2017 was possibly one of the greatest years in video gaming. So many amazing genre defining titles came out that year, and it's hard to nail down which one was the most innovative or important. It was the year that brought variety back into the video game industry and encouraged developers to do their best to create single player experiences that could be enjoyed for years to come. Proving story driven adventures still had their place in the market while also proving fun still had a place as well.
Nintendo brought out their new innovative console the Nintendo Switch, a console that was made for both for home and on the go gaming. Not only that, but along with it they released The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. A new step forward for the Zelda series and a groundbreaker for the open world genres. You could go anywhere you’d like to at any time and there were no restrictions. No icons or constant reminders telling you what to do. Just pure freedom and exploration left for the player. Capcom made an epic comeback with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which surprisingly brought the series back to its survival horror roots and showed the players could still be scared while armed. PlatinumGames partnered up with Yoko Taro and released Nier: Automata, an unexpected rollercoaster of emotions that delve into the philosophical themes of existence and what drives a human being to continue pushing onward despite almost everything they love being taken away from them in a hopeless world of misery and death. (Probably the most important game of the year. Not gonna lie.) Guerilla Games finished up Horizon Zero Dawn, the Playstation 4’s new exclusive open world sandbox that told an amazing story and offered a unique spin on stereotypical sandbox design tropes. After several years of development and hiatus, Atlus and P-Studio finally released Persona 5 which is possibly one of the best JRPGs of the modern generation for its stylish artstyle and intriguing story about staying optimistic in a corrupt world. So many good, impactful games and all of which have aged incredibly well.
However, for every major release there is always a game that is never acknowledged. A jem lying at the bottom of the dry well. Waiting to be dug up from the ground and acknowledged for what it achieved. While survival horror fans were praising RE7 and all its glory, there was Darkwood which put a heavier emphasis on survival horror to generate the most intense, dreadful moments seen in a survival horror experience. Super Mario Odyssey was a treat to 3D platformers who were thirsty for more content in an absent genre, but A Hat In Time was another delightful treat with more level variety and personality that was overlooked since it came out around the same time. Hollow Knight, my number one game of all time and Game of The Year for 2017, was a hand drawn hardcore metroidvania that wasn’t noticed since it released during the time of the Nintendo Switch. Then there is today’s game, one that I hold incredibly close to my heart alongside a few others. It’s an underrated Triple A title I believe every gamer should try once, and deserves more acknowledgement than it originally had. This game being Prey, another title to mark the comeback of the immersive-sim.
Arkane Studios is one of the many development teams at Bethesda Gameworks. Their first game published under Bethesda was Dishonored back in 2012, a first person stealth game inspired by old immersive-sim titles mainly Thief. 2012 wasn’t a really active year in gaming, actually it was a really chaotic year, but one of the many stand out titles was Dishonored. People praised how well designed the game was, and many critics even considered it to be one of the greatest games ever made. Arkane Studios then followed this up with Dishonored 2 in 2016, which was also pretty well acclaimed even though it’s sales were lower than the first game due to some sh*tty business practices Bethesda was conducting at the time. After the financial failure of the sequel, Arkane Studios began development on a standalone expansion that would end the Dishonored storyline, but at the same time they were working on another new original property. A few years before the massive success of the Dishonored series, Bethesda gained the rights to a game called Prey which was once owned by 3D realms. The team behind the Duke Nukem series who were now inactive with the Prey licensing.
The original Prey came out in 2006 and it followed the role of a Cherokee named Tommy as he battled against a mysterious alien race using magical out of this world Cherokee powers to rescue his family. You would also use portals to navigate around the environments and gain the upper hand on the enemy. The idea behind the game sounds ridiculous when you hear this out loud, but it was well received because of how unique it was at the time. Gaining a cult following. A sequel was planned for the game and early prototype footage was shown in 2011, but eventually the sequel was canceled and the final ideas were scrapped. The Prey series was never touched again, but eventually Bethesda bought the rights to it and had big plans.
