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Prey (2017)


spatular
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Because I had no time to play anything while working 8 days straight and I just want a relaxing multi-game experience till I get my head back into it. You have to be in the right frame of mind, and that's not me right now.

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I only unlocked the vanilla skills because I ain't getting rid of my humanity like some xenos scum. Most of the abilities in that tree are utilities that you will get some use out of like lugging heavy shit and upgrading wrench damage but the slow mo will make combat a lot easier so I would definitely go for that. 

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  • 2 years later...

Fired this up on the Series X courtesy of Game Pass. I tried this on the base PS4 on a 1080p TV and it seemed to struggle, so seeing it in it's 4K HDR glory at 60fps is a sight to behold. Looking forward to getting stuck into this properly now Last of Us 2 is finished.

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Played a good chunk of this yesterday and i'm now about three to four hours in. Really not sure how this passed me by first time around as it's pretty much my dream game. Talos, the space station is a joy to explore with multiple paths/solutions to most situations. The art style is bang on - sci-fi art deco? Hell yes. It's pretty much the sequel to Bioshock that should have been.

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  • 1 year later...

It's weird, cause it being called 'Prey' made it pretty easy for me to dodge, as someone who found that 2006 game utterly underwhelming and saw none of the cool Bladerunner stuff in this game that was promised in the 'original' Prey 2.

 

I have this game on my 'backlog' list somewhere. Thinking after Gothic II it will either be this or Arx Fatalis (both Arkane games). I heard this is great but found it hard to get into last time I tried it, the mimics were really annoying (I played an hour or two, I count this as my game impression!!)

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19 minutes ago, one-armed dwarf said:

It's weird, cause it being called 'Prey' made it pretty easy for me to dodge, as someone who found that 2006 game utterly underwhelming and saw none of the cool Bladerunner stuff in this game that was promised in the 'original' Prey 2.

 

I have this game on my 'backlog' list somewhere. Thinking after Gothic II it will either be this or Arx Fatalis (both Arkane games). I heard this is great but found it hard to get into last time I tried it, the mimics were really annoying (I played an hour or two, I count this as my game impression!!)

 

Huge shame, as it's honestly one of the most inventive and underrated titles of the previous generation. Absolutely nothing like Prey 2006 and from a completely different studio, so not quite sure why that put you off alone to be honest.

 

I really don't get why they stuck with the Prey name though, the only thing it had it common was that they're both set in space.

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It put me off cause it is an IP I had no interest in. I was also put off by how it reviewed, but I don't think immersive sims/more 'hardcore' kinda RPGs are received particularly well in mainstream journo circles anyway and often are the kinds of games that will peek through the cracks years later as some overlooked kinda thing. Which rn I'm on a kick of 'lets play all the cult RPG/RPG-adjacent classics that people dont stfu about' and Prey is on that list as one of the more modern ones. Frankly I don't think a lot of mainstream journo circles are good at articulating what's good about games like these and tend to massively overrate unremarkable shite like Bioshock as exemplary versions of the genre.

 

It's more like, I had other things competing for my interest back then. Also I just played way less new games in 17 as I had more of a social life back then as well lmao (which also meant way less money to spend on games, so I just played xiv) 

 

tho tbh I am more interested in the idea of drawing spells on the screen with a mouse than whacking spidery bois so lets see. Anyway like I said, played the intro way back when and found it interesting but found the initial stages of the main game a bit annoying for whatever reason. Anyway leaving thread alone unless I actually pick it up again as there's blog posts on the first page full of spoilers lol

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Yeah that's fair enough, it was probably the opposite for me purely because I trusted Arkane so much after Dishonored 2 that I would turn up for whatever else they put out in the future. The gameplay videos and stuff prior to launch made the game look super interesting, to me anyway, which is why I was excited for it back in the day. Reviews were great at 81% but nowhere near as high I think they should've been but obviously that's subjective. 

 

I don't think you're alone in people being put off by the IP alone though, I also think the pre-launch marketing (along with a lot of Arkane's other games) never really explain what the game 'is' very well which is probably another reason it's considered a cult classic and wasn't the blockbuster smash hit I believe it should've been.

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  • 4 months later...

Now I will bump with actual impressions, from about 4-5 hours. I finally beat Deus Ex 1 the other week after nearly a decade of aborted playthroughs (incredible game) and moved onto this next cause of some image graphic I saw that put this and Mankind Divided as the two 'must play' modern imursims. 

 

It's very Bioshock, and the Bioshock take on immersive sim isn't as much my thing as the more hub based Deus Ex, because DE has way more NPC interactions while these System Shock-ey style games everyone is dead, zombie/sploicer or an audio log, and there's so much loot. This game also really likes jump scares, which is great when you're playing on mouse and keyboard and your vision flies all over the place cause your mouse hand jumped.

 

I'm playing on nightmare with a bunch of survival modifiers, reason being is games like this are more interesting I think on higher difficulties cause each upgrade and environmental interaction matters way more. So I was out spacewalking and flew way too fast into a wall when I got a fright from a mimic out in the vaccuum of space, and fractured my legs (so when I sprint it makes a nice crunching sound), these kinds of details are cool to me. 

