"Prey" Review - I Preyed, Arkane Answered

Some of you may remember that a week before Prey released, I played and reviewed the demo. It sucked. Badly. In that review, I stated that if things didn't change, this game was going to be a flop. So, imagine my surprise when Prey managed to be the following: 1) My favorite game from Arkane Studios, 2) My favorite game that takes place on a space station, and 3) One of my favorite games of this year. In a word, Prey is excellent. In several words, Prey is a testament to how a game can improve when a developer listens to criticism and makes improvements based off of it. It isn't going to be for everyone, and I hope to be detailed enough that you'll understand if it isn't for you. Now, buckle up in your escape pods and hit everything inside with a wrench as I explain to you why I believe Prey is worth your money.

Prey puts you in the shoes of Morgan Yu. Morgan is a scientist (either a man or a woman, but I'll be saying "he" from here on) with the TranStar corporation. He and his brother, Alex, run TranStar's operations on the Talos I space station, studying a hostile alien species called "Typhon." Morgan wakes up one day to find that the Typhon have broken containment and that his memory is gone. Upon waking, Morgan is contacted by a mysterious voice identifying itself as "January." With January's help, Morgan uncovers a message that he left for himself and learns what he needs to do to ensure that the Typhon don't destroy humanity. From there, we have our story. Alternate choices to contain the Typhon are really the only way the story itself evolves past this point. That leaves us with a game for which 95% of the runtime consists of fetch quests and padding, and that is really the game's biggest weakness. This is one of those games where every objective you have will, without fail, be delayed by a need for some part from another side of the station. If that's the kind of game you like, you're going to love Prey. I, however, found it quite irritating.

What makes up for this is the game's excellent cast of characters. Because this is an Arkane studios game, the names are needlessly complicated and I don't remember hardly any of them. However, the characters themselves are actually really well-written, and on more than one occasion, I found myself wanting to know even more about a particular character. There are just so many interesting little details hidden around the world that give you insight into a character's life, and it's so unlike Arkane studios to do something like that. The real kicker here, though, is the fact that you don't even meet half the characters you end up reading about. One of my personal favorites was an insecure shuttle bay engineer who was starting to suffer crippling depression. He really liked (possibly romantically) a woman he worked with because, "she was always nice to him." I picked all of that up from reading material in the shuttle bay. At one point, I came across his personal computer and looked through his emails. One of the emails was an infuriating note from his boss telling him to, basically, quit whining about everything. The other was a draft (with the title, "draft") to the woman this character works with. This draft opened up with the line, "I lied to you yesterday when you asked me if I was ok." From there, I saw him completely open up about how miserable his depression was starting to make him, and how he knew he couldn't seek professional help because his boss would have him fired for it. It was heartbreaking to read. Part of what made it so haunting for me was the fact that he didn't end up having the courage to actually send that email, and that's just a tiny detail that could easily be missed. Fastforward another few minutes and I came across this character's corpse. He had a note on him. It was a note to the woman he worked with, wherein he apologized for not being able to save her. The last line of that note was, "You didn't deserve to die. You were always nice to me." With just a few scattered notes, and without a single line of dialogue from this character, Arkane wove together a truly full human being and a story arc that I was invested in from beginning to end. Now, this kind of detail isn't present for every character as far as I can tell, but I also left a lot of Talos I unexplored, so it's possible that I'm wrong. The point is that the little stories you'll come across more than make up for the lack of plot.

Another way that Arkane makes up for the lack of plot is in their world building. Now, good world building isn't a new thing for Arkane. Despite how terrible the characters and writing have always been in Dishonored, the world has always been painstakingly created, so it's no surprise that the same is true of Prey (albeit with decent writing and stellar characters). Sure, the world does tend to take some cues from Bioshock with its arboretum section and superpowers being administered in a painful way, but it does stand well on its own. A nugget of wisdom from critic Yahtzee Croshaw on creepy space stations is that it should feel like somebody may have lived there at one point. Dead Space is an example of how to do it wrong, as the space station just felt like a creepy space station. Prey, in contrast, adheres to this bit of wisdom. Part of what makes the atmosphere so tense is how normal everything looks. There are crew quarters with personal artifacts still present on bedside tables, fitness centers with locker rooms located next door, long tables on parts of the station where character sheets from some variant of D&D are stacked, etc. Talos I feels like a place that was at one point inhabited by people, and it really helped me to believe in the world that Arkane created. Likewise, if you go to the exterior of Talos I, into outer space, you can get to literally any part of the game world by floating to the right airlock. This made it feel like the space station is actually all of these areas linked together in particular ways, not just separate game levels probably built in different windows of whatever software Arkane used.

