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It's on Game Pass now! If you are someone who enjoys the BioShock or Dishonored franchises, you'll love this game. Sadly, this game apparently didn't sell to well despite high review scores:( Hopefully that won't keep Bethesda from funding another Prey title.
Bethesda’s Prey turned out to be a surprisingly engaging game for me. It reminded me of BioShock and its progression system where I became more and more powerful in dealing with frightening enemies. But I also felt manipulated and frustrated.
More than once, I slapped my head about why the developers at Arkane Studios, who clearly agonized over this game in the multiple years it took them to make it, made the choices they did. I felt they tortured me.The.
The original came out in 2006 from Human Head Studios. The sequel got lost in development hell, and Bethesda acquired the rights to it. It finally cancelled the sequel in 2014.
Meanwhile, Arkane Studios in Austin was making an interesting sci-fi game after creating a title called. It was an open-ended space station game. And then it was given the Prey name, though it had no resemblance to the original title. They eventually completed the game and shipped it a few weeks ago (it released on May 5 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC). It took me a while, but I finally got to see the final outcome. The enemies in Prey were far from traditional.
Dubbed the Typhon, they are an alien species that scientists were trying to study and graft their best qualities onto the human mind. The experiments went bad, the aliens took over the spaceship, and it’s up to you, as the character Morgan Yu, to stop them from spreading to Earth. The Typhon have no stable form.
The weaker Typhon, called Mimics, are inky black beings that can take the form of anything around them. That means they can hide as a coffee cup and then strike at you when your back is turned. This made for a ton of jump scares that gave me a heart attack every time. You also encounter tough Typhon such as Phantoms who can give you a lot of grief in a duel, and other Typhon are truly nightmarish. Image Credit: Arkane Studios/BethesdaSadly, in this game, you are woefully under-equipped. And that’s why, even on the normal level, Prey is definitely a difficult and frustrating game. It’s one of those games where you have to scavenge for every weapon and the ammo that goes with it.
The developers chose to make the ammo very scarce, and that turns the game into a test of survival. If you scrounge and become a completionist in scavenging every single scrap you can, you stand a better chance of living.The enemies can inhabit just about any place on the ship.
But I have to believe that the developers were very precise about how they didn’t allow me to replenish my ammo as I needed to do so. In fact, ammo was so scarce that finding it became the primary object of the game for me.
I didn’t want to find out what happened to the main character. I just wanted to have enough shotgun shells. My kingdom for a shotgun shell.When I had a pistol, I needed bullets. In the game, you can craft these bullets if you find the right materials and recycle them. You can recycle and craft items at specific stations within the maps. But everything is scarce.
I was elated when I got a shotgun, until I found that I had to make every shot count and scrounge for shotgun shells. And when I got the shotgun, I found that the enemies had also gotten tougher. At one point, I wanted a rocket launcher. And the cruel developers made no such weapon.Some games do a good job of balancing ammo scarcity.
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The original Halo had me looking all over for assault rifle ammo, and I was happy to find every single bullet in The Last of Us. But Prey is definitely a game where it would have been much more fun if I had only had access to unlimited ammo. I got so angry at the Typhon hunting me, I just wanted to mow them down. But if I did so, I would have run out of ammo. In trying to acquire more ammo, I did something that I almost never do in games. I went back to levels that I had completed to search for ammo that I might have overlooked. That was nuts, and I blame Arkane.
Image Credit: BethesdaNow the developers could say that they gave me the means to create plenitude in the former of the recycler and the crafting station. I had a recycling grenade, which reduced everything that wasn’t nailed down into raw recyclable materials. It was a great way to take out enemies, but it also produced raw materials that I could use to make things. But I found that it wasn’t a cure-all. I gathered a huge number items into a pile and threw my last recycler grenade into it.
And it only produced a couple of raw materials. I couldn’t even use those materials to create another recycler grenade. If the developers had simply turned open the spigot a little more and given me more ammo, I would have been delighted to take the fight to the enemy.On the PS4, the game suffers from ghastly load times that will send you off to the kitchen for a snack.The moments of frustration occasionally turn into elation. In one scene, with survivors rallied by Sarah Elazar, you get to ambush the Typhon. They come through a door and a bunch of human and mechanical defenders set up in a semicircle. As the door opened and the Typhon rushed in, I tossed a Nullwave grenade (it messes with the minds of the Typhon) and an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) grenade.
