It's unfortunately a casualty from the same good ol' plague affecting some seemingly interesting games, which I'm suspicious MCA is partly responsible of, here : a motherfucking narrative twist.
I can't even. Why ? Why are good settings, plots and stories thrown out the window for the sake of a ridiculous "oh snap" moment ?
In this case, it's even more baffling, as you can completely remove that fucking twist and IT WORKS JUST THE SAME.
Actually no, it works even better, because on a subsequent playthrough you're not convinced that none of this shit matters because it'll end with GabeN and his sexbots telling me what I did during the game.
I mean, it could be worse. Bioshock Infinite decided not to have characters or a logical plot after its great twist. Its twist was so powerful and oh snappy that it broke the whole narrative...
sigh
I disagree about the twist ending ruining the rest of the game's narrative. In fact, it was one of the few interesting moments in the entire story after the breaking of the glass in your apartment, which was promising but led nowhere. Once you watch the first half of your video diary in your office, you already understand the nature of the tests, the purpose of the Typhon, and the likely fate of the crew aboard Talos 1. All you learn after that is... more of the same? Alex teases the player with some potential character nuance but it all boils down to "I trusted your old self dawg it was you who told me to do this stuff idk". The setting and fiction are all super well-realized, but it's scant development and drawn-out intrigue for over 20 hours with minimal payoff. The stuff with Dahl wasn't too bad but the the game's pacing has already grinded to such a halt that it ends up as more of a chore than anything. The twist ending recontextualized the events in an interesting way with a metanarrative about the nature of player choice in games that's at least less hamfisted than Bioshock's and with an actual dose of self-awareness (it didn't break the fourth wall to call attention to the banal ultralinearity of contemporary first person shooters only to feature four more fucking hours of banal ultralinear mindless shoot 'n' loot that borders on self-parody). The premise of the commentary is that players tend to lack empathy for fictional entities in games just like the Typhon lack mirror neurons, and so the purpose of the Talos 1 simulation is to engineer situations that prompt and test the player's empathy for doomed characters who may even deserve their condemned fate. This video makes the argument better than I can:
I can agree that it can feel a bit deflating for a game focused on immersing the player in a fictional environment to call attention to the fact that you're just engaging with simulacrum, but I think Prey deserves some credit for what it tries to make of the idea. I'd much sooner criticize the the dull audio logs and lackluster story beats prior to the ending, because I struggled to engage with Prey's fiction over any of my three playthroughs, while games like Deus Ex still capture my attention with details that I overlooked even after I've thoroughly dissected that game.
Prey is competently-executed
. Sort of a cut-rate mashup of Deus Ex and Bioshock. Doesn't do anything at all new or interesting, just rehashes old, well-worn tropes and gameplay elements.
False, Prey is
with middling execution. The level design, weapon arsenal, and enemy roster give up halfway through, but the core of the game is a relatively principled Shock successor with a ton of emergent complexity and some genuine gameplay depth at times. There are a number of minor innovations with e.g. the Mimics, the multipurpose GLOO gun, and various systems interactions that I would have liked to see taken further, but still brought some fresh ideas to the table. A shallow eye candy romp through a haunted theme park it is not.
Yeah, that's what it
wants to be seen as.
An it obviously is. There's shitton of direct parallels between Prey and SS2 (and that's even without the fanservice nudge nudge wink wink stuff like looking glass tech or gravshafts), but not really DE or Bioshock. Well, ok, with Bioshock there are, but that's only by proxy.
Prey's level design is very obviously inspired by Deus Ex, with a large degree of vertically connected spaces and paths through the levels gated by optional player abilities. I've previously argued that I don't think this hybridization was actually that effective since you don't make exclusive choices about how to carve a path to your objective like in DX, but rather scour an entire level for loot and key progression items like in SS2, whose levels were built with challenging choke points, hazards, and scripted ambushes to put the player on edge. I like that Prey gives the player the freedom to scout out obstacles and form plans to tackle them, but I think it could have pulled the rug out from under them more often, which is easier done when you know the path players will take.
What do you mean by "solid reactivity?" I agree about the first two but am less sure about the third, although I did only complete the game once. In my second run (as typhon) I didn't see much reactivity at all, but I only got about a third of the way through so it's likely I missed it.
(FWIW I don't consider a different epilogue sequence as reactivity.)
Prey keeps track of nearly every relevant permutation of interactions with NPCs in the story. If you pre-emptively kill January, December will be your guide through the game instead (though not as fully implemented as I'd have liked). You can fail to rescue Mikhaila and/or Igwe and dialogue will change. Go to the Cargo Bay early through the G.U.T.S. and Elazar will contact you to say the area is on lockdown. Most of it builds up to the presence or absence of some dialogue or event (e.g. you have to have rescue Igwe
and incapacitate Dahl in order to escape on the shuttle, rescued characters will be on the shuttle, etc.), but the game still manages to make every accessible NPC mortal without breaking the story. Admittedly, they cheat by locking Alex in a panic room, but it's a nice effort towards handing the player the reigns.