You can stand around admiring the scenery and the world all you like, but in the end, you're going to have to face the Typhon. And with that flawless segway, we arrive at gameplay. How to even begin to talk about such a varied platter? Much like in Dishonored, you have the option to be stealthy or go in guns blazing. Unlike Dishonored, the gameplay is just as tense either way. This is an example of how to balance a game's difficulty well. Stealth is challenging, but not impossible, while open combat is manageable, but not easy by any stretch of the imagination (and I should know; I played on easy because I thought I was going to hate this game). Combat is made up of two moving parts: weapons and abilities. The game sports a pretty standard array of weapons such as wrenches, silenced pistols, and shotguns. However, there are also a few creative options, such as the GLOO gun (which can be used to incapacitate an enemy) and the flexifoam dart crossbow (which does no damage, but can be used to press buttons from across a room). When it comes to the abilities, I really can't say all that much. I never picked any of the superpowers (and you'll learn why as you progress), and the only combat ability I ever picked was one that slowed down time. That being said, the one ability I used helped me out of pinches more than a few times, so I'd say they're worth investing in.

New abilities, whether they're passive ones like boosts to health or combat ones like slowing down time, are unlocked with neuromods. Neuromods can be found in the world or crafted when you have the right skill and the blueprint. You start off with three skill trees: Scientist, Engineer, and Security. The scientist tree contains boosts to med kit effectiveness, boosts to your psi pool (which controls combat abilities), the skill you'll need to craft neuromods, and hacking (which you'll want to invest in heavily, trust me). The engineer tree helps you do more damage with wrenches, make modifications to weapons, lift heavy objects, get more out of recycling (more on that later), repair electronic devices, and increase the amount of items you can hold. The security tree helps you boost your health, do more damage with guns, slow down time, sneak more effectively, do more damage to surprised enemies, and run faster. There are three additional skill trees as the game progresses, but that ventures into spoiler territory. The key to getting through this game is to not keep all your eggs in one basket. You'll need to be able to survive combat, sure, but you're going to find yourself stuck if you aren't good at exploring and have no way to get out of an area. If you don't want to spend time trying to find a hidden way into a room, I would personally recommend putting a mild amount of points in combat-based skills and putting the majority of your neuromods into hacking and leverage. Thankfully, if you have zero abilities that help you open locked doors, thinking outside of the box often gets you where you need to go. For instance, I came to a point where I needed to get into a room with powered-down doors. At the time, I couldn't force it open, so I had to think. Eventually, I decided to try to use my GLOO gun to gradually climb my way up the wall. GLOO blobs can be climbed on, so I decided to leverage that in my favor. Eventually, I found myself at a catwalk leading to a maintenance shaft that led to the room. That catwalk couldn't have been accessed any other way. Another example would be when I needed to get into a second-floor office that I didn't have the right key card for. Those types of locks can't be hacked, so I was stuck. However, I had a hunch. I carefully made my way across a beam slightly below the office, created a platform for myself with the GLOO gun, climbed up, and hit the manual override button for the door by shooting a flexifoam dart through the office window. Even though I enjoyed just being able to hack through things, it's a testament to how well thought-out these levels are that outside-the-box thinking can be that rewarding. The only issue is that this game isn't idiot-proof. If you drop your GLOO gun or crossbow and don't have the right skills, you're basically screwed. That's a thought I had in the first outside-thinking example I gave. As I meticulously climbed up my man-made GLOO ladder, I thought to myself, "I would literally not be able to finish this game if I'd dropped this gun." Though it didn't affect me, that's kind of a problem. To prevent this, either don't drop your GLOO gun or your crossbow, or get the right skill and the blueprint to craft neuromods. It'll be a collect-a-thon grind fest to make it work, but it's actually kind of endearing.

Crafting is a non-negotiable part of Prey, and to some, that might be a turn-off. For me, however, I actually enjoyed it. Ammo is scarce, so 9 times out of 10, you'll need to turn to crafting to have enough to survive, and the same goes for medkits. Unlike in most other games, every little thing you pick up can be used for a greater purpose. Pick up a banana peel, and you can use it to gain organic material and possibly craft a medkit. Pick up a useless burnt circuit board, and you can use it to gain mineral material to possibly get the pistol ammo you need to make it to the next checkpoint. It's a junk and crafting system that is consistently rewarding and makes you feel like a true survivor. There are two sides to crafting: recycling and fabrication. With recycling, you can take literally any item you pick up and turn it into raw materials. In fabrication, you take these raw materials, select a blueprint, and the item will be crafted. There are four material types: organic, mineral, synthetic, and exotic. Ammo is crafted from mainly mineral material, and that is the one type of material that is harder to come by, so you'll find yourself keeping an eye on everything you come across to see if it'll yield mineral material in the recycler. Organic material tends to be used for things like health kits. Exotic material is used exclusively for crafting neuromods, so you'll want to loot every Typhon you kill. Synthetic material...honestly, I don't know. I can't say that I ever crafted anything that drew too heavily from my synthetic material deposits. Either way, I sometimes spent whole evenings of gameplay looting everything in sight and building up my reserves of every material type, then crafting tons of ammo, neuromods, and medkits. The thing about it, though, is even if you do that, the game is balanced in such a way that you will, before too long, have to go back to crafting. From what I hear, there are a few infinite resource glitches, but in the vanilla gameplay, you cannot break the game or remove the challenge by grinding no matter how hard you try. It's a testament to the game's balance that I can leave a room with ammo galore, but still have to play the game on its terms.

