anything, but at times not having much fun. Spoiler; I found myself in a quandary when I was to report back to a former love I had rescued, what happened to her father. Most of you know damned well what I did to her Father, as a former iteration of myself. So, was it Morgan Yu dealing with this, or me? Morgan as he was reminded could avoid the situation. What would he really have done? Broken her heart and hated a Morgan Yu no longer capable of these things? In the literal sense, I did not go back.

But this is a good game in most respects. I went the Typhon route, and I do remember what I was told at the time. Prey I do want to get back to.

Dope game. One of the best one of those, if not top three.

Did y'all notice the story moment they lifted directly from Bioshock? It wears its inspirations on its sleeves.

Yeah, it's really fucking good...definitely wish it would have gotten more love in the GOTY talks. I need to go play it more now.

I'm halfway (I think?) through it, and I really enjoy it. One of the biggest surprises considering I was really upset we didn't get the rumored Prey 2.

It's very good. I enjoyed the atmosphere, story, characters and environments. I found the gameplay a bit irritating, but I think that's mainly due to how the Typhon "don't play fair" and can warp around. Also, you can't play Prey like a straight-up shooter, especially in the beginning when ammo is very scarce. I don't think I learned that until half way through the game. There's also slightly too much backtracking in the final bit of the game but that exterior level where you can fly around the station to quickly get between areas is great.

I'd be really interested in seeing a Prey 2, but given I understand the game didn't sell very well, we might be waiting a while. But overall Prey is a great "System Shock 3".

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. That said, the final several hours tainted my appreciating of the preceding... I don't even remember how many hours. I honestly want to say seventy hours. Yeah, I expected maybe a fifteen-hour experience, but exploring every nook and cranny of Talos 1 took much, much longer. I played it a lot so finished it over a few days though (maybe it was a week, I don't remember). The last several hours for me though were just going from point A to B by mad-dashing it because I felt I had seen everything I wanted to as all of Talos 1 was explored, so the story was all there was left and I guess I wasn't all that interested in that aspect.

It also didn't help that the last hour I got a call into work, so I had to hurry it up. I just remember thinking 'yeah yeah, I get it, let's hurry this up.' I suppose the ending was kind of interesting though in hindsight. It didn't give off a good final impression to me. I took the game off of my PS4 right when I turned the game off after the credits and hadn't played it since, which isn't a good sign. I really did enjoy it though. As I played Prey, it was consistently a game that I thought 'this is definitely one of the best games of the year', but thinking about it now, while it may have been, it's one that I'd forget to ever put on the list of best games of last year.

I just recently went back through Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and before putting that back on my PS4, I thought maybe I should play Prey instead, but I chose not to.

I finished Prey over the holiday break and I fell in love with it, I haven't been that absorbed in a games world since I played The Witcher 3, the only other game I played in this vain is Deus Ex Human Rev. which I liked at the time but Prey blows it out of the water.

I tried playing Dishonored and couldn't get past the third level without getting bored. I think the fully connected world of the game is really fun and using the EVA to move around outside was cool. Every time I came into a new area I would look around and say 'I wonder if I can get there' and I could every time, I managed to find all of the audio and text logs without even trying.

I went all human with maxed shotgun, starts out tense, you become more powerful then the tables turn and you have to rethink things. I also love the crafting ammo and supplies systems.

I'm in the same boat. I just picked up Prey and never would have guessed how much I enjoyed it. The most surprising thing about it is how well that game controls. It feels so fluid to jump, glide, and mimic around its universe. This really could have broken my top 10 if I played it in 2017.

It's a shame it didn't get much love from the crew. That atmosphere is intense.

I bought Prey shortly after it released and played through about 3/4 (?) of the game when I experienced a bug that would not let me progress (PS4). I tried various things, but couldn't fix the issue. I put it down and then picked it back up after a patch was released about a week later. Sadly, the patch did not address my issue and I stopped playing. I may go back when I have a lull in games. I mostly enjoyed what I played.