 

That said the game just sort of throws resources at you to the point that the difficulty seems to really be only in the moment, that might be one of those things where later on it stops pulling its punches and gets more savage, I don't know. But the parts I like is where it gives you opportunities to feel clever, like using the foam gun to create platforms to access higher out of reach areas, and flinging gas canisters at enemies and damaging enemies with environmental hazards. The combat doesn't really need to be good in games like this so long as there's a broadness in the tools you can use imo, it's more about brains than skill (which is why I bought the upgrade to stop time so I can spend more time thinking, I'm not good at twitch reflexes on keyboard)

 

I will say tho that immediately playing this after Deus Ex will mean I can't help constantly drawing comparisons with that, and how organic the decisions and their impact feel in that compared to this. But on the other hand this looks better and plays smoother.

 

On PC, I had to enable vsync from the nvidia control panel and limit the fps to 145. Until I did that it had this constant annoying stutter on mouse movement on PC. Figure I would just mention that if it helped anyone else who wanted to play this.

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I'm not sure how far I'm in, but I guess I've made a substantial dent in the game. Hard to say, it sort of has me wandering almost aimlessly through the station cause so much of it is optional. What it reminds me of is Outer Wilds, in its freeform nature of discovery but also the breadcrumbs of ambient and textual storytelling scattered throughout. You can read some HR email, find out about a rivalry between two station workers over theft of intellectual property, find their office, find out what happened, find the body of one of the dudes in the anti-gravity tunnel between all the different station compartments. You can look up on a terminal where each station member is and if they are alive, dead, or 'unknown'.

 

There's things I like and stuff I don't. I think it is probably the best modern version of this type of game I've played, much better than Bioshock. The sense of possibility in skill tree and environment interactions feels pretty wide and open. I turned myself into a cup and went through a broken window to unlock an office from the inside. I built a popcorn tunnel with the gloo gun up into my brother's office because I didn't want to level hacking, I enjoy that kind of lateral thinking the game rewards, jank as it is. I spend a long time turning myself into an EMP grenade and rolling into a little cubby hole to interfere with some possessed operators (this didn't actually work unfortunately, but I think cause the hole was too small). I fully upgraded leverage and got a telekinesis spell, so now I just have the gravity gun from HL2 and can manipulate chests from 10 metres away, kinda like Morrowind telekinesis. I'm going to stick with the weirder skills like this I think and see what other interactions I can find. At this point I identify as an alien to the turrets so what upgrades I get will probably have to account for this too

 

The thing I don't like is the way the economy works, you can fabricate near everything including 'neuromods', which are your skill points. Enemies will always respawn when you leave rooms rather than on some sort of story progress trigger, and I think both of these decisions dilute the experience somewhat. I think games like this need to make you make hard decisions about what you invest in rather than let you just grind enemies. At some point I'll probably stop making neuromods and impose a bit of an artificial limit on my development but we'll see I guess.

 

Mostly tho I think it lives up to the things I've heard about it, which is rare in a game. It's a very intricately crafted location which makes you feel present cause of all the attention to detail, like the story breadcrumbs I mention but even things like being able to fly outside the station and access the different compartments from the outside (unfortunately you have to unlock the door from the inside first). It's very non-linear and open in its design in the way lots of modern games don't really try to do, other than BOTW and a few other exceptions maybe. The thing I like most of it, you can play the whole thing with waypoint indicators off and it's extremely clear that they designed the game world around this. Games aren't always good at having worlds with clear signposting and landmarks to guide you, but you can find everything in this by reading maps and signs, and developing the mental layout over time (I do use the in-game map to at least learn where places like 'psycotronics' are in relation to 'arboretum' and so on)

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  • 3 months later...

Beat this now, after taking a multi month break from it. I had to take that break cause well, it's fucking long. Or for me it was anyway, granted it was on the highest difficulty and I basically studied every room like a combat puzzle, which isn't something that's very sustainable. Especially in a game as respawn happy as this is. Still, it's a seriously good game, in a sort of understated way. It's derivative but also a game that flexes its muscle in every category. The intertwined character narratives which piece together a backstory for the station, and the station itself make it one of the more impressively realised 'spaces' in a video game. Even just like the amount of attention put into things like what everyone's living arrangements are, the number of amenities. Even the number of fecking toilets. Every email sent has a recipient, who has connected stories with other members. It's hard to keep track of tbh, but it's very Outer Wilds.

 

?imw=1024&imh=575&ima=fit&impolicy=Lette

 

Lots of people say the combat in this game is bad but I really disagree, unless it's just people talking about the act of aiming and shooting a gun (and doing it on a controller, maybe). The level design and powers have lots of cool interactions and opportunities to take advantage of. Like this bit where I realised I could lock a nightmare in a room using remote manipulation and kill it through a skylight. Or where I get some robot and turret friends to help handle some operators. There's also neat details like how fall damage effects enemies, and how nullwave/psychshock will cause flying enemies to retreat up higher and lose their shielding against the GLOO gun, which makes them fall like a rock. Lots of brainy ways to use the levels, enemy behaviours and weapons/skills to your advantage.

