Game Complete - Prey

So, if you read my previous post, I had taken a significant break from painting miniatures and getting back into gaming. I dabbled with a few - Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (took awhile to relearn after a year long break of this one, but the side quests are so numerous I got burned out after trying to complete them all before moving on with the main storyline (still in Chapter 5)), Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (got my face kicked in brutally and then felt bad about myself), Etrian Odyssey V (completed it after a 2 year break, and after completing both Persona Qs last year), Valkyria Chronicles 4 (It was interesting and fun, but I was still recovering from my massive burnout with the anime genre), Fallout 4 (loved my time, but the open-ended nature of it made me want to put it down for a bit and move onto something a little more finite?), before popping Prey in.

I didn't know much about Prey before purchasing it, it was on sale for I think $13 on Amazon and was well reviewed and by Bethesda, so I figured 'why not?' and went ahead and purchased it. It has been a fantastic adventure exploring the Talos I Space Station. There are so many things that I enjoyed about this game.

The environment and design of the game was gorgeous, I loved the way the Space Station looked. It had that clean, futuristic vibe, but not cold and sterile (which I find many sci-fi environments to be). I also liked that the environment was interactive, you could move it, destroy it, cause gas or fire leaks if you shot pipes. I liked how the nature of the enemy made me always feel cautious and paranoid, I didn't know if that chair really was a chair or a mimic. The story, while slow at first, was enjoyable as I read e-mails and found transcribes to try and figure out what happened. The designers did a great job in building the world, every character had a backstory and life on the ship and interacted with one another. Again, these things make the world feel inhabited and real, and less like a series of levels for the protagonist to wander through.

Another thing I noticed and appreciated (and maybe I'm really behind on this one because I did not really jump into 'current-gen' until May 2019 when I picked up an XB1X) was how fluid and natural the character movements were. The way characters ran and stopped, their gestures, they all seemed so realistic. It's really a far cry from a lot of the Nintendo games I tend to play where the anime characters are expressionless or overexaggerated and the movement is so rigid.

I really enjoyed the gameplay. I've always been a great fan of the Bioshock series, and this game had a similar feel - a FPS with RPG elements that focused on the storytelling. The developers, Arkane Studios, did a stellar job making the game non-linear. Similar to Dishonored, they allow the player multiple ways of defeating enemies or completing objectives depending on how you built your character. If you were strong, you could move barriers out of the way, sometimes there were maintenance tunnels you could traverse to get there a different way, if you used Typhon powers you could mimic a small object and roll through an opening, or sometimes you could just chuck a Recycler Charge to suck up all the objects and destroy them. I never felt constrained to play in any specific manner.

The only issue I had was with combat, it felt really difficult for a long time because I only had the worthless pistol, a gloo gun, and my wrench. Combat tended to consist of me trying to dodge projectiles, wrap them up in gloo, then when they were fully incapacitated, charge out and whack them with my wrench until I was exhausted, then repeat the process. The solution, of course, was to find the shotgun, which I had missed grabbing earlier on from the Security Room. Similarly, I panicked during my first encounter with a Technopath as my weapons were, for the most part, ineffectual against it. However, after I wrapped it up with my gloo gun, it fell from the second floor to the bottom and died from the fall damage. A hilarious death for a typically fearsome enemy.

The last thing that really resonated with me was the protagonist, Morgan Yu. It's not often the main character is Asian (at least, a non-Japanese Asian), and being Chinese myself, it felt satisfying playing as an avatar that did represent me. Even certain things in the environment - the udon noodles, dim sum, unagi - all seemingly small and insignificant details helped shape a world where me and my culture were represented, and I appreciate that.

It was a game that I had so much fun exploring, I didn't want to look anything up. I wanted to experience everything organically, as I was meant to. In fact I was raging when, 2 weeks ago, my XB1X's HDMI port just decided to randomly die. As someone who takes great care with my electronics and who's never had any console failure in their life, I was livid when I found out online that this wasn't even an isolated or particularly uncommon occurrence. Luckily, I was able to have it covered by warranty and received my replacement in a week, despite the COVID-19 situation. In that regard, I feel Microsoft handled the problem well, but it's always disconcerting that these issues can arise despite meticulous care. I guess I'll be looking at Microsoft Complete when I purchase a Xbox Series X in the not too distant future.