Any tips?

I couldn´t beat myself to finish the game even tho I wanted to so badly :/ maybe I will give it another shot

@marcsman:

its a good game but also... very buggy and has problems with overlapping voice lines which can mess the narrative up, but beside that, the combat is good and the story is okay. The environment and art direction is also really well done.

Reading through this thread makes me want to finally check it out. I had held off because of the combat, but the story sounds pretty good.

The combat isn't amazing, but it isn't bad either. Some weapons like the pistol and shotgun feel really good. Other weapons like the gloo gun and wrench feel very cumbersome. For being such an essential weapon, the GLOO gun gets caught on geometry so much that you more often end up constructing a wall between you and your target rather than actually hitting your target. For the most part, you're aiming to level up in order to shorten the duration of combat. I have no idea how the alien powers feel though.

Oh man - this makes we want to play it again with only human powers this time.

Did they ever fix the PC controller support after fucking it up in the 1.05 update?

Edit: I see it's only £10 for Xbox One on Amazon - might just get that if the PC controller support is still knackered.

Edit: PC controller support is still broken according to Steam - shame.

@arjailer: wow wtf? Well good to know as that takes any reason for me to ever buy this game lol. Wow, and they broke it in August?

@oursin_360: Yeah, it's a real bummer. Steam Controller works, but Xbox controllers are now handled as emulated Steam Controllers with the right stick emulating a mouse and it doesn't work very well at all. Hundreds of comments on Steam complaining about it. No idea why they did it as Xbox controllers worked fine until that patch. No patches since. There were also lots of complaints about DS4 support early on, but I don't know if that got fixed or not as I don't have a DS4.

I thought it had some cool moments but I got quite bored of the enviroments and the enemies. I also feel like Arkane's games have very binary good/evil choices (basically if you dont kill, you're golden) which I wasnt a fan of. I did like the game though, even if the story didnt land.

(I like pretty much all of these 0451 games though, whatever you wanna call them)

@boozak: I really don’t think the choices are that binary. Like I said in my original post, there were a few situations that actually forced me to think about what to do. Like an escape pod that’s stuck and people inside are asking for help to launch it after opening the escape doors? I mean you could help free them (good) but what if it has mimics inside (bad)? And you jettison them to earth(really bad)? Alternatively you could launch the escape pod, slamming it against the launch bay doors and killing the people inside (bad). They wouldn’t know, no one else would know, and maybe you just saved the earth (good?).

There are at least three other choices like that in the game.

@strangestories: What i'm saying is the way the game/Arkane judges your choices are always favoured towards not directly killing people even if it's for the greater good so from the options you've listed theres only one good outcome.

Personally i'm just a bigger fan of the Deus Ex model of not gamifying your moral choices.

@boozak: what happens at the end of the game if you make choices that kill most people in Prey?

And while I saved the people in the escape pod, with the shuttle choice on Talos’ bridge I blew it up. I didn’t really receive any judginess for that.

@strangestories: The elder Wu (forgot his name) kills you claiming "this isnt the one". I just found the idea of 'play our way or die' to be really shitty and Dishonored did the same in it's DLC. (which makes even less sense since I played Corvo as a pacifist) I will say it at least makes sense in Prey but I was still disappointed.

Prey was a bit of a revelation. It is just so full of good ideas and the level design is up there with the best. If you haven't played this one you are missing out on one of the best first person games of 2017.

Prey is stellar.

I got around to playing Nioh recently thinking I'd hate it but that game is fantastic too.

I haven't written many reviews, but it is the first 5-star review I wrote and my GOTY 2017. That game truly is better than the sum of its parts.

Looking over my 'best of all time list', I am pretty sure I only have around 10 to 12 games played in my entire life that I would give 5 stars. That said, I have somewhat of an outlier's taste, so I guess that doesn't say much.