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

That said it's a bit overly combat heavy I'd say and the game could maybe do a better job of giving the player a break from all the psychic clobbering. There's none of that social stealth stuff, no interesting NPC interactions. Story triggers respawn new enemies all over the station and do it very frequently, you don't need to do many missions to trigger a station wide changing of the guard. I cleared away a bunch of operators late in the game and felt pretty good about it, but returned to the shuttle bay and it was full of fire phantoms and a nightmare. It impacts the pace negatively, and would be my one major complaint with it. There should be imo ways of handling threats that aren't always based around combat interactions, but that is more of a Deus Ex thing I guess (and why that game remains better than this one, even though this is still great). Also story reactivity seems to boil down to what sidequests you do

 

I will try Mooncrash, tho it seems repetitive. At some point I'll try and replay this maybe with just the human powers, but turning yourself into a pomegranate and rolling down a corridor to possess operators is too much fun I think. How could you play this game any other way? I don't see how you could find the fun with just human abilities, but maybe if you're really into stealth, hacking and run n gun it could be interesting

 

To a post mfnick made in the redfall thread, I think an 80 metacritic seems a bit low (considering the score inflation with video games), but imo games like this aren't super conducive to a review environment where they have to rush through things and don't really have the liberty to explore the extent of the game systems. You kinda have to meet the game halfway a bit and be ok with going through it slowly, in my view. 

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3 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

 

Lots of people say the combat in this game is bad but I really disagree, unless it's just people talking about the act of aiming and shooting a gun (and doing it on a controller, maybe).

 

yes a controller is bad, or at least was on launch, maybe it's been patched up now. still really like the game despite that. i didn't use the alien abilities that much, maybe that's a good reason to play it again at some point.

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Made a start at Mooncrash

 

I usually don't like rogue like stuff but I find this one interesting so far. The premise is you have 5 characters who need to escape from a base on the moon. There is a timer, but the timer is more about spawning in more difficult foes than it is about making things difficult to complete on time. If one character uses a certain means of escape it is not available to others. eg, only one character can use the shuttle to escape, another uses an escape pod, another uses Soulkiller from Cyberpunk lol. The state of the world persists across runs, so if one character rummages every drawer for every resource in the crew annex early on it will make things more difficult for others. If a character dies they can be revived as a dangerous phantom, but you can also prevent this with certain equipment (and loot their corpse, whether they are phantom or not). So there's a layered approach required, and careful planning ahead.

 

The 5 characters have different strengths/weaknesses. An engineer who excels in wrench combat, a scientist who scans enemies and can sneak around, as well as raise the dead and turn them into personal minions. A sort of psi-mage who can burrow underground and 'immersive sim' the shit out of things and a more bread and butter slow-motion shotgun specialist are the 4 I've unlocked, I assume the 5th is a hacker. Speaking of to set up certain escape routes you need to mix and match the characters' skill set. The engineer can repair a door and a hacker can setup something else to create one route for instance. 

 

It's cool I think as the character classes force a more broad knowledge of the ways you can play Prey, rather than playing the strict version of Morgan you do in the main game (any character you level yourself will eventually funnel into a pretty limited playstyle, I find). It's interesting going from a character who has the ability to fling heavy objects at stuff to one who does not. Means you need to not only know how to gravity gun things to death, but also how to throw a light canister up at the air and aim a gun at it to shoot everything at once. You've got to know how to play both the strengths and weaknesses and adapt. If an engineer can hack a few turrets it can also help out some of the weaker characters in their runs. The DLC also has randomised environment hazards that force different strats (or can be leverage against enemies, perhaps). Sometimes you need to go out of your way to bring a spare battery to fix the tram that connects the 3 main areas, so there's a sort of PSX Resident Evil 2 style 'zapping system' aspect to how you try to leave the moon base in a good enough state for the next character to come through on.

 

It kind of assumes advanced enough knowledge of the game's systems, so it's not something that you should probably bother with without playing the main game first. It also has some story stuff that connects into that, but it's fairly lightweight. A time sensitive roguelike game isn't something which is a good fit for poring over emails.

 

Will try to get the 5 escapees on a single run before ToTK comes out.

 

Here's a video explaining what it's about, probably better than I can manage

 

 

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Done

 

mooncrash.png

 

Pretty cool DLC, but also very overrated by Skill Up I think. The biggest takeaway I got from it is that save scumming is the Achilles heel of immersive sims, as it takes away the very cool ways you can adapt to unexpected situations. It's better to just roll with the punches, and figure out other ways, which is what you have to do in this thing cause it's run based. But at the same time, it's not particularly difficult to trivialise the things that get thrown at you. You get around a lot of stuff once you learn how effective EMPs are, honestly once you do that it seems you've beat the DLC. 

 

Nowhere near as good as the main campaign, though oddly everyone on the internet suggests its way better. It's not, but it shows you different ways to play Prey and that still makes it a very cool companion campaign to the main game and one of the coolest DLC I've seen in general. Just not as good as people make it out to be though. As a roguelike its possibility space is quite small and linear. 

 

There's a few small quests I still have to do, but I've had my fill with it.

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