Thoughts on Prey (2017) (Patreon)

If you don't know, Prey is a new immersive sim from developer Arkane. After making Dishonored, the studio split in two with one side (in France) working on Dishonored 2 and the other (in Texas) on Prey. 

The game is designed as a spiritual successor to the System Shock games so expect space stations, RPG elements, psychic powers, dead bodies, emails, and artificial intelligence. 

Overall, I really enjoyed the game's sense of free-form exploration and ingenuity in problem solving, but found the combat to be a bit of a drag. I'd easily recommend it to fans of the immersive sim genre, of Bioshock, of sci-fi games, and of Metroidvanias.

If you want to hear more about what I did and didn't like, read on! I'll try to be spoiler free, but you may wish to discover some of this stuff on your own. 

I may do a video on this game. Not sure. But wanted to get some thoughts down on paper, at least. 

What I Liked

Inventive solutions

Like any good immersive sim, Prey gives you problems (often, a locked door) and a number of different tools, abilities, and systems you can use to overcome that problem. 

To get into a locked office you could: find the key code, hack the key pad, fire a dart gun at a computer screen to run the unlock door program, lift a heavy box in the doorway, turn the heavy box into tiny Lego bricks with a recycler grenade, find a maintenance tunnel, make a staircase to the roof out of glue and drop through the skylight, or turn yourself into a banana and slide through a crack in the window.

This is so much fun and every solution felt very personal (even if most were anticipated or set up by the designers). 

Good tools and powers

The Gloo gun that lets you build your own platforms or incapacitate enemies. The ability to turn machines and monsters into temporary allies. The ability to morph into a mug. Your own personal anti-gravity lift.

After a few upgrades (you get loads and loads of upgrade points) you'll have an inventory of fun and multi-purpose powers to use. 

Some are less fun: I found the various PSI powers all kinda merged into one. They're all just blasts of damage in various colours.

World building

For the most part, Prey works on the iceberg theory of world building. Which means Arkane's writers have fully developed this consistent and well-realised world, but only surface the top 10% of it to the player.

So, you spend very little time reading stuffy lore and Wiki-style world building detail. But you still get a sense that Talos 1 is a realistic space with history, believable technology, and the capability to hold lots of people - just by wandering around, looking at stuff, and reading the small scraps of info you are provided. 

Also, Prey focuses more on delivering stories about people, instead of technology and events (putting aside a small museum area!). 

You'll find plenty of emails, notes, scraps of paper, audio logs, and environmental storytelling that tells you about the people aboard Talos 1. What they did for fun, who was in love with whom, and their opinions on the central sci-fi themes of Prey's wider story. 

An especially nice touch is that there are no random dead bodies on the space station. Every one has a name, and you'll be able to find them on the central crew logs and can maybe even find their room or office. 

Open structure

After you finish the tutorial section, Talos 1 really opens up and you're free to explore the space station at your leisure (though, some areas will be locked until you follow the main quest a bit further). 

So I just started wandering, found and finished side quests, opened new pathways through the station, collected weapons and items, and generally had a lovely time. Most immersive sims have a hub world and then discrete missions - Prey mixes the two together in a satisfying way. 

As the game goes on you really start to learn the layout of the space station. There's no fast travel or mini map, but you don't need it - the interconnected nature, the clear signposting, and your knowledge of the layout means you can zip from area to area with ease. Just don't forget to turn off objective markers by deactivating quests!

It's almost a Metroidvania at times. Which is great - but does lead to a little bit of nonsense backtrackery towards the end. 

User interface

Prey uses a standard weapon wheel for selecting guns and powers. But as you get more and more stuff, the wheel turns into a spiral. It feels good to use, and is a very smart piece of UI design. 

Also, the game does a good job of keeping you in the world - instead of booting you into a menu. The 3D-printing crafting menu, for example, is accessed through a big touchscreen. Same for all the computers.

A simple button press pulls the camera in to frame the computer window and lets you move the computer's cursor with the left analogue stick. 

