Prey - Opinions

There are few games with an opening act as strong as Prey's. The first few hours are a tense, frightening experience (especially on hard mode) simply packed with environmental storytelling that only further instills a sense of isolation to complement the overwhelming dread. As you start to encounter the main enemies of the game, the Mimics, in rapidly increasing numbers, the environment itself begins to emanate a sense of hostility, as any innocuous object could potentially be an enemy in disguise. When vitality is low, Prey demands caution from the player, and even instills some genuine fear at times, but all of that changes once you pick up the shotgun.

Upon gaining access to your first powerful firearm, combat immediately becomes much less frightening and far more intense, for better and worse. On the plus side, the gunplay is very smooth and remains enjoyable for a very long time, but on the downside, it heavily overshadows all the other options available to the player, and even worse, this almost never changes unless you intentionally limit how you play the game. The only time that sense of fear managed to creep back into the gameplay for me was the first few times I entered the GUTS, where I encountered new, deadly enemies in a situation where I could no longer jump around and dodge as freely as I could under normal gravity.

Now, it's very clear that Prey is influenced by BioShock, which is a game I dearly love, but I was disappointed to see how just a few changes to the BioShock system make Prey a much less standout experience. Firstly, although Prey has smoother combat than BioShock, that alone cannot prop up the whole system. There is a significant lack of enemies equivalent to BioShock's Big Daddy in Prey, and it shows throughout the whole game. The Big Daddy is iconic to BioShock for not only their purpose in the story, but also their role in the core gameplay. In Prey, the closest analogue story-wise would probably be the Mimic, but they serve an entirely purpose from a purely mechanical perspective. The Big Daddy fulfills the very important role of guarding a specific resource in BioShock, and demands the player sacrifice something in order to obtain it. Even if you know what you're doing, defeating a Big Daddy is a significant investment at best, and suicide at worst. You may win the battle, but you'll often be left drained of ammunition afterwards, forcing you to scavenge for more. In Prey, there is no similar incentive to encourage spending ammo, since you can almost always just run away or craft more. Doing well in Prey means you save a few bullets, while doing well in BioShock means you get to keep living, and the tension created by that greater risk is an important part of what keeps BioShock's atmosphere suspenseful until the very end.

There is one other element important to supporting BioShock's atmosphere however, which is the audio diary. I'd personally argue that the audio diaries are the most important aspect of BioShock: they fill an acoustic void while you creep around; they're spread out enough such that they almost never overlap, and they communicate dense information in the most conducive way possible in a video game. In Prey, these tenets aren't upheld nearly as well: I noticed far more dead silence overall when walking around the space station vs. the halls of Rapture; there were commonly three or more audio diaries in the same location when I did come across them; and for some reason, there's a significant reliance on reading text over listening to audio logs even though I think that's the single least interesting thing you can force a player to do in a video game. That last failing point is the most egregious to me, because there was almost no text in BioShock that wasn't scrawled on the wall, and it helped massively to keep you locked into the setting. In Prey, not only is it common to scroll through emails on a virtual computer terminal, you also find duplicate emails, junk mail, and general inane chatter between residents. Sure, you can consider all of it as "worldbuilding", but it's lazy worldbuilding, and that's coming from someone who reads the wikis for various things for fun.

I felt basically no attachment to any of the side characters in Prey because all the interesting bits were hidden in text messages. As pensive and thought-provoking as Prey wants to be, reading text is never going to be more fun than sneaking around and shooting enemies, and it certainly shouldn't be used as a primary reward for exploration. I would have loved more pre-plot dialogue between characters on the ship, but as it is, they were mostly faceless aside from a few solid ideas like the tabletop RPG character sheets and the concert.

If I ignore the atmosphere and comparisons to BioShock, then Prey starts to look a lot more enticing. It's got some good level design, a nice crafting system, incredible environment interaction options (the GLOO gun and recycler charges are awesome), and a solid plot. It's still hard to ignore the bar Prey sets for itself in the first few hours though by how well it handles the early stealth-survival aspects. For me to fall in love with this game, I think I would have to appreciate the creativity available in the gameplay a lot more on its own. However, I think I'll almost always prefer a game to railroad me towards a single interesting idea than offer me a couple shallow ones.