Prey (2017) — Review
Genres in video games do not mean much these days. Sure games are classified whether they are first person or third person, more often than not, you can have both of the options in a single game. RPG mainstays like inventory management, looting, progression have slowly spilled over to other genres; the reverse is also true. Games are being designed to no longer be confined to strict gameplay principles as the developers are getting confident in experimenting and iterating more so than ever before. So what role does the genre play in the industry today? If you ask me, I think genre still has a meaning. It is now tied to overarching, high-level design principles as opposed to adhering to strict gameplay paradigms. In a sense, the details do no matter, it is how the entire experience as a whole is perceived which counts. One such school of design principles is encapsulated under a genre called the ‘immersive sim’.
While not as popular as the late 90s or early 2000s. Immersive sim is a genre which may look like a first person shooter at first, goes above and beyond that. You are given large, non-linear levels to explore; solve problems as they come by using the various tools and abilities, which naturally grows overtime. The magic happens when players understand these tools, get proficient with it and starts to combine them in a wide variety of ways. There is no ‘right way’ to play these games. Sure there are fixed objectivities and you will always know what to do, but you are never told how to do so. Games like Deus Ex, Bioshock are great examples of immersive sims. However, it is safe to say there is only a few developers out there that knows the genre better than anyone body else, one of them is Arkane Studios.
Having done the Dishonored series, which took the best elements of Thief and expanded upon them. With Prey, the studio wanted to go after another gaming great and try replicating the same thing they did with Dishonored series. Arkane went forward to capture the brilliance of System Shock and bring it to the modern world.
In Prey you are Morgun Yu, an engineer who works in one of the world’s most mega corporations, which also happens to be a family business. With your older, chubbier brother at your side, you are all set to make greatness for mankind from the comforts of a giant space station called the Talos I. Of course, this being an entertainment product, everything goes wrong soon after.
The main enemies you will face in Prey are aliens called the Typhoon — half specter, half squid, which comes in all shapes and sizes. From the most grunt type mimics which takes the shape and form of objects around you to more humanoid phantoms which are much tougher and do not waste any time trying to kill you.
If you are familiar with Dishonored series, then there is a lot of similarities you will come across as well as some major differences. Let us start with the structure. Where Dishonored series had giant maps with plenty of traversal options in the horizontal and vertical sense; Prey goes for a single, more complex environment. In Prey you are no longer traveling between different maps, instead your playground is one giant space station. The cool thing about this whole setup is that there is no smoke and mirrors behind all this. You can either zig-zag your way from point A to B from inside of the station, or you can directly go from A to B from the outside. This also helps with the pacing as the most of the game’s tense encounters take place inside of the station, making the spacewalk an almost relaxing experience, similar to Bioshock’s water sequences.
Bioshock is a perfect comparison to make as the game feels very similar to that end. You have neuromods which gives you abilities to improve your human traits like shooting a gun, hacking or fixing anything you broken. Or, you can get new powers which mimics that from the aliens you scanned (think Biohock’s research mechanic). Heck the similarities with Bioshock is even more striking when the default weapon is a wrench. Of course the similarities end about there as Arkane have put enough of their ideas to make Prey more than just Bioshock in space.
Great power comes at a cost however. As players install more and more alien powers into them, they are essentially becoming similar to the aliens themselves at a molecular level. After a certain point the automated defense systems of Talos thinks you an alien and starts shooting you on sight.
The game’s combat is divided into two sets, weapons and powers. Weapons are conventional human means of fighting back with pistol, shotgun, grenades etc. Powers on the other hand are the various abilities which helps you directly like incineration, or indirectly like mind control. There are plenty of ways to approach a combat. You can of course go full on offence, use stealth, use trickery to start a fight amongst themselves or simply ignore and move past them. The more you play, more options will open up, but unfortunately not as much as I would have wanted.
You see there is one fundamental way the game’s various powers and abilities differ from that of Dishonored however. Where every action in the Dishonored series flowed and connected nicely to one another. In Prey, it does not feel like the actions connect as well. What I meant to say is in Dishonored you felt you were creating combos on the fly, often in direct response to a given situation. Prey’s systems feel more rigid to the point it feels like a hindrance to create combos, only for it to fail and play out as separate actions. Now this caused a lot of problems for me. Coming from Dishonored series I tried to play Prey with the same creative approach, every time I tried to do so I either died or just was very inefficient. It was only when I realized that I can’t play like that I started to make progress, of course it meant shallowing my experience moving forward.
Although you do not have to do much in terms of inventory management, it is still an integral part of the game. You have your Resident Evil system grid system to fit all the stuff you find in Talos 1. Apart from the usual things like weapons and consumables, you also get raw materials. Talos I is at the very forefront of technology and environmental concerns, so they have two kinds of dispensers scattered across the station: Recycler and Fabricator. Every object you have with you can be recycled into their base components using the Recycler. With the components you can use to construct anything else of more importance at the Fabricator, provided you have the blueprint for it, think of it as 3D printing. It is one of my favorite parts of the game to simply haul everything I can pick up and bring it all to the nearest recycler. You also save a lot of inventory space once the objects are converted. This mechanic also opens up the gameplay as now you have option to mostly carry the things you would normally use.
After Dishonored 2’s technical mess. Prey runs really well. It uses a different engine altogether which might have helped in this regard. However, to be fair, Prey does not look anywhere near as good as Dishonored 2, both in terms of details and technical features. It has its own distinct art-deco thing going for it. It however falls short from the impeccable world building design of Dishonored 2.
Sound disappointed me. The music of the alien encounters can quickly get frustrating as the same few tracks play over and over again. What was even more shocking was just how poor positional audio was. 3D positional sound had been in common for games for years now, yet in Prey it does not work at all. Instead if you are wearing a headset, it funnels the audio into two very distinct left and right channels. There is little to no transition in audio between left and right channels. For stealth gamers or if you simply want to have a jump on the enemies, this can be very frustrating.
In every review I tend to write a moment of frustration if there is one and unfortunately Prey has quite a few. Chief among them happens towards the end when a certain type of enemies keeps on spawning indefinitely until you leave the area. In the year 2017, this kind of game design should not even exist, especially when taking out these enemies quickly depletes through your limited resources. I am not sure what was Arkane thinking in this regard. I also want to mention that you have to travel back and forth a lot, since remember there is only 1 giant map in Prey. Now I would not have any problems with it if the level data seamlessly streamed in and out, yet it doesn’t. You have go through airlocks in order to order to move to another section, which means there is a loading time. Sometimes you even have to go through 2–3 airlocks in quick succession. Loading times aren’t bad in this game, but again, this sort of technical limitation have no place in modern gaming of this kind and ends up breaking the immersion, which is a crime in immersive sims.
It is as if it fell down to Arkane Studios to rejuvenate a lost genre as in immersive sim and they are doing just that. Where Dishonored series felt like a perfect execution of ideas, Prey feels more loose and disjointed. It is not a bad game by any means, but it is the weakest entry for Arkane Studios as of writing.