Arkane Studios was given the rights to the Prey franchise by Bethesda, and alongside the development of Dishonored 2 they were secretly working on a new Prey. In 2016, they announced the development of a new science fiction property that went under the same name as the original, Prey. They were expecting gamers to be amazed with this newly anticipated project, but what they got was mixed reception. Fans of the original Prey were actually outraged that they weren’t getting the sequel they were promised back in 2011, and the new ideas Arkane Studios showcased just looked weird. Well no one complained about a mysterious black eyed floating man who lent you powers that allowed you to summon rats or turn into a rat yourself, so why are we complaining here on what ideas work? It was because of this backlash and Bethesda failing to market the game to any audience at all that Prey failed both financially and mainstream critics. Nobody wanted to play Prey, which is a tragedy because what was lying underneath the ridicule and doubt was one of the best games of the year. A masterpiece.
This new Prey reboot came out in 2017 and it turned out to be better than everyone thought. It’s personally to me one of the most innovative Triple A games of 2017, and it’s where the minds at Arkane Studios’ combined together to form a brilliantly shining star. It even managed to fix the problem of past immersive-sims and modernize it in such a way where it could appease veterans of the genre and newcomers. Prey (2017) is just a very interesting game to talk about from so many perspectives and it’s here today we show you what good game design really is. Since I just played through Prey for the third time I decided rather than do a normal review that instead I’d make an essay depicting why Prey is so amazing and what developers can learn from it. In some way Prey (2017) is an immersive genius, the best immersive-sim to come out in years, and here's why.
The History of immersive-Sims
Before we talk about the design choices of Prey and why every idea clicks together to make a clever puzzle box, let’s first talk about what genre Prey belongs to. You may consider Prey to be a first person shooter due to how you fight enemies with guns from a first person perspective, but it's not. Survival horror due to how rare resources are or an RPG due to how the character progression works, but if you know the old school years of PC gaming then Prey can be traced down to being an immersive-sim. You may be asking yourself what is an immersive-sim? Let me take you back in time. When PC gaming was hitting the market and along with it was an ocean of possibilities.
Consoles were a staple to the video game industry, but with the advancement of technology came new horizons for programmers to explore. More diverse color patterns, better rendering, detailed environments, first and third person perspectives, adding more sounds and voices to your game, bigger spaces for players to wander around in, animated mouth movement, or somewhat realistic character animation for the time being. Stuff that wasn’t possible with previous tech like the Super Nintendo. There were quite a few games made for home computers that made use of such technology. Fallout, Starcraft, Half-Life, but one of few interesting games of that time was System Shock. It was another first person title that aimed to be immersive much, but from a different level. It stood out for its level design, mechanics, storytelling, how it handled it’s atmosphere, and confined space. It was a game aimed to make the player feel as "immersed" as possible and it did so perfectly. You really felt like a random bumbling idiot crawling through the halls of an abandoned space station and being taunted by a rogue AI. Trying to be prepared for whatever monster is thrown into your face, and when they finally are you have to choose between a fight or flight.
System Shock was somewhat ahead of its time and it started a new formula for first person experiences, which was later expanded upon with two major games The first game was Thief: The Dark Project by Looking Glass Studios, and the second game was Deus Ex by Ion Storm. Both of these games focused on sneaking around and making the player rely on whatever was available at the moment to navigate around without being noticed. They were also a big step forward with the stealth genre and how stealth was implemented into games. These three games helped pave the way for the immersive-sims genre, and what really cemented this category was the late release of System Shock 2 in 1999. System Shock 2 is considered by many to be secretly one the greatest games of all time, and the last game before the blackout of the genre.
The genre wouldn’t return for quite some time due to the shutdown of companies who published such titles, and it wasn’t until 2007 the developers of System Shock 2 created a spiritual successor called BioShock. Can I just say one thing? BioShock is a goddamn masterpiece for the time. Everything BioShock did was a major improvement from what System Shock 2 did. The level design was great, combat found a way to mix classic and modern design, unique powers allowed the player to interact with the environment in special ways, certain scenarios could be approached in numerous ways, the writing was compelling and deep, and the City of Rapture is possibly one of the greatest and most recognizable locations in video game history. BioShock is timeless and talking about it right now kind of makes me want to play it again. There were problems like how BioShock didn't implement morality as well as let's say Deus Ex, but it was an attempt to bring the immersive-sim genre back to the industry.
