Prey (2017)

In my opinion the attention on Prey (2017) has been way too much of pointless discussion about Prey (2006) and its canceled sequel. And it is entirely Bethesda's fault. And maybe Kotaku's somewhat misleading rumors too. I guess I'm ironically adding to that discussion but the record needs to be put straight.

According to Prey's lead designer Ricardo Bare, Arkane Studios had started working on two games after Dishonored. One of them was a completely new thing (codenamed Project Danielle). It wasn't intended to be a reboot of a franchise and unlikely was the reason why Human Head Studios' Prey 2 never happened either.

Arkane's publisher Bethesda came to them after the fact and asked if the Prey name would fit the game if they wanted Arkane to use it. Evidently it did. It's vague enough to fit many things, really. Bethesda could've even forced the whole ordeal, like Kotaku's Jason Schreier reported. Bethesda most likely didn't want the acquired IP to go unused.

PsychoShock

Prey (2017) is a so-called immersive sim and very much a *Shock game too. System Shock 2 is probably the closest point of comparison with the space station and all but you can recognize other titles, Arkane's and otherwise, in its features.

Dishonored can be seen in the melee combat, smooth movement mechanics, and randomized suit upgrades. Talos I is the space version of Arx Fatalis's dungeon setting, and like with BioShock's Rapture, Art Deco was used in stylizing it. Vertical level design is again utilized to a great degree. In many games there'd be no space to enter nor items hidden above ceiling panels.

The interactive monitor screens were inspired by SOMA and the elegant auto-search for containers and corpses was apparently shamelessly copied from Fallout 4.

Prey is so on the nose with its declaration of lineage that even the fancy video recording technology in the game is called Looking Glass (after the shutdown game studio who developed System Shock). One of the alien powers you can learn in the game is called Psychoshock and it could have been the originally intended title. It sure would have fit the game perfectly and made it instantly clear what to expect from it. Another suggestion I've seen thrown around is NeuroShock.

Challenging until you learn the ropes

I initially found Prey to be pretty hard even on Normal difficulty. I wasn't dying often but I had to heal up after every fight. You are encouraged to use a weakening attack before a more damaging one (the ol' one-two punch) against enemies. You don't quite have all the means at the start and it leads to challenging encounters. The game also forces you into close quarters combat as there are no effective ways to kill from a safe distance.

Your ability choices can drastically affect the combat as well. For instance, on my first playthrough I never picked Combat Focus which turned out to be quite useful on later runs. Getting at least the first wrench attack upgrade can lead to easier time too when you don't have a shotgun yet.

The shotgun definitely ups your killing speed, especially after it's been upgraded with weapon kits and abilities. Its limiting factor is the lack of ammunition. But once I found the shotgun shell fabrication plan, the majority of fights became a cast of psychoshock to nullify psi powers followed by a shotgun barrage to the kill the enemy. It's easy to fall in such a simple pattern even though the game has a plethora of different things to use in combat.

On a later run I upped the difficulty to Nightmare and didn't find it that much harder. Enemies do more damage and have more health but not significantly so. By that time I had already learned how to dodge attacks and what works in general.

There's an enemy type that starts showing up every now and then as you make progress, similarly to BioShock 2's Big Sisters. They're supposedly hard encounters but the psychoshock + shotgun combo works splendidly for them too. It even seemed like the power disables the creature's AI as it mostly just stood in place after it had been silenced.

Having luck with the random suit upgrades can also ease the early game. On my second run, the first chipset I found was the impact amp that considerably increases the chance a wrench attack knocks enemies down. Phantoms became literal pushovers with it. And things like having found the EMP shielding chipset before fighting a Technopath in zero g help a lot.

I don't know why they made it possible to find the same suit upgrade multiple times, though. That wasn't a thing in Dishonored nor BioShock Infinite. There's no point to it since you can equip only one of each chipset and you can't even recycle the redundant copies.

No trouble-causing Void Engine in this one

Prey uses CryEngine 4 and ran very stable for the vast majority of the time for me. It did have few issues, however. There was some texture popping and loading times were long -- like they have been in every game I have played that is protected by Denuvo. It could be due to the games simply having a lot of assets to load (an SSD would probably help) but who knows.

