I replayed Prey(2017)
This is going to contain spoilers for Prey if you haven't completed it, so if you plan to you have been warned. If you like slow paced systems heavy games I absolutely recommend Prey replaying it was such a joy. I had forgotten so much of it since its release 9 years ago this felt like a fresh play through which is always a great experience.
I beat Prey when it was released in 2017 and I liked it, but didn't love it even though it feels like a game tailor made for me. With this replay I absolutely loved it and remembered that my first time playing both Deus Ex & System Shock 2 I bounced off them and it wasn't until I returned to them years later that I enjoyed them so much more. For Prey something I realise now is that I took the cowards way out on my first play through but for good reason and that reason might also be why I didn't enjoy it as much the first time through. I'll get to what that is shortly.
Prey is a sci-fi FPS immersive sim about trust. Or a lack of trust. The game starts with you waking up in an apartment about to start your first of work for a new company with your brother. You get up, get dressed, look out over the skyline of the city and get a helicopter to your new office. Upon getting there you meet your brother, take a series of tests with what the testers see as odd results before an alien attacks one of the testers and you're knocked out. Then you wake up in an apartment but this time you don't get a call from your brother. You retrace your steps from the day before and the janitor form the day before lies in the hall dead with a wrench lying next to her. It's a game so you pick it up and wander around looking for somewhere to go but all the doors are locked, but your balcony door is made of glass so you can just smash the glass to get out. You smash the glass revealing the behind the scenes fo the facade you've been in. There is no city, it's been an image on a screen made possible with Looking Glass a technology that accurately simulates a 3D world on a screen. None of this is real and as you begin to explore you find the helicopter is nothing but a motion simulator with screens. In many games the theme of trust would be in the story but Prey takes it into the game mechanics as well. The first enemy you encounter is a mimic, an alien creature that can mimic any object in the game to hide in plain site. For the remainder of the game you will be weary of two identical objects sat next to one another. It's a brilliant start to a game that perfectly sets up the main theme that will persist throughout.
Once the game starts proper you find our you're on a space station that is overrun with aliens known as the Typhon who have the ability to not only mimic objects but also people along with various gnarly powers such as telekinesis and mind control. Catching you up on what's going on is January an AI Operator created by you for this exact situation, you find out that you were previously researching the Typhon but for some reason were reduced to a test subject by your brother. Also speaking to you is your brother. Then December, another AI operator created by you to tell you not to listen to January. Or was it? January shows you a video you recorded telling yourself to destroy the station. December shows you a video of you with your brother telling you to nullify the aliens. There's a chef who has locked himself in a kitchen who asks for help getting an item from his room. If you're observant you'll cop he neither looks or sounds like the person he claims to be in the logs you find. Or if you encounter another character before him they'll tell you he isn't who he says he is, but at that point can you trust her? I love how much the game is filled with these situations, even the fish tanks aren't real they're just Looking Glass screens! There's a pond in one location that on this play through I accidentality shot and it revealed the whole pond and waterfall are just an illusion, a Looking Glass screen.
Before I get to what I enjoy so much in terms of game play I want to touch on another way Prey integrates the fiction with the game play. In BioShock's story Rapture has gone to shit after the discovery of plasmids, a way for people to splice their genes to have super human powers such as shooting fire or lightning from your hands. You too can get these powers but the fiction never feels relevant. You come across people driven mad by plasmids, no longer fully human and desperately killing and looting to survive. I never really felt that as a player, getting plasmids never felt like there was a downside it was all upside. In Prey you can learn to harness the powers of the Aliens using Neuromods, a technology that allows humans to learn various skills(such as piano) that you learns the cause of this whole disaster was the research into infusing Alien abilities into these. The difference in Prey is that you're warned the use of these will turn the station's defences against you as the more you get the more you will be recognised as an Alien. For my first play through I never learned a single Alien ability which is essentially a voluntary hard mode. The Alien abilities are incredibly powerful especially when it comes to combat and the reason I took the aforementioned cowards ending, which is escaping on a private shuttle and just abandoning making any decision on the mess you created, was because of how difficult it was to survive an onslaught that occurs at that point in the game. I realised on this play through where I learned Alien abilities from the get go what a difference they make even beyond combat and I had a much better time having learned these abilities. I will argue that the punishment is pretty mild and it won't take you long to learn more abilities and strategies that nullify the punishment, I would have liked to see this pushed further. I do still like that the game lets you forgo them with a good reason for why you would and Dishonored 2(another Arkane game, probably my favourite game there is) also allowed this with an explanation but in that case I saved doing so for a later play through.