Anyways, BioShock is amazing, but it’s sequels aren’t what help revive the immersive-sims. BioShock 2 is a pretty good game in my standards since it’s more of something I like, but it wasn’t as successful as the first one and failed to innovate in any way for the immersive-sim formula. Then there’s BioShock: Infinite, while one of the greatest games of 2013, is your basic run of the mill first person shooter with cover based shooting, generic gunplay, and linear level design that ditched the immersive-sim design which made BioShock a standout in the first place. I’m not saying Infinite is a bad game, it's a great game in fact, but compared to the other BioShock games it strayed the furthest away from what the original did best.
What really got the immersive sims back on track, again, was everyone’s favorite game about augmented human beings in a politically divided world, Deus Ex. In 2011, the series was brought back to life with Deus Ex: Human Revolution which stuck with the series roots of immersion and sneaking around, and was well received by critics. It had more choices than the original games and allowed the player to use crazy augmented powers similar to BioShock to solve a multitude of situations. That’s the thing with new immersive-sims. Not only do you give them tools to fend off against enemies, but you also give them powers that allow them to interact with the environment.
Finally Arkane Studios came along and in 2012 published Dishonored, one year after the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. A good chunk of the design in Dishonored was derived or inspired by the original two Thief games, and since there hasn’t been a Thief game in several years people were excited to play a game that practically served as a spiritual successor. Much like how BioShock was a spiritual successor to System Shock. What they got was a game with rich world building and an artistic design that made it stand out from most games with a steampunk setting. There was a Thief reboot in 2014 that came out due to the reprise of the immersive-sims, but it failed because it didn’t understand what was making other immersive-sims great at the time.
In 2016, two immersive sequels came out to follow up the critical hits we just mentioned and show that immersive-sims were always a staple for gaming. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Dishonored 2, but there were minor controversies between the two. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided released with microtransactions, mass amounts of monetization, and came out half baked due to Square Enix cutting the funding of the game to pour it into other products. Dishonored 2 had no review copies during launch, because Bethesda thought the game would sell better if they refused to give out review copies and advertise in general. So the sales of both games tanked, but they were still very great games especially Dishonored 2 for me. This is where we come back to Prey.
Arkane Studios’ Prey was revealed back at E3 2016 with a cinematic trailer exploring what the game would be centered around. They later followed this up with an actual gameplay trailer showing how it would play and look like. Prey has been in development for a really long time. It started off as the originally intended sequel being developed by 3D Realms, and then the franchise was passed down to Arkane Studios. Rather than continue off of the original, Arkane Studios decided to just create an entirely new franchise. When it came time to develop both Prey and Dishonored 2 the entire company split into two teams. One team worked on Dishonored 2, and the other worked on Prey. Arkane clearly stated and showed how drastically different the game was from the original and I think that’s what turned people off. They wanted an exact follow up to the original cult classic, but they didn’t listen carefully and got disappointed with what they called some System Shock clone. However, for those who actually played the game what they got was the most hearts down immersive-sims.
BioShock was supposed to be a spiritual successor to System Shock, but Prey feels more like an adaptation of System Shock in a modern form. A sci-fi setting that takes place within an abandoned space station, grotesque monsters who roam the halls waiting to kill you, the occasional horror moments that pop right into your face, etc. Fun fact about me folks: I played Prey immediately after I completed the BioShock trilogy, so it was easy for me to draw the similarities between the two and how they both followed a similar formula. A majority of the players who played Prey weren't fans of the original, but more like old PC players who wanted immersive-sims similar to the classics. It was the audience whom Prey was marketed towards and succeeded with. Prey is a pretty unique game, but what makes the world of it so interesting?
Welcome Aboard Talos 1
I can really tell Arkane Studios was trying to draw out a few key concepts from the System Shock series, but quite a few elements of the story remind me of BioShock and even Half-Life of all things. In an alternate reality John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the US, wasn’t assassinated during a public car ride; he then afterwards poured a good chunk of government fundings into space programs. Allowing the United States to get far ahead in the Space Race and beat the Russians. Members aboard the spacecraft Sputnik 1 encountered a mysterious alien race known as the Typhoon, organisms that feed off of living organisms and rapidly multiplied in numbers. The team aboard the shuttle were wiped out by the Typhoon during examination, but being interested in what happened the United States and Soviet Union teamed up to create another spacecraft to research the Typhoon this time named Kletka.
