Prey is a game very much in the vein of System Shock and Bioshock. You play as Morgan Yu – or so everyone in the game tells you. You have amnesia, it seems, and a mysterious man named January has helped you escape while aliens run amok on Talos I, the space station you’re on. But this isn’t altruism – January wants something from Morgan. You see, everything has gone sideways; the aliens that were being experimented on have escaped from containment and are doing horrible things to the humans on board the space station. If even one of the aliens from the ship make it to earth, it is game over. There’s really only one solution – blow everything up, and make sure nothing gets off the ship.
Are such extreme measures justified?
Can January be trusted?
And given that the world has very advanced simulations, and chips that can be implanted into your brain to give you new skills (and removed to take away your memories), can *anything* you see really be trusted?
Throughout the game, this is tested repeatedly, as you are beseeched by survivors to rescue them, have mind-controlled humans thrown at you in suicidal attacks by aliens, and your big brother – Alex Yu – asks you to listen to him and trust him, despite the horrible experiments which have been done on Talos I. And if you pay close attention to various aspects of the environment and game design, you might get even more suspicious, doubly so when you start reading about just what some of the experiments were. The many hints dropped throughout the game about the true nature of what was going on worked really well, and kept me nice and paranoid all the way through to the end.
Prey, like many games, has a morality system, but unlike many games, the game actually hides it; rather than the morality system being anything obvious, any sort of meter, it is dictated by your actions over the course of the game. You are constantly exposed to contradictory directives – you yourself, in a memory gambit, left behind multiple conflicting goals for yourself, and you have to choose which of them are right. Worse, when dealing with people who were involved in various experiments – or who are prisoners who were sentenced to death for terrible crimes – should you save them, or is it right to leave them to die, or even kill them yourself? Is January’s callous action – that blowing the whole place up is the only way to be sure – a sign of his sociopathy, or is he encouraging you to do the right thing?
The core gameplay itself consists of exploring the space station while using a variety of weapons to combat both the aliens and a few robots corrupted by their control. Morgan starts out with the classic wrench, but over the course of the game finds a small but versatile armory – a pistol, a shotgun, a long-ranged beam weapon which can cause aliens to explode when they’re fried with it enough, a zappy stun gun that is great for stunning things and damaging electronics, a gun that shoots a powerful industrial adhesive which can be used for both messing with enemies as well as shutting down environmental threats and scaling walls, and a handful of creative grenades that, rather than simply exploiding, do things like recycle all nearby material into base components or send out an EMP shock wave or attract enemies. There is even a nerf gun in the game which seems useless at first but which can be used to push buttons from a distance or blow up mines.
This is a game about using what you have to your advantage, and most situations can be approached in a variety of ways. You can sneak past enemies, or sneak up on them and attack them, or use the station’s turrets to supplement your firepower. You can acquire alien psionic abilities, but at the potential cost of your humanity, and automated defense systems which are designed to protect against aliens will also start protecting against *you*. You can spend the materials you manage to scrounge up on making more ammo, or on improving your weapons, or on crafting neuromods to enhance your base talents. And even navigating the environment often allows multiple routes – hacking your way through doors, finding keycards or key codes, finding a secret route into the room through the crawlspaces, using the typhon mimic ability to turn into a coffee cup and roll in through a gap, break a hole in the glass window and shoot your nerf gun in across the room to punch a button to open the door on the other side…
Many, many parts of the game can thus be approached in a wide variety of ways, giving the player a broad spectrum of potential axes of approach. Better still, trying to do the same thing over and over again is likely to result in you running short on a necessary resource – simply running around shooting everything will rapidly deplete your ammo, forcing you to either use a different weapon, or rely on other abilities to see your way through.
This is a lot of fun, though it can also make the game into something of a chore if you aren’t into thoroughly exploring the environment. While it isn’t strictly necessary to do a thorough exploration of every nook and cranny, doing so not only earns you extra stuff (and allows you to see almost all of the ship pretty early in the game if you are willing to go off in the “wrong direction”), but it can also help you find ways in to side areas. The thing is, though, if you want to see all the content, you pretty much have to do a lot of exploration, which slows the game down a fair bit. If you want, you can just run through a lot of the game, but doing so will cause you to miss content – and, moreover, makes the game harder, as resources will be even more scarce if you don’t bother collecting them.
The enemies are pretty unique as well; you start the game fighting mimics, which are enemies which can copy objects in the environment and duplicate themselves, meaning you should always be suspicious of multiples of any object in the environment… and of course, the game is then FULL of objects, meaning that you’re constantly wondering if that chair or coffee cup is a mimic or is just another chair pushed into the table. This sets the stage for the enemies in general – the teleporting phantoms, the weavers that constantly run away from you and protect themselves with a psychic shield while dumping explosive tracking minds behind them, the technopaths which hijack turrets and turn them against you while zapping you with electricity, and the telepaths which mind control humans and send them against you, forcing you to try and subdue the telepath without killing their victims (or, you know, not, if you decide that, well, they’re all going to die anyway!). While there isn’t an enormous variety of enemies, what enemies there are are all interesting, and none of them feel like random throwaways – and given their frequent swiftness and ability to attack you in various unexpected ways, the game keeps you on your toes.
The game on the whole has excellent production values; the environments look great, as do the enemies, and the whole game has a certain stylized aspect to it, a sort of pseudo-realism which simultaneously conveys the idea of realism without trying to be photorealistic. The environment is full of neat little details and the game does a pretty good job of conveying clues to the player via the environment about what they’re supposed to be doing, with many things you can do being reinforced in a number of parallel ways. Audio logs help to convey both the humanity and the lack thereof of the people on the ship, and you see all sorts of details which convey the idea that these people had lives before this whole thing went down. The whole ship feels very lived-in, and the aliens cause some pretty beautiful damage to the place. Even the touch screens that you use to interact with computers look good and feel like authentic parts of the environment.
All in all, this is a very good game – albeit, perhaps, not necessarily a game for everyone. If you don’t like exploring environments, this game may be frustrating, as it is built around the idea that you want to explore as much as possible. On the other hand, if you are into immersive sim type games – if you liked the idea of Bioshock, but wanted it to have stronger core gameplay – this is very much likely to be up your alley. Overall, I’d recommend this game to most people – it was very interesting, the core gameplay is quite solid and felt quite nice by comparison to many FPS games, and details big and small kept me nice and paranoid about everything I was being told all the way through to the end.
4.5