It broke the back of the Typhon assault. Then I just started firing my shotgun. Here’s a video of the scrounging I did to set up the ambush and the actual firefight.But such glory was fleeting. Instead, I had to hide and try to get away most of the time or try to outrun the enemies.Prey also gave me a false sense that I could level up my character to become something truly powerful. The game gives you the choice of leveling up as a human or as a hybrid Typhon. But since the automated defense robots on the space station were attuned to shooting at the Typhon, I chose not to level up as a Typhon. That mean I lacked some very powerful abilities that I could have used to finish the game.
Instead, as a leveled up human, and I was a pathetic character always starving for more ammo.You could say that I made some poor choices, but I felt like the developers forced me into them. And, as it turned out, I really didn’t have the right information to make good choices in the first place.That’s where I thought the game was clever, as it went beyond the mechanics of scrounging and killing. The Mimics took the form of objects around me, and that made me very paranoid. But that nothing was what it seems in Prey. It’s an existential nightmare, made more interesting for me because it had an, a rarity in games.
I felt like I was Morgan Yu. But Morgan also wasn’t what he seemed to be. Image Credit: BethesdaIn fact, the first scene conveys that so well. You wake up and go to work and something goes wrong. Then you wake up again and find that the apartment where you woke up before is in fact a soundstage where everyone is watching you in a simulation. Once I realized that Morgan had been tricked into thinking he was Morgan, I then wondered who the heck he could be.
I was intrigued by how this storyline was going to turn out, and whether Morgan’s older brother Alex was going to turn out to be a creep or someone I could tolerate in the end. Morgan has amnesia, but he has to make critical decisions about Alex and the Typhon.I became so paranoid that I was being manipulated by the game developers that I started making choices that were based on countering what the developers expected me to do. Prey comes down to making a few very important choices, but you don’t realize until the end just how important those choices are. I really want to like this game, but I hate it at the same time because it put me through so much torture.
I guess that’s the nature of an addiction. You love it and you hate it. That’s how I feel about Prey.
When I was in college, I took a Shakespeare class that nearly broke me.At first, it felt like I was trying to read a bowl of alphabet soup. My professor’s suggestion to read aloud didn’t help me find rhyme or meter, and even Cliff’s Notes couldn’t help me divine any meaning. I was lost and seriously considering dropping the class when, for reasons I still can’t explain, my perseverance magically paid off.
As I read the third play in as many weeks, The Merchant of Venice, the words melted away. I met characters, read in their voices, cringed, fell in love. By the time the semester ended, I became, God help me, one of the 0. Percent of the population who actually enjoys reading Shakespeare.I don’t think much about Shakespeare these days, but when I do, here’s what I think of most: In the English literary canon, Shakespeare has the gravitational force of the sun, even though his characters had to speak, at least on the surface, like they were reciting a poem.
He endures through centuries because his stories encompass, grapple with and explain essential parts of the human experience. And he did this while shackled to a rigid, weird narrative form. Shakespeare, in other words, achieved greatness despite his constraints.When I think about developer Arkane Studios’ Prey, I’m reminded of Shakespeare. Like the Bard, Prey operates under easily identifiable constraints.
At first, the form seems rigid, even impenetrable. And yet, like a play written in a form of English that I’d never use and in a way I’d never talk, Prey implores players to break through their walls — sometimes literally — and rewards us with a story, characters and self-directed experiences that were among the best in 2017. GAME OF THE YEAR 2017 # 7: PREYFor, Polygon will be counting down our top 10 each weekday, beginning on Dec. 18, we'll reveal our favorite 50 of 2017. And throughout the month, we'll be looking back on the year with special videos, essays and surprises! Previously:Prey is great not because it ushers in a new paradigm. It’s great because it embraces constraints — principles born decades ago at developer Looking Glass — and deploys them like a reliable recipe, tweaking the ingredients to taste.