Kletka became part of a program named Project Axiom, but later failed when the Typhoon breached containment and killed everyone aboard as before with Sputnik 1. The United States and Soviet Union dropped the project as all efforts were useless, but somewhere down the line there was world peace so that counts! Decades later a newfound company named TranStar acquired the rights to the Kletka, and began expanding the station to research the Typhoon. Using the Typhoon’s DNA they create Neuromods, special injections that can be inserted into human beings and increase their physical strength, capabilities, and even give them crazy genetic powers the Typhoon have. The Klekta became so big that it became a giant building or skyscraper in space and was renamed Talos 1. TranStar is runned and led by the Yu family, and together they gather some of the world’s greatest minds and artists alike to research the Typhoon and share their knowledge with each other. Sound familiar to another man who tried making a utopia for scientists and artists alike?
We play as Morgan Yu, one of the many head researchers aboard Talos 1. He and his older brother Alex run the entire station, and it’s up to them to research the Typhoon and show the effects of neuromods. On a lovely sunny morning Morgan wakes up in his apartment and prepares to go to work. He rides a chopper to work, lands on a building rooftop, and is escorted in. Alex prepares Morgan for a test and so far everything seems to be like your ordinary day. Push some buttons, hide behind a chair, and take a short quiz. At the end of the quiz Morgan is shown a strange image however, and while he is sealed behind tight glass walls the Typhoon breaches containment and starts killing the researchers with him. Morgan is knocked out unconscious and he hears his brother Alex say something he doesn't understand. It all felt like one bad dream.
Morgan wakes up in his room yet again, but everything looks the same as if he is on a Groundhogs Day time loop. He walks outside to find things have drastically changed into a cryptic setting and the game does a good job of this by making sure the first thing you spot is a dead body of the mechanic you saw during the intro. Morgan is then contacted by an operator named January, robotic intelligence. January explains that Morgan is not safe right now, and that he must escape the room he is trapped within. Morgan breaks out of his apartment and finds out he is not on earth, rather the space station Talos 1. Morgan figures out that his memories were wiped out when Alex and his past self removed the neuromods from his mind weeks ago. Wanting to see what happens they soon discover that by removing all neuromod injections from a person's head they forget all their memories up until the day they receive their first neuromod. This rule is written really well into the story and is actually used again for a late game mission. Anyways, for several days Morgan has been reliving the same scenario over and over. A past message recorded by himself instructs Morgan that he must blow up Talos 1 before the Typhoon figures out how to get to earth. It reminds me of Half-Life and how their research goes too far, and now a basic scientist must stop an invasion. Your goal is clear, but it's not shoved down your throat immediately. Cleverly presented within the first two hours and it expands as the player goes deeper into Talos 1.
Play The Mind Game
Despite being this epic adventure to destroy a space station infested parasite, Prey has a philosophical message and it’s executed brilliantly through presentation, reveals, and symbolism. It uses the show don't tell rule, otherwise environmental storytelling, where the player should witness the information through the gameplay without having to be drawn out from it so much. That way they'll always feel part of the world, and that they are Morgan Yu. A problem that arises with a lot of video game stories is that the character you see in gameplay and in cutscenes can be different. The protagonist in Fallout 4 may sound calm during dialogue sequences, but it doesn't change the fact you ran around shotgun blasting everything to death in the last thirty minutes. While there are audio logs left behind by the past Morgan, the protagonist never speaks of the entire game. Meaning you get to imagine what Morgan Yu is thinking. Could he still be the stern scientist he is, afraid of what is going on, gain more intelligence than before, or become a rampaging psychopath who guns down everything in his way. It allows the Morgan Yu in both gameplay and writing to match up to the player's vision.
