Note: I'm gonna spoil the shit out of this game because the ending is the most interesting thing about it.
Prey is a game that openly shows its influences. Bioshock is probably the largest as it directly inspires the art design, level design, and even the basics of combat. The skill tree reminds me of Deus Ex and the weapons are similar to Dishonored. There is a hidden morality system similar to Dishonored and MGSV as well. There is even survival horror elements like resource management and the rare poorly executed jumpscare. All these influences combine to make a game with something of an identity crisis.
I'm not sure what I played. Prey is not a bad game by any means and I like plenty of stuff that is just a mashup of other properties best ideas, but here those influences don't always mix well. The paradox that is Prey, is a game that has a great first 5 hours, a great last 6-7 hours, and a middle 12-ish that falls into to many video game design traps.
The game has a major twist in its first hour and its a brilliant one too as it's a twist you interact with as opposed to something you're just told. The game starts as you wake up to take a helicopter (while listening to this games awesome theme song) to another building to do some tests. You seem to be failing these tests, which will be important much later, until something attacks the scientists and you wake up back in your room*. You get up again to find out that the whole thing was a simulation, except for the creature attack.
Looking Glass Studios reference??.....Nahhhhh
*Side note but I only just now realized this is a plot hole. How did you get back to your room?
The game takes place on the Talos 1 space station where creatures called the Typhon have broken out and are killing/possessing everybody on the station. You play as Morgan Yu, who has amnesia because of course he/she does, your brother Alex Yu is hiding out somewhere and might be responsible, and a robot with your voice named January is giving you advice. The Typhon were being used to make Neuromods, a dreadfully painful looking eye ball needle that gives you powers. Also, other than being a narrative catalyst, the Neuromods double as your ability points for your skill tree and I'm always a fan of skill points having a narrative explanation rather than generic "Level Up". Good on ya Prey.
Why are those needles coming out of that camera OH GOD NO.
The first act ends once you reach your office and an old video of yourself tells you about why you lost your memory (removing Neuromods resets your memory back to before it was installed, or, when Morgan was on Earth) and what you need to do. Your mission is to blow up Talos 1 killing everything, including yourself, to keep the Typhon from spreading to Earth. Easy enough but that doesn't leave much room for story in the middle section. "Act 2" basically ends up stalling the story for hours until you finally get some twists in the last section. Sure, the middle section has some decent side quests to deal with and they are much better than the put on hold main story, but it does feel like a drag after seeing what the last section of the game can bring.
The main missions fall into the video game trap of checking items off a list. You need to go to this area but the door has no power so you go somewhere else, turn on the power, then go back. The next door you need a keycard so you go get it then go back. This device you need doesn't work until you go get this item then go back. So on and so on. Prey is a paradox in having it's main missions be fetch quests while its side quests, usually, are not. The side quests feel like real stories while the main missions, until the last 5 hours, are go do the thing so you can do the other thing then do this other thing. They seem to exist only to unlock areas of the space station so that the second half of the game can be free roaming without any real narrative reason for doing so.
Later, you can freely explore Rapture....I mean, Talos 1.
Well....there is a meta-narrative reason for this stalling. That hidden morality system is about those side quests which usually revolves around saving the other survivors of the station. This is juxtaposed to your suicide mission of blowing up the station. These people are going to die anyway. When you do these, even January is like, "it's telling that you went out of your way to save these people knowing what their fate will be." Why you judging me robot? Step off. The choices only really effect certain lines of dialogue in the ending but it's still cool to have around....even if it probably shouldn't be? I'll get to that.
There is also a meta-narrative with the skill tree because Dishonored is also a Bethesda game. You get three human branches and three Typhon branches. The game warns you that it's a bad idea to use the Typhon tree so I only unlocked a few. Yes, this game borrows from Dishonored twice here. Once with the narrative depending on who you kill and also giving you a bunch of fancy toys you can't use unless you want the "evil" ending.