Prey really shines once it comes to the actual game part of it, it allows a great level of freedom and never feels like the designers have spotted something and clocked up from doing it. To the contrary it feels like they've spent an enormous amount of time giving you choices and making sure they all work. Take the security stations you encounter in each area, within each one is a terminal that will give you a map of that area and access to the locations of people. Every one of these are the same design but how you get in changes; some are locked, some are just open, some you'll already have a key for or you will find the key on a body nearby. All of them have a small slot like you'd find at a teller in a bank and if you have the power to become any object you can just become a small object and you're in, I don't think I ever found one arbitrarily blocked. You get a small nerf gun that you can use to active the unlock door button inside rooms if you can get a shot at it. At one point there was a locked office I could not figure out how to get into, then I just smashed the glass window and walked in. Of course I can do that, this was just some offices that in every day life no one would do that but now it's a fair approach to take. They're not some how indestructible as a way to force you to find other solutions, sometimes the simple brute force approach is the one to take. You can set up explosives as traps for enemies, sneak past them ignoring them entirely or just run away from them. You're never forced into a way to play and while your choices might leave you in a pickle there is probably some way out of it. Even the power curve of the game is something it lets you abuse, save for a small roadblock you can manufacture as many upgrade items as you like so long as you have the resources allowing you to become absurdly powerful later in the game. I had an amazing moment where I was away from the starting area for hours and when I returned it felt familiar but I was no longer the same terrified Morgan sneaking around and running away, I was now near indestructible and that flip feels so satisfying. Rooms that filled me with dread before I now passed through without realising. IF I have one criticism of the game it's that the enemies never evolve much and the mimics turn into more of a nuisance than anything else, half way through you've seen almost all of what's on offer and shortly after you're so powerful that they pose little threat.
The last aspect I want to talk about is the station itself and how well realised it is. I've already brushed on the realistic approach taken to the office spaces & security stations and unsurprisingly that extends to every aspect of the station. From developer interviews there's one aspect of the station that is faked when you're looking at it from the outside but otherwise it all fits together logically and doors between areas are where they should be. Every crew member exists on(or just outside in a few cases) the station and can be found. These people who's bed you can find with emails you can read through to piece together what their life was like are all real people not something that's there for the sake of exposition. The crew works as a great device to flesh out the politics of the station, who knew what was really going on and who was oblivious. You'll discover bitter enemies and lovers, two people who couldn't stomach what they were working on any more and were in the midst of exposing the truth, a tabletop RPG group and their character sheets, colleagues trying to undermine one another to give themselves an advantage. It's all really well written and does a lot to make the station feel real. As does the architecture, there's a great variety and the sort of things you'd imagine would be there. Accommodation of various quality depending on your status within the company, a level that is a small garden area right down to a power plant area that is as massive as you'd imagine it to be. Every department has an office area complete with desks for the people who work there. Everything holds together incredibly well and the thought that went into creating something so cohesive is clear.
I'll touch briefly on the ending, I'm not sure what other people think of it but I like it. In the end you find out that you're not really Morgan or at least not Morgan living through the events. Some of the events have probably played out, it seems like Transtar doomed the Earth to be overtaken by the Typhon(or the Typhon did so independently) from their reckless research but Alex is looking to put things right by seeing if the Typhon can have empathy for humans by injection a Typon(you) with Morgan's memories. It's not super clear but it is one of those endings that gets away with being open to interpretation. Thematically it's a great fit, as I said at the start at no point can you trust what you're seeing including the entire story that has just played out.