Now back to the morality of Prey. I’m not really sure if I understand what the term “philosophical” really means especially with how I used it, but I just want to clarify that this paragraph will dive into later story segments of the game. If you haven’t played Prey (2017) yet I suggest doing so before continuing with this part of the essay. Anyways, your objective is pretty straight forward. Find a way to blow up Talos 1 and escape before ultimate destruction. What makes the journey through Prey deep are the moral choices you are presented with during stressful scenarios. Throughout the main story you will encounter human NPCs, survivors trying to stay safe during the Typhoon outbreak. You are offered the chance to either help them, or leave to die while you pursue your main objective. Unlike some games which shrug off the fact that you did something bad and don't bring it up later on, for example Fallout 4 and how it handled it’s yes or no answer quests, Prey (2017) may not have the most complex moral choice system out there but it has the most "well written into the story" moral choice.
The first human encounter is in the third major area of the game, Psychotronics. Talos 1 uses Russian prisoners as test subjects against the typhoon, with a majority of them haven’t survived the tests. The prisoner will ask you to free him from the chamber he's locked in, but if you search around for some background documents then you’ll find his criminal record which is filled with illegal activities. He’ll even become aware of what you may be looking at and tell you to ignore it with an ignorant voice. You have the choice of either freeing him and he’ll give you a code to a weapon cache, or you can kill him and gain some extra information about the typhoon. The prisoner doesn't deserve to be let free for his crimes, but at the same time you will be put responsible for his death. January will actually call in after you make the decision and judge you for whether you decide to spare a human life. Something now sparse on Talos 1.
Later down the line you encounter more cryptic scenarios. A top researcher who is quite close to you named Dr. Dayo Igwe has trapped himself inside a shipping container during a great escape and he is slowly losing oxygen as the container drifts out towards space. You can either save him and gain a helpful ally, or leave him to suffocate and continue along with your journey. Danielle Sho is one of your top employees and states her girlfriend was murdered by a prison volunteer pretending to be the cook. You can either get vengeance for her, or ignore her request and let the volunteer cause chaos across Talos 1. There's a great punishment if you decide to ignore her! Recycler Charges, which are a deadly weapon amongst Talos 1 for they act like blackholes, will be placed around machinery and terminals if you refuse to take him down early. Meaning you have to be ready if you accidentally walk into one. Mikhaila Ilyushin is the chief director and needs her medicine to survive. You can either retrieve them for her by traveling outside of the station to get them and gain another helpful ally, or leave her to die as you progress with the main quest. There is even a later quest where you reveal what happened to her father who was a volunteer that died during a test.
One crucial NPC to me is Dahl, a pilot who was sent to eliminate any survivors aboard Talos 1. You have to eliminate him in order to progress with the story, but if you save Igwe he will propose an idea to you. If you can somehow leave Dahl unconscious using the Stun Gun then Igwe will remove the neuromods implanted in his head making Dahl forget his objective. This will offer the survivors an easy way to escape Talos 1 by convincing Dahl to fly them off the station. If you kill Dahl, no one gets off the station besides you the player. It's a choice of whether you care about others or are selfish.
All of this adds up to the final moment of the game where it’s revealed to you it was all a simulation. You're not actually Morgan Yu. All this time you're a hybrid between a typhoon and a human. Alex and a few characters you encountered in the game, now robots, begin questioning your morality. If you decide to leave everyone to die or suffer a fate caused by your hands, they will confirm that the test failed and throw you out along with other failed subjects. If you save everyone you encounter and choose to do favors for living human beings, then they will offer you the choice to help them. The real world earth has been taken over by the Typhoon, and the real Morgan died trying to protect his allies. Should you aid the cast you grew to know, or kill them all as they twisted your mind and they are not even true human beings anymore. Just machines. A lot of players had mixed feelings over this ending. Saying it was a curveball that came out of nowhere. However, it's hinted during certain sections of the story and I personally believe there was enough leading up to this twist.
Prey isn’t a game about pursuing the main goal. It’s a game about whether the player are willing to show empathy through actions. A lot of video games may throw emotional scenes at us, but the ones that allow us to interact with are the moments the player feels something. A quiz you take at the beginning of the game that is cleverly disguised to represent the main events in the game, and it’s quite literally just a retelling of the trolley problem being told through a forgettable test. The good of the many or the few? Family or friends? The good of others or yourself? Choice plays a big role in Prey and your choices affect what type of person you really are.