One aspect of the gameplay that I haven't yet touched on because the topics just sort of segwayed together naturally (and it would have been awkward to just throw it in) is the enemies. They're still uninspired. That's one aspect of the game that Arkane didn't (and really, couldn't) fix since the demo. Every enemy is an amorphous purple and black blob of some kind, with the exception of the telepath (which looks like a Half Life 2 building), the mimic, and the weaver (which is an amorphous red and yellow blob). There's quite a variety of enemies, but it's just that they're not very interesting. Thankfully, one aspect of the game that has been improved since the demo is the mimics. Prey is significantly more conservative with the mimics than it was in the demo. Mimics can turn into anything, and they hide in the world by disguising themselves as coffee cups of chairs, so you have to constantly be on the lookout for things that don't seem like they belong. The problem in the demo was that far too often, my hunch that an item was a mimic turned out to be right. In the full game, there'll be large stretches of time where you don't see a mimic, so you'll get lazy with your investigating. Then, once you've let your guard down, you'll get scared by a mimic, and the cycle will continue. It ensures that there's a consistent fear of being jumpscared by a bar of soap or something. There is one other enemy worth noting, and that is "The Nightmare." The nightmare is an absolutely enormous purple and black blob (nice, Arkane) who will appear at random. Once it appears, you have to either kill it or evade it for a two minute time period. It's supposed to add to that consistent tension, but I found it to just be a nuisance. It isn't a difficult enemy to kill, but it does require quite a bit of ammo to put down, and if you don't want to fight it, that's two minutes of your gameplay that you have to spend staying in one hiding place or just running like a mad man. If you kill it, it just comes back at some other point, so there really isn't a point to wasting your ammo. However, there are times when you just won't be able to run or hide, so it's just a nuisance.

As a technical package, Prey is decent, but flawed (it's published by Bethesda, what do you expect?). For most of the game, the framerate was solid, but towards the end when things start to get more chaotic, it takes a major nose dive. The framerate at that point gets to be pretty darned bad. What's more, I did experience one hard crash during my playthrough, and it wasn't where the framerate was falling either. In addition, there are a few bugs. One that I experienced was an enemy falling through the floor and knowing where I was, but not being able to attack me. So, the battle music just kept on playing for the rest of the time I was in that room. That was just a minor annoyance, but there are still bugs present here. Despite all that, the game itself is gorgeous. The world is rendered with a varied color palette, and the visuals are just unique enough to make it look otherworldly. Character models have the classic Arkane studios semi-watercolor look to them, though they're better here than they are in Dishonored. All of this is set to a soundtrack from composer Mick Gordon, who received critical acclaim for his part-techno, part-metal soundtrack for The Right Trigger's Game of the Year 2016: Doom. Gordon's soundtrack for Prey is varied, with some tracks being heartachingly beautiful and others being haunting. More importantly, his score fits this world, and it's always used well, without exception. It isn't a soundtrack I would go and listen to for fun, but it's one of the better utilized soundtracks of this year.

Dear readers, I sincerely hope I've effectively communicated to you why I enjoyed Prey, and I hope that you've been able to make a decision about buying it based off of what you read here today. For me, it goes beyond just the surprise of it not sucking. It's how much it did right in addition to how much it improved over the demo. It's a game that wears its influences on its sleeve, but the shirt that these sleeves belong to makes a fashion statement of its very own. This game isn't for everybody. If you can't stand fetch quests, even if there are interesting tidbit during these quests, Prey isn't for you. If you can't stand crafting, Prey isn't for you. If you don't like having to really think outside the box, Prey isn't for you. However, if you're willing to deal with fetch quests, if you think that a well-done crafting system adds value to a game, if you view out-of-the-box thinking as a welcome challenge to be overcome, I would suggest you put some money down for Prey.

Let us review:

Too many fetch quests - 0.5
Uninspiring enemies - 0.3
Technical hiccups - 0.5

The final score for Prey is...

8.7/10 - Quite Good
Excellent work, Arkane Studios, excellent work