The main narrative is bogged down with so much running around, reading E-mails about people you are not sure if you will ever meet, listening to audio logs about people you will probably not meet (and cause Bioshock did it), listening to January give you fetch questy objectives and Alex being vague over the radio about what is going on. The main narrative never progresses until much later because this story doesn't have a 2nd act. Well, I guess it has a 2nd act but you never know if any of the people you learn about are alive and the few that do actually are pretty good, especially Danielle Sho who gets enough backstory with her relationship to Abigail Foy. You find Foy's body before finding the still alive Sho, who then requests that you kill the guy who killed her girlfriend. Good stuff.
The rest of the 2nd acts story is about....the most pointless and boring world building ever. Why is this story set in an alternate timeline where the USA/USSR secretly cooperated during the space race, for no reason? There is a ton of stuff about TranStar, the company that owns Talos 1 and who everyone is an employee of, but they are only important on the periphery. Even the Wikia only has three sentences about them (I checked cause I was wondering if I missed something...nah). There is also a ton of psuedo-science "tech talk" about researching the Typhon that all leads to a, "hell if we know?" It's like all this work was put into world building without really relating to anything.
While the story drags, you get to spend your time with the Typhon, the whole 8-ish types. The first enemies you encounter are Prey's marque enemy, the Mimic, which can transform into a chair, box, coffee mug, desk lamp, whatever. These black Half-Life head crab looking things are the dominant enemy in the entire game and give the player a mild paranoia about what objects might actually jump out at you and attack. Luckily they don't do much damage and can largely be killed with a few good whacks from your wrench. This gets tiresome though as this leads to a lot of combat being focused at looking down at your feet as these things are only about a knee high a lot of the time. Other enemies are more humanoid Typhons called Phantoms. They are the generic black one, the fire one, the lighting one, the purple one, and the strangely weak invisible one. Oh, and there is even a giant one that acts as a mini boss. They are all palate swapped versions of the same thing like this is a JRPG or something. You also have two floating squid things that are super tough to take down, one that controls people, and one that controls robots. Add in a few other flying thingies (see footnotes) and corrupted robots and you have Prey's very limited enemies list. They are all introduced by the mid-point of the game in which fighting the same things over and over gets boring.
Sorry. I should have said: "Indistinguishable Blob 1, Indistinguishable Blob 2,..."
I mean, combat is fun...for a while. Guns don't actually do a whole bunch of damage so you have to stun the enemies first. The most common way is with the GLOO Cannon which, works exactly as it sounds. Slow or even freeze them with it then switch to another weapon to deal greater damage. You also get stun guns, emp grenades (which only work on the robots and electric Typhons), lures, and environmental weapons like turrets. Add in some offensive Typhon abilities and there are a lot of creative ways to take them down. You can lure them into turret traps, stun them with a telekinetic blast, and even throw objects at them to knock them down. However, after a while, you are just going to stick with the strategies that work best, and with the limited enemy selection, combat becomes a chore. I got really, really sick of whacking at the ground with my wrench for those Mimics man.
A lot...of whacking....the ground.
"But Jason," I hear you asking, "can't you just avoid combat if you want? Doesn't this game have.....stealth mechanics?" Oh. You know me too well. Of course I'm gonna talk about that.
Prey is NOT a stealth game. I mean, sure, the stealth mechanics work just fine but....it's boring. Firstly, the Bioshock level design, that thinks it is Deus Ex level design, doesn't really gel with stealth all that well. The game outright says that there are multiple paths to get to objectives but that is misleading. What they really mean is there is one main path but you can build stairs/bridges with the GLOO Cannon to reach other areas. That's fine, but firing the GLOO cannon alerts enemies to your presence. How am I supposed to stealth my way around like that? (Also, I never had fucking ammo for the thing when I wanted to do construction with it).
Not gonna lie. I want some.
Secondly, there just isn't that many stealth skills. There is some "make it harder for enemies to detect you while crouched" bullshit that always feels like a waste. Shouldn't that be standard? Whatever. The Typhon abilities include the ability to Mimic, which I did unlock, and is pretty unique. Unfortunately, I couldn't upgrade it due to the meta-narrative and at level 1 it is almost worthless. You can transform right before an enemy sees you but as you stay disguised it drains your Psi (mana) pool. The Typhon have sloooooow patrols so the odds of running out of juice before you leave their line of sight is high. You can move as an object a little before tipping them off but it was difficult to get down the timing.