Your Choice Morgan
Like true immersive-sims, Prey gives you a lot of space and choices to work with. Each area feels widely open, but you're confined within an interconnected world. Sometimes your objective isn’t as straightforward as you think as the most straightforward pathway to said objective is blocked. You'll have to find a new out of the box solution to solve a simple problem. This may sound like drawing out a problem, but this is what I like most about Prey. It rewards the player for thinking creatively and going for the easiest answer.
A locked door prevents you from getting inside a room. You can find the keycard or code to get into the room, but let’s say you can’t find them or they are out of reach. You could hack the terminal using your hacking skills, but you don’t have the skill level to hack it just yet. Suddenly you find two more ways to get into the room. Climb above to enter through a large gap and drop down into the room, or crawl through a small vent to eventually reach the other side. That’s more than five ways to get through a door! The developers accommodated for all the skills and abilities the player could unlock throughout the game, and made sure every problem allowed you to take each scenario. Some methods are harder than others, but it allows the player to decide.
Prey wants the player to constantly be thinking and luckily they give you the right tools to do so. The weapons in Prey are pretty simple. Pistol, shotgun, a giant laser cannon that melts foes slowly but consumes a lot of ammo, and even electric grenades. Two of my favorite weapons in the game have to be the Gloo Cannon and the previously mentioned Recycler Charge. The Gloo Cannon is a multipurpose tool, meaning it serves a purpose outside of combat. Use it to stick objects to the wall. Freeze enemies in place if applied enough. Plug up pipes spewing out fire. Plug up electrical sockets so you can fix them with spare parts. Create a staircase on the wall so you can reach higher areas. The Gloo Cannon is one of my favorite weapons in gaming, because it isn’t a weapon entirely. It can be used to interact with the environment and create more ways to solve problems. Then there is the Recycler Charge which shreds up enemies and turns them into material. Material can be used to craft items at fabricators, and you can gain material by either picking it up or scrapping junk you pick up across Talos 1 at recyclers. Also, crafting isn't a pain in the ass in Prey. It limits down to four resource types and game automatically plugs the recipe in for the item you want.
Neuromods play a big role in Prey, because they are what allow you to upgrade your physical capabilities and obtain alien powers. Human upgrades are basic enough like increasing maximum health, stamina, defense, attack power, hacking, lifting heavier objects, inventory space, repairing tech, and much more. The alien powers on the other hand are more drastic. You can unlock new powers by observing different types of Typhoon using your Psychoscope. It only works on living Typhoon, so it forces the player to get risky. The more research you obtain the stronger powers you can unlock. The trade off is that if you gain too many alien powers, turrets throughout Talos 1 will begin identifying you as an alien and shooting at you on sight and story wise you begin to go crazy. Some NPCs will even question if you are more of an alien than a human being. At the end of the day the question is: A fighter or thinker? Human or monster?
The Use of Environmental Storytelling
There are ways to make a player feel immersed without always having to remove control away from their grubby little hands and catch them up on what is going on through dialogue heavy cutscenes. The answer is through environmental storytelling, using the environment and other important objects the player finds to piece together what is going on. Most games would have to interrupt the flow of gameplay which disconnects players from the world, but games like Prey and BioShock are willing to let the player figure stuff out on their own. Pick up either an audio log on or shorten the amount of text to continue on with the game without having to watch a cinematic cutscene. The game even allows the player to listen to audio logs while playing the game. Think of it like listening to a video essay while drawing. You get to learn two things at the same time without having to get close to one.
The broken shops, bloody messages on the wall, and psychopaths of BioShock let the player realize the political disconnect and civil war that led to the fall of Rapture. It’s somewhat similar in Prey, the player figures out how diligent the staff was on Talos 1 before the outbreak. Employees taking breaks during shifts, peacefully or chaotically discussing workplace problems, and the stuff a believable workplace would do. Some of the audio logs and texts in Prey make the game feel more human rather than dead.