An engine that could stream the whole station seamlessly as if it was one area would be great for a game like this that is heavy on the whole immersion thing. And/or the game could make you sit in an airlock or elevator while the next area loads. Functional mirrors would also be great for immersion. It's unfortunate that an amazing feature such as the Looking Glass can be created yet mirrors are still too costly to include in modern games.

I'm guessing though that unlike with mirrors, the game doesn't need to render the scene twice with the Looking Glass -- it just opens a view into another room. I have to say that the recording with three Looking Glass panes facing away from each other was great in its seamlessness. Peeking into the room from three different windows was almost eerie and there was a nice little secret in there too.

Prey could have used better anti-aliasing. I wish a mod like Alias Isolation was available for this game too. The mod almost completely removes jagged edges from Alien: Isolation whose own temporal AA is seriously flawed. Prey also seems to be one of those games where upping field of view doesn't seem to do as much as usual. I had it up to 100 and couldn't see the fish-eye effect.

Maybe that is because the game's reticle is below the vertical center, which in turn keeps you looking up more. I guess that's a way to accomplish that. I recently learned that it's just not in games but in real life too where people tend to miss things above.

Also, related to visibility, I'm not sure I like how the screen darkens when taking damage and fighting the aliens close up. It makes it unnecessarily difficult to see what's going on.

Save system has potential issues

I recall mentions of saves getting corrupted at the time of Prey's release a year ago. And I guess it still happens. Firstly, the game doesn't actually delete saves when you clear one of the campaign slots for a new run. At first everything was fine but then I got to the lobby area which was in its endgame state. You evidently have to manually delete the campaign folder from the save game location to have a clean state.

Secondly, on my latest run I tried a slightly different route in the game's final bits. I didn't like the result and reloaded an earlier save. The map the save had been made in was fine but every other area was as if I had already triggered the next main mission. One might never even encounter the issue, though.

Adequate story

I found Prey's plot to be reasonably entertaining. The path for the station's destruction the game sets you on after a while was bit conflicting as I was certain that I wouldn't need to do it in the end. The ending concludes the game in a brilliant way, though. It's always cool to have your choices summed up. Maybe that was one of the things added by Chris Avellone who was apparently one of the writers.

When starting the game, you get to choose whether you play as female or male Morgan Yu. The choice doesn't have a whole lot of effect and the protagonist is silent too. It does change Morgan's voice in recordings and a robot you soon meet, though. I wish they had at least put non-voiced dialogue choices to pick from instead of having NPCs just talk without you saying anything. It tends to feel so goofy to me. I also reckon Yu was intentionally picked as Morgan's last name for being a homophone to 'you'.

Most of the things on the station are there before you even get a mission to find them. You can do a bunch of quests and find secrets out of order, so to speak. The game usually takes things into account if you've done so but there was one mission that wasn't handled as perfectly as it could've been.

There's this one suspicious guy who clearly is trying to lead you into a trap -- the game telegraphs it quite heavily. I decided not to walk into it and took the guy out with the disruptor stun gun (since I wasn't killing any humans). In the following side mission the game didn't acknowledge him having been rendered harmless already even though his unconscious body was just lying there. You actually have to kill him.

A quick google search revealed that dropping a body from high up and killing it with falling damage doesn't count towards your kills. Thus I was able to shortcut the mission without losing the Do No Harm achievement. There's a difference in the most empathetic ending when you have no kills instead of 1+. It's nothing as drastic as in BioShock (0 vs 1+ Little Sisters killed) but is still a pretty neat one.

Apart from the mentioned case, avoiding human kills isn't hard. Instead, getting the I and It achievement is considerably more difficult. You have to kill all 42 humans yourself like for the By My Hand Alone achievement in Dishonored: Dunwall City Trials. There are few sections where you have to rush in to get the killing blows. Playing like that doesn't make much sense. You are heading to destroy the station and yet see the effort to kill everyone first?


But did I like the game? Yes, very much so. It succeeds at what immersive sim tries to -- being immersive. I hope they continue making more games like Prey.

Arkane has been teasing with a Moon related addition and are probably going to reveal a DLC at E3 at the end of this week (or the start of the next) during Bethesda's conference. Should be interesting.