Lastly, the large amount of backtracking, added with the fact that enemies respawn when you leave an area (and seem to comeback with a dozen buddies), adds to NOT THIS SHIT AGAIN. It sucks stealthing through the same areas over and over again. I did it in some sections but it felt like a waste of time especially when in the late game I found the best method of getting around...just openly sprinting everywhere. I knew my way around by this point and since I was so sick of combat and stealth I just wanted to see where the story goes as fast as possible. I had a mountain of health packs so I didn't mind taking a few hits in the 5 seconds I could sprint through some of the hubs (I also maxed out my stamina).
The biggest flaw of the game is that it is too repetitive on a small scale. As much as I like the Meta-narrative stuff, it probably would have worked better for me had those side quests been more related to the main quests in favor of more set pieces. Because, wow, those set pieces are great.
They pick up again near the end. Most of the game tries to convince you Alex Yu is the villain by making him be vague about everything. Eventually you get to his office and he shows you another video that proves this whole thing is kinda sorta your fault. That OTHER video was the fail safe plan in case your own stupid plan fails. It also shows why your relationship with the rest of the Talos staff is pretty rocky. You were kind of a dick pre memory wipe. Anyway, Alex proposes a new plan that will wipe out the Typhon with a MacGuffin but leave the station in tact. Meanwhile, those side quests finally start getting involved in the main narrative as saved people present other options to end the game.* January, of course, tries to convince you to stick to the suicide mission plan, which you can do, but side characters make it possible to escape the station during the self destruct. There are multiple options....that lead to only barely different endings but, the final levels are significantly different.
The....the robot is playing God?
*There is also another ending you can access earlier on when you find the keys to Alex's personal escape pod, the only one that works. It's basically the "fuck everyone, I'm out" bad ending but it's there.
Just when you think the ending is kinda lame, there is an after credits scene that drops a bomb. You wake up to see Alex and four robots all with the names and voices of the people you saved. You were playing as a Mimic the whole time, in a simulation based on Morgan's memories. (That means, the beginning of this game was a simulation INSIDE a simulation can I get a BWWAAAAHH in this mutha! Yeah!). Alex shows you that Earth is already taken over by the Typhon and says something like, "I spent all this time tying to make humans more like the Typhon (ie. Neuromods) but I never tried to make them more like us", and yeah. Cool shit.
Prey on the whole ends up being a game that isn't sure what it is, but thinks it knows. The aspects that are unique to Prey or parts that are pretty good, the game ends up overusing. Things that Prey does really well, like the set pieces and the meta-narrative stuff, is jammed into short sections of the game. It's like the designers made an opening and closing act to Prey but forgot to put in a middle and instead just put Bioshock there. Prey would have been better suited if its interesting ideas made for a more cohesive whole.
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Follow me on Twitter. No I have not played Dishonored 2 yet. I actually just bought it on sale though so....
Couple notes that didn't fit into my post:
1. Due to some video game law I assume, because this is a game released in the last few years, of course there is a crafting system. It's mechanically the same as every other one. It's boring so lets move on.
2. One part of the ending I HATED was the sudden new villain who is a mercenary sent by your parents to kill everything on Talos 1. The dude spams military robots and it's extremely annoying. I just ran past them as fast as I could to deactivate them and/or lead them to a bunch a Typhon where they would fight each other.
3. There is several parts of the game in zero gravity. This too the game made boring even though it should have been cool. There is really only one enemy type in this area which are these little flying radioactive balls that don't do much damage, are easy to kill, but they are fucking legion! They need to be killed at a distance too since they are radioactive and I hate, hate, hated wasting a ton of ammo in a game where ammo isn't that plentiful on this almost non-threat. Plus...I'm fighting balls! They're fucking balls!
Balls! Fuckin balls!
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