I like it when you can interact with your surroundings, rather than watch a bunch of scripted cinematic moments play out and eventually tell you where to go. It doesn’t break up the pacing so much and allows you to move on and have fun in this immersive atmosphere. Isn’t that the point of a game? To have fun? Not watch a sixty dollar movie play out? I like having a good story, but sometimes too much story can affect the flow of a game. I actually encourage players to do a majority of the side quests you encounter in Prey, because while a majority of them nail down a generic fetch quest some of them can offer some pretty neat back stories and worthy rewards like new fabrication plans or upgrades. One video that easily explains storytelling through level design is How Level Design Can Tell A Story by Game Maker’s Toolkit, so check that out if you want to learn more about environmental storytelling.
I Keep Having This Dream
This game hasn’t really aged that bad at all. Actually, I think it’s timeless and it has aged better than I thought it would. With the amount of customization and branching paths the player is offered, Prey (2017) has a ton of replay value. Powers to mess around with, solutions to solving problems, and how characters judge you for your moral choice throughout the game. Prey also has a new game plus mode which was added a year after the game was released. Much like a majority of new game plus modes, it allows you to replay the game keeping the powers from their previous playthrough. You may think that a new game plus mode breaks the game entirely or makes it much easier, but new games plus is well balanced because it still manages to make you start off weak but get stronger overtime. You could also make the game harder by turning up the difficulty and activating some of the survival features available on the harder difficulties. Stuff like weapon durability or a permadeath mode.
The graphics and environments are crisp as always. Compared to some of the other games that came out in 2017, Prey looks fine and still looks fine three years later. I should also mention the DLC expansion for this game, the roguelike side story named Prey: Mooncrash. It takes the maze-like design the main game had and turns it into a roguelike. You follow a hacker named Peter who works for a rival company of Talos 1 who wants to expose what they are doing aboard the station and other designated outposts. Wait, didn’t the original System Shock follow a hacker being put into a dangerous situation. It's really nice how they sneak an influence like that into the story. Prey: Mooncrash is more gun heavy than the base game, requires more planning, faster thinking, and it’s much shorter, but for twenty more dollars it’s a worthy expansion. I always liked how Arkane handles DLC. Rather than make new missions to the same game they just make new games entirely. Borrowing assets from the main experience and introducing elements that tie into the main story. You can even play as one of the cousins of the Yu family and learn how family members take control of other outposts.
I do want to point out some minor flaws with the game so it balances out how much praise I’m pouring onto Prey (2017). We are nearly done with this essay and I probably should point out some problems before everyone assumes I think this game is perfect. The zero gravity sections are cool and creative, but take some time to get used to due to how confusing the controls are especially on consoles. Tools like the Typhoon Lure are useless since most players won’t be relying on stealth in this game especially as a majority of environments leave you easily exposed. Combat sections can easily be blown through if you stock up on a ton of ammo. Loading screens are a little tedious with the amount of areas you'll be running through in Prey. Broken electric sockets kill you faster than they should and that’s the final minor complaint I had. However, these complaints really come across with how you perceive Prey. This is a game where any solution works as long as it’s available, so it all ties back to you somehow.
Only Yu can save the world.
Thank You, Arkane Studios
Prey is still one of my favorite games of 2017, and one of the best immersive-sim ever made. It’s innovative at times and features design choices that other developers should not be afraid to embrace. Originality, incredible storytelling that doesn’t disrupt the gameplay too much, maze-like level design that twists back into each other, and taking good ideas from other games. Games like Prey (2017), Return of The Obra Dinn, and Disco Elysium really deserve more attention for how well designed they are and how they elevate the genres they belong to. This may offend people of the original Prey who didn’t get the sequel they wanted all these years, but I hope this new Prey gets a sequel. The cliffhanger ending leaves a lot to be desired.
Arkane Studios has been in a rut recently. They mentioned that they helped out with the development of Fallout 76 and Wolfenstein: Youngblood which kind of sets a bad image for them. They are however working on a new IP called Deathloop, and personally I’m real excited to see what new ideas it brings to the table. I hope five years from now I can come back to this game and still enjoy it, and if any Arkane employee is reading this I would just like to say thank you. Thank you for bringing this fantastic game to life and I wish you the best of luck for any future projects! Overall, my final review score for Prey (2017) is going to be a 10/10 for being incredible.
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