Free to Prey

I find a secret route into an area that was locked down. Unusually, this feels exhilarating as I’m still not familiar with the game’s signposts. There’s a genuine sense of discovery. Can this last? Perhaps I am just enjoying a longer than usual honeymoon period, where the lack of education about the game’s design imbues it with mystery and surprise?

Of course, I consider backtracking. I’m not exactly running with a powerful character and perhaps this is not the route I’m supposed to take. There’s an office ahead; I want to at least see where this leads. Ah, a few corrupted operators. Annoying but not difficult to dispatch.

I’m inside a small maintenance crawlspace and the only other exit to the office is blocked with boxes. Corrupted operators continue to stream through the open windows, so I refuse to enter the office until it’s safe. God, how many more of these? Suddenly

WHOMP

all the boxes jolt forward as if something is trying to get in. I assume it’s just another operator. And again,

WHOMP

Boxes go flying and– what… what the hell is that trying to get in? It’s as big as the door! I put up a good fight but The Thing From Beyond the Door kills me. Reload, it kills me again. I reload again. And again and again.

Just as I’m on the verge of throwing in the towel, I spy a window on the opposite side of the office. I sprint across and throw myself through it – and fall a few metres to the floor below.

I hold, staring up at the window with the gloo gun in hand. I wait.

Moments pass and it seems I am safe for now. But where has this one-way trip taken me? There’s only one thing to do: keep quicksaving and carry on.

This is Prey (Arkane Studios, 2017). Backtracking is for wimps.

*   *   *

I’m one of the precious few who enjoyed the original Prey (Human Head Studios, 2006) a first-person shooter that had been in development for, incredibly, almost a decade. Looking back, it was my Dead Space (Visceral Games, 2008) before Dead Space: a shooter invested in a wider palette of interactions – Dead Space had its zero-g sections, ‘strategic dismemberment’ and asteroid shooting, Prey had its spirit walks, portals and topsy-turvy magnetic walkways. It was nonsense but my kind of nonsense although Dead Space had the superior execution.

While I wasn’t really looking for a Prey sequel I did see Prey 2 in action at the Eurogamer Expo, although I’ve always assumed we were watching a video and not live gameplay. Nonetheless, I’m sad this promising ‘bounty hunter in an alien city’ game never made it to reality and I’m not the only one.

I was surprised to find Bethesda had used the name to spit out another apparently generic space shooter unrelated to anything we might know by the name Prey. Oh, you’ve got powers and inventory and stuff, and missions to follow, space station fallen to alien enemy, blah blah blah I think I’ve heard this all before.

Except this new Prey turned out to be great for an explorer-player like myself.

*   *   *

I have an optional objective to look for someone’s body in the Trauma Center. I don’t actually know why but, whatever, right? Game’s gotta game. I find the Trauma Center quicker than I expected, it’s right here in the Talos I Lobby. Well, let’s tick this objective off, make a little progress.

I creep into the Trauma Center and review the stock environmental narrative scene: place in chaos, dead body on floor, lah di dah. But I can hear something from within the Centre, something… talking to itself.

It’s a guy looking like a reject from the Venom auditions, wispy black smoke and a menacing walk. I lose the fight a couple of times but with a turret I eventually take him down. Great, so—

Hang on, kitten. There’s another one of these guys in here. I’m pretty confident I can take this one down too. Better pace myself, this one can conjure jets of fire from the floor, specifically the floor beneath my feet. And this Venom reject is a lot stronger than the first one, I’m barely making a scratch. Thus: I prepare to die. A lot.

You know, Prey, I sure do remember those damn skeletons near Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls. I know what’s going on here, you’re telling me I am not yet ready for this. If you value your lives, be somewhere else.

After countless deaths, I leave the Trauma Center and lock the door, sealing inside the firestarter, twisted firestarter. But I walk out with my head held high because I know: I’ll be back.

*   *   *

Prey is plastered with the affordances of an “action role-playing game” or what you might call a shooter with extra bits. While Dead Space might have started off as System Shock 3, Prey ended up far closer to System Shock 2 than Dead Space ever did.

But it has a crucial quirk that elevates it above your average shooter with bits, something that can’t easily be pointed at like a health bar or a teleport power.

Prey level design is initially like a tunnel bored through rock. The light at the end of the tunnel is your nav marker. The nav marker is your friend. Trust the nav marker. However, once you reach the station lobby, you’ve actually graduated from Prey academy and Prey says all these worlds are yours (except Europa). Go where you want. The objective markers are still there, but they don’t own you. Because you’re conditioned to follow the pied piper’s nav markers, players may not notice this immediately.

