I always felt like Prey flew under the radar. All the comments I read about Prey close to it’s May 2017 release spoke highly of the game. Then, within weeks it seemed, Prey vanished. No one was talking about it anymore and I forgot about it. I’d see a comment here or there — all positive from what I can remember — that’d give me pause and remind me, oh yeah, I need to check that out, before I forgot about the game yet again.
Eventually, I stopped procrastinating checking out Prey and I scooped it up during a recent Steam sale. I was immediately shocked by how similar Prey is to Bioshock — an ironic twist because Bioshock was developed/published by 2K, the publisher of the original Prey. Small world.
To be clear, Prey has nothing to do with the original 2006 game, also called Prey. The 2006 game was developed by Human Head Studios, then Bethesda bought the rights for the sequel — which never happened. Instead, Prey was rebooted into the game it released as in 2017.
It’s hard to talk about what happens in Prey without ruining some early-game surprises that I enjoyed experiencing. So, to keep the review spoiler-free I’m going to bypass talking too much about what is actually going on in the game. If this review feels overly compartmentalized, that’s why.
What I will say about the story is that it is delivered in a way that was strangely similar to Bioshock’s method of narrative dictation. As players travel through Prey, they’ll find audio records that the various characters have left around that provide a window of insight into what was happening in the days and weeks that led up to you going through their personal belongs for some reason, *points to the spoiler-free reminder.*
This type of narrative style, I know, isn’t for everyone. Prey doesn’t make it easy for players to digest that narrative either. Often, the game’s soundtrack, narrative exposition and the sounds of me shooting monsters overlapped into a messy cacophony that had me grinding my teeth in annoyance. There were even climactic moments that were interrupted by overlapping conversations, so I had two important characters telling me equally important messages. I’d have to pause the game and read the objective text in the objectives menu to fully understand what just happened.
Making sure you’re always aware of what just happened is very important in Prey. Your choices matter and they matter in a way that’s not simply black-and-white/good-guy or bad-guy decisions. For example, the game allowed me to approach a sensitive situation and instead of taking the time to make sure I was doing it right, I used my best judgment and a character ended up dead. Whoops. Had I taken a minute or two and ensure I was following the process correctly, that character would have been around during later parts in the game.
That’s one aspect of Prey that I really enjoyed. The non-playable characters (NPCs) feel like they really matter. They’re not just objects for me to shoot or vessels for narrative delivery…they all each had a purpose for being there. I genuinely felt bad when I failed the character who ended up dead, and as the body count rose later in the game, I felt bad all those times too.
Prey encourages players to take a moment between the volatile combat events to look around the environment. Doing so isn’t required, so people who just want to shoot more monsters are free to do so. However, I felt like I really benefited from exploring the areas and picking up on the little tidbits that the developers included to personalize the different groups of characters. For example, finding half-written apologies written on paper scraps crumpled and tossed into a trash can, only to find out that the final love-letter apology never made it to the recipient because of [redacted] really provided gravity to some of the decisions I would make throughout the game. That little discovery brought to life two lifeless corpses that I otherwise would have run by without thinking twice about.
As I mentioned, the combat in Prey is volatile at best. The game is populated by enemies who are capable of shape-shifting into any environmental object and then leaping out at you when you get too close. I’ve had office chairs, clipboards, buckets and guns all come to life as mimics. Those critters kept me on my toes throughout the entire game.
The other enemies are equally frustrating to deal with. As I’m sure you’ve picked up from the screenshots and trailers, the enemies are swirling masses of dark, tendril-like clouds. Shooting a cloud isn’t fun. It’s strange that the game also picks up on that realization by giving players weapons specifically to deal with the wispy enemies. A foam (Gloo) gun can be used to spray and solidify enemies making them easier to shoot, while an energy beam (Q-beam) weapon can destabilize the enemies’ phantom forms enough to eventually cause them to burst.
In a sci-fi game, I expect the enemies to be interesting or exciting. The enemies in Prey are neither of those. There’s the enemy type that can turn into anything; there’s the one that is invisible; there’s the one that shoots fire; there’s the one that shoots electricity; there’s the one that’s just really big and really loud….you get the idea. Yeah, those attributes apply to many enemies in video games, but the problem with the enemies in Prey was that I found myself either looking at a swirling-mass-of-what-the-heck-am-I-looking-at, or a floating lunchbox-looking killer robot. That’s it.
The enemies in Prey re-populate the environments, even after you clear through an area. While the reasons for the repopulation makes sense given the context, it was still annoying to have to deal with clearing out the same rooms multiple times as I backtracked through the game to complete different objectives. Considering some of the higher difficulty levels introduce weapon wear-and-tear, having to constantly clear out enemies and deal with weapons breaking down would have made the process even more tedious.
Prey provides players with a weak stealth mechanic option that can, supposedly, allow players to avoid encounters. But in my experience, sneaking by most enemies was near-impossible due to their cognizance. As the game progressed and I tired of dealing with enemies, it was simpler to just gloo ’em and shoot ’em — or just sprint right by them —than it was to crouch-walk the long way around to an objective while hoping the cloud of smoke in the room was the one-in-one-hundred that didn’t have Jedi-like senses.
Prey is a polarizing game for me. There were aspects of the game that I really enjoyed — the exploration, the soundtrack, the level designs, the user interface, some parts of the story — and then there were aspects I really disliked — audio bugs, overlapping voices, the messy enemy designs, dealing with the same enemies over and over, other parts of the story. Prey’s story is ambitious, but at the end of it all, at the very end of the story, I found myself let down by the conclusion. There are multiple endings to Prey, but they all connect in the same way. That connection was disappointing and left a bad taste in my mouth.
A PC retail copy of Prey was purchased by Epic Brew for the purpose of this review.