Survival horror

Prey isn't a full-on survival horror game, but it has its moments. Because you don't have loads of guns and resources are limited, you'll be put off from fighting many monsters. The mimics, which are spider-like enemies who hide as physics objects, will make you jump. And there are some things that will make you say "Nope! No! Nope! No thank you!"

I thought a lot about Dead Space while playing the game. So if you're waiting for a Dead Space 4 announcement, this might scratch that itch. 

Costs and consequences

You'll constantly be weighing up pros and cons, and risks and rewards while playing Prey. A particularly interesting one is that adopting alien powers turns your character less and less human. 

The consequence? Turrets, that are trained to attack non-human targets, now target you. There's a second consequence too, which I won't spoil. This makes a no-powers run into something quite different, rather than a simple self-imposed challenge like it was in Dishonored. 

What I Didn't Like

Combat

Fighting enemies never quite worked for me in this game. 

Shooting enemies with the game's two-and-a-half real guns often felt like chipping away at a health bar. You can't really play it like a stealth game because the monsters don't work like the guards in Deus Ex or Dishonored. And using PSI powers meant long waits between shots, using precious PSI energy, and fiddling with research menus to find each enemy's weakness. 

Obviously, the joy of this sort of game is coming up with unique ways to tackle enemies - and that's where I had the most fun.

I spent a lot of the game letting others do the killing for me, by hacking turrets and using telepathy to temporarily put robots and enemies onto my side. And I used the TK ability to pluck explosive canisters from across the room before throwing them at foes. 

But overall, I struggled to find interesting ways to use my tools and powers to neutralise enemies - especially compared to the endless ways you can overcome foes in Arkane's other game, Dishonored. Ultimately enemies were more of a nuisance than a fun challenge, and I sought to just do whatever was easiest to get rid of them. 

And, no, just sneaking past them wasn't an option. Prey thrives on exploration and you can't read emails and poke through cupboards when an electric Phantom is wandering about.

Who wrote that?

So, I loved a lot of the world-building detail, as noted above. But I must admit that I found it really tough to keep track of everything and everyone. And so I didn't enjoy it as much as I could have. 

I think there's two issues: scale and clarity. And I'll compare it to Gone Home's excellent narrative archeology on both. 

So for scale, there are just so many different characters and so many different stories to follow that it became overwhelming. Compare that to Gone Home where you're juggling the stories of four (maybe five at a stretch) characters. 

And then there's clarity. So in Gone Home, you could immediately tie each item you found to a character by the location of the note, the handwriting, and other tell tale signs. In Prey, a lot of this stuff is just emails and you've got to study the sender and recipient names and then try to store them in your brain (Talos 1 has over 100 crew-members!). Perhaps an email interface that involved photos or avatars would have made this stuff easier to track. 

Also different in Gone Home: people aren't trying to murder you all the damn time. 

Guiding hand

Prey is very keen to push you along the main quest. A robot partner called January calls in and gives you missions, and floating objective markers guide you along. 

I don't think it really needed half of this stuff. Talos 1 just begs to be explored, and it would have been interesting for the player to stumble upon the main thread of the story and take the initiative to follow it themselves. 

(For those who have played it, imagine a game where January simply doesn't exist. You'd still find your office, still watch the Looking Glass video, still go down the same path - just under your own force). 

In many ways Prey feels like a game out of 1999. The difficulty and frequent game over screens. The immersive sim design. The lack of mini maps and fast travel. But here, it has the nannying handholding of a modern game - and provides few options for the player to turn this junk off. 

Same old, same old

This last one is a little painful to write, but a lot of these games start to feel the same. There's only so many times you can puzzle your way into someone's office to listen to an audio log before you realise that you've done this in Bioshock, Deus Ex, Dishonored, and their various sequels. 

Of course, the new powers, settings, characters, and stories keep them fresh. But at some point, we'll need to see something a bit more bold in this genre. Without the modern Deus Ex and Dishonored games, Prey would feel like a wonder. But with them, Prey feels a bit unambitious.