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Prey video game1/5/2024 ![]() Given you spend no more than ten minutes here, there's a remarkable amount of detail packed in. What matters here though is not the squabble between Tommy and Jen, but the space of the bar itself. It's clumsily written and poorly acted - an issue that dogs the game throughout. Stuck between them is Tommy's grandfather, Anisi, who spends the scene warbling portentously about great challenges lying ahead and the importance of Tommy embracing the traditions of his ancestors. Our protagonist, Tommy, wants to leave the Reservation, but his girlfriend, Jen, wants to stay. Prey kicks off in a tacky-looking dive bar somewhere on a Cherokee Reservation, and concerns itself initially with a petty human drama. Prey's depiction of native Americans is not exactly the most sensitive. Although the game itself has not aged brilliantly, the ideas contained with in it are fascinating. And you know what? Looking at it from the other side of a billion Call of Duty sequels, I feel very differently about it. Oh and it doors that look like bumholes, because video games.īut with Arkane's reboot of Prey hovering just beyond the horizon, I decided to go back to the original, to see if there was anything more to Human Head's game than the vague snippets I recall. And the main character was a Cherokee fella who hated being Cherokee so much he refuses to acknowledge his heritage even when his dead grandad gives him a ghost eagle and the secret to immortality. I remember that it had portals like Portal, only you couldn't do anything with them and so they were basically just doors. It's only been, what, six years? *sniff*.Īs for the game Human Head Studios produced, frankly, I've barely thought about it in the last decade. It's an idea that still excites me, not that I'm still mourning it cancellation. A conceptual head-on collision between Mirror's Edge and Blade Runner, Prey 2 was set in an open-world, neon-soaked alien megacity. There was supposed to be a sequel, and it looked fantastic. The original Prey took a decade to develop, going through numerous iterations and engines before stumbling onto shelves in 2006. In fact, up to this point Prey is probably better known for the games that never happened than the one which eventually did. There are stormtroopers with better hit rates than that. This 'franchise' (imagine airquotes the size of skyscrapers) has been in existence for two decades, resulting in one single game. Everything's there, but none of it coheres.What a curious legacy Prey has left behind. There's also a growing set of player abilities-neurological enhancements allowing you to access superhuman powers and alien ones-that can be combined in creative ways. All the pieces are certainly in place: a confined space, a wide ecosystem of enemies, a highly detailed and consistent world that adapts to player intervention well. And to its credit, it is probably the most expansive and technically accomplished iteration of the immersive sim that anyone's ever made. Prey is desperate to be an immersive sim in this vein, capturing the greatness and creativity of *Deus Ex'*s mad cyberpunk hellworld and *System Shock'*s haunted deep space exploration. Players are encouraged to fight against the will of the designers, to imagine solutions that the developers couldn't have thought of and see how the world reacts. Inside these spaces, details are layered on thick, alternate passageways and hidden details everywhere. ![]() Immersive sims tend to take place in broad but confined spaces: the lavish mansions of Thief the elaborate space stations of System Shock the underwater city of Rapture in BioShock. ![]() *Prey'*s mood-that endless movement between curiosity and inane frustration-is all the game has to define itself. Find out who Morgan is, find out the truth about Telos I, and try to stay alive while doing it. In a very traditional videogame fashion, your goals are mostly about surviving and gathering information. You also learn that Morgan (who you can play as a man or a woman) is seemingly both responsible for the infestation and unable to remember any of it, due to experiments she insisted on running on herself that erased much of her memory. Early on, you learn that the space station has become infested with an amorphous alien race known as the Typhon. What you do know is that you are Morgan Yu, a scientist on board the Telos I. Should you be exploring? Fighting? In Prey, it's hard to tell. It encourages you to quietly poke around while being aware that monsters might lurk around any corner. It doesn't seem to know what kind of game it wants to be at all. ![]() That instance, though, was all too brief, mostly because Prey doesn't know if it wants to be the kind of quiet, thoughtful game that lets you meditate in space. This Massive Videogame About High School Is All Demons and Angst-in a Good Way Arrow
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