The lobby area feels spacious and open, riddled with lots of minigoals. The teleconferencing centre. HR. The staff lounge. The trauma center. Hardened explorers will likely hang back from following nav markers until they’ve cleared the area out, but doing this with meticulous attention takes time. Further, we have a metroidvania aspect as not every area is accessible right now, with one particular part of the lobby inaccessible until late in the game. The icing on the cake is a honeymoon hours quirk where you might not even recognise an ingress because it just looks like background scenery.

Now Prey is partitioned into levels which are connected via loading screens and, eventually, the player will reach the point where they have to leave the lobby and embark on a new level. Instead of following a nav marker, my explorer instinct kicked in. Why don’t I peek in, erm, the Hardware Labs instead? Except I peeked and peeked and peeked. There was nothing to stop me exploring, nothing telling me to turn back.

Prey prefers to lock doors if it’s too dangerous to go somewhere and, in the main, eschews the Dark Souls model of using giant beasties to gate areas. Which means if a door is open, it’s an invitation.

*   *   *

A locked door in a videogame is a taunt that operates on two levels.

First there’s the obvious challenge to the player to find a way through. Doorway blocked with heavy freight? Hmm, there are a few options. Need a code to unlock it? If you don’t know the the code, perhaps you can hack it. But many doors are not immediately “solveable” in the same way. For example, a door might need a keycard and that keycard may not be nearby. It may not even be on the same level.

That’s the second part of the taunt. The metroidvania memory game, to remember all those locked doors you still haven’t defeated. I found a locked maintenance panel early in the game and it drove me crazy knowing it remained unbeaten. Level after level fell before me but this locked panel scoffed at my progress. Hey, sweetie, I’m still locked, you don’t know what’s behind me.

Prey loves its locked doors. It knows you’ll be coming back so, behind your back, will sprinkle new, stronger enemies into areas you had previously cleared. Be seeing you.

*   *   *

Prey isn’t an open world game and surely you wouldn’t confuse it for one. But when you go outside the station, it feels, just for a moment, like all bets are off.

When I traversed my first airlock, I was reminded of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy entry on space:

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Frankly I was overwhelmed and did only what I was asked to, then hurried back inside the airlock. Of course, it never is as open as you think: airlocks across the station can only be unlocked from the inside. The Talos I exterior is effectively a faster way to move to other levels if, and that’s kind of a big space-sized if, you know where you’re going.

Seeing the station as a single entity from outside helps reinforce the perception of its interior as a single space, rather than the amalgamation of different levels. It never quite convinces, though. Loading screens are cruel reminders of Prey‘s partitioned structure, particularly with their all-too-evident constraints – just try carrying a turret from one section to another.

On subsequent spacewalks, I was more game for exploring and even though the station has plenty of recognisable bits, it was easy to get lost. Unlike corridors and rooms that have discernable connections and signs every ten paces, space doesn’t really have that. I never understood the exterior and could not claim to have found everything out there.

Space is big.

*   *   *

Sadly and somewhat inevitably, Prey narrows as you approach the end. Certain sections are strongly gated, such as Deep Storage which forces you to run around looking for parts of a “key”, so the story climax can be deployed in an orderly manner. The middle of the game, where I made my own way through the station, was over. There were few unexplored places left and a prescribed sequence to follow. Welcome back to the tunnel.

In a shooter with bits, players crave consequences. They want decisions, they want choices, they want feedback for their choices, they want big picture moments, they want the spectacle of grand player agency. If their actions are unimportant to the story, then the only decisions that seem to matter are operational in nature, like how skillful a packrat they’ve been, the best hoarder in all of space.

I never found Prey gripping and have no interest in discussing its story. But it still put me through a series of interesting decisions and consequences I always chose to live with. Between the intro and the coda, Prey gave me a symphony of choice superior to any narrative decision tree. I explored the game out of sequence and experienced wonderful confusion throughout this journey.

I also know there are many secrets inside Talos I that remain undiscovered and I don’t care to find them all. Prey is not a game for a completionist, although you can find a stats page if you really want to ruin your enjoyment of the game.

Prey is not just a shooter with bits. It is crawlways. It is airlocks. It is corridors. It is space.

Above all, it is space.

The Alternative Take

Jess Joho thinks it’s all bullshit. There’s a subtle difference between our motivations though – she cares more about mechanics and powers and doing stuff. I was on Talos I for the tourism.