And the core of that recipe — the big, fat slab of meat that all of the herbs and spices accentuate — is an obsession with player agency. Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks The formulaPrey owes its formula to the developers at Looking Glass. Its 1994 first-person shooter, System Shock, was so influential for so many reasons that it’s difficult to imagine modern games without looking through the lens of System Shock and its sequel.Looking Glass influenced and inspired games as varied as first-person shooters like, walking simulators like and, I kid you not, rhythm franchises like.In short, Looking Glass established a formula that many games, including Prey, have followed. If you’ve ever played a game with audio logs scattered about to find, unfurl and deepen the story, you’ve seen System Shock’s influence. If you’ve ever played a first-person shooter with a deep and immersive story, you’ve seen System Shock’s influence. If you’ve ever played a game with inventory management and scarce resources, you’ve seen System Shock’s influence.If you’ve ever played a game where the code 451 (or some derivation thereof) opens a door, then you’ve seen the Looking Glass code. In the years since System Shock used it, the Looking Glass code (which once unlocked the developer’s real-world door) became something like a sigil, a way for developers not only to pay homage to the long-gone developer but to wink and nod and quietly signal simpatico values.
In Prey, a game that randomly generates almost every key code, protagonist Morgan Yu’s office is always behind code 0451.Hell, the in-game sci-fi doodad through which you peek into Prey’s past is called the damn Looking Glass. If you want to understand Prey and what makes it work, you need to understand Looking Glass and System Shock. Their influence loomed large as Arkane Studios created Prey. Everyone begins Prey with a wrench and confusion Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks The applicationMany games are bespoke experiences, thrill rides that guide players with an invisible hand.
They unfold like summer blockbusters, so you’ll see every explosion at the right time, from the right angle — and grab the right tool just before entering the dungeon that requires it. These can be fun, but they’re anathema to games like Prey, which prefers players’ hands to invisible ones.Throughout Prey, players make choices, and those choices influence — and to some extent, change — the game. The developers’ responsibility is to design a world where divergent choices work just as well for the sneaky and the loud, the magic user and the pistol shooter, the human and the genetically altered hybrid.Everyone begins Prey with a sense of confusion and a wrench. Where you go from there is up to you, and the whole of the deserted Talos I space station is designed to accommodate your choices.
Whether you prefer the slow deliberateness of stealth, the magic of telepathy or the explosive, double-barreled power of a shotgun, Prey bends to your will.It’s not that Prey allows you to choose. It insists that you do so. And not just in small ways, like faster reload speed or bigger ammo bags, but in fundamental choices that determine not just the kind of killing machine but the kind of person you’ll become.From your first moments in Prey, you’ll make a series of decisions that affects not just you but the characters around you, your space prison and, ultimately, the future of the human race. This is all, everywhere and always, because of you. It’s your fault if things go poorly. It’s your fault if things go well.
It’s not a summer blockbuster. It’s a choose your own adventure book with galactic consequences.This is the legacy of System Shock, where players are at the center of a narrative that they change through their actions and their decisions. And as Prey demonstrates, these ideas work as well today as they did in the mid-‘90s.Prey, through this lens, is an ode to a classic, but it doesn’t feel derivative. To those who know its influences, it feels familiar without slipping into parody. It’s a thoroughly modern take on an established formula, not content to simply paint by numbers but to realize these tested ideas with modern affordances.
Prey updates the things that didn’t age well, keeps those that still work and adds some ideas of its own.Everything in Prey — from the early realization that anything can kill you to optional side quests — feeds the narrative, connecting like a quilt’s patch into the fabric of a story that you control. Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks The futureThere’s an old saying that tradition is the democracy of the dead. It’s not an argument against innovation, but rather an argument for reflecting.
As you pause, you may find wisdom from your predecessors who worked this stuff out, too. Maybe don’t be surprised if your house’s flat roof has more leaks more than your neighbor’s A-frame.Prey knows and respects its forbearers. It’s one of the best games of 2017 not because it is radically different, but because it is unflinchingly, unashamedly and uncompromisingly constrained, reverential and modern at the same time — all the while making sure that players stand at the locus of decision.Unfortunately, Prey may have more in common with System Shock than its creators intended. As influential as System Shock may be, nobody would characterize its sales as great.
I’ve seen no indication that Prey was a colossal sales hit, either. With a few notable exceptions, games of this mold tend not to be terribly popular. Could Prey, yet another System Shock-influenced project with possibly middling sales, become an unintentional swan song to this series or even this kind of game?Maybe. But there is hope. Decades after the original, System Shock producer Warren Spector and a team of developers at Otherside Entertainment is developing. After a successful Kickstarter, veteran developer Chris Avellone and Nightdive Studios are.Whether or not Arkane gets to expand on the universe it created, Prey is a towering example of a game that flourishes under brilliant constraints.
As with System Shock, maybe it will inspire other developers to revere the past, imbue players with the power to make meaningful decisions and mimic one of 2017’s best games.
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