Be Excellent To Each Other

I don't know about you lot but I've not been interested in nuPrey at all. I watched a video where you turned into a mug of tea or whatever but it wasn't exactly going to light a fire under your genitals.

So when there was the first 35 minutes released I thought "meh, I'm in the bath I might as well give it 10 minutes" and sat through the lot. Completely spoiled the opening section of course, like a dick, but I was never going to pick it up anyway, so I thought.

Turns out it looks pretty darn fab. If, unlike me, you were interested in this don't watch the video below at all. Seriously. The opening section is great: moody, atmospheric and twisty. It looks and plays like a combination of Dead Space, Deux Ex and Bioshock. If that doesn't sound like your thing then you must be dead inside.

Graphically it looks the business and is apparently running on a PS4 judging from the button prompts but it looks a little too slick for my liking.

So anyway, here's Prey's first 35 minutes. You just might find this ends up pretty good. Stupid 2017 with all its decent games coming out. Gah.

You can play the first hour of this soon in a big ole demo. As nicked from some Reddit user, details are:

Demo is available now. I hear it's pretty fucking good.

It's definitely available as I've downloaded it on the PS4 but i haven't tried it yet.

I definitely want to and will play this, but I've got a massive pile of games I've bought and not yet played, so it can wait til it's cheap.

I don't know anything about this, but I enjoyed the Prey game on the 360. Is it linked to that in some way?

You have to use an existing IP just to make it today.

Not really all that related. This new one is like a system shock spiritual sequel.

This took a long time to click with me but it's properly under my skin now. It's very much a System Shock style game, and although it also feels a lot like Bioshock at times I think that's more shared geneology than anything. It's a cousin to Bioshock, not a descendant.

Example: even the weakest enemy is quite tough, especially in numbers, and the second weakest one is very dangerous. You see them correspondingly rarely, and when you do, you take time to plan your fight -- pick your battleground, consider your approach. Coupled with no regnerating health and a finite supply of medpacs means it's a slow, thoughtful game. I like that.

Plot wise I'm early but it's very engaging so far. It's doing some interesting things with player choice and Mrs Doc informs me it has multiple endings (she completed it several times.)

It's definitely a game with lots of secrets, too. Hidden areas, little physics puzzles (that feel very Half-Life), clues hidden in recordings and emails -- again, it rewards thoughtfulness and attentiono to detail.

The controls still aren't great on PS4 -- early versions had bad input lag, which has been partially resolved in later patches but it's still a bit sluggish. This was mildly irritating at first but I've stopped noticing it now.

I am very shortly going to be looking for my next game to play as I'm almost finished on my High Chaos runthrough of Dishonored 2, and Prey sort of piqued my interest earlier in the year but I was in PC-crappo-zone at the time so gave it a pass. (A situation which has been remedied now, of course.)

Keys are going for £13.69 on G2A which is more appealing than the £29.99 Steam want for it.

I may well give this a go.

EDIT - Got a key from G2A, it actually came to £14.57p as they added on 88p for a 'payment fee', whatever that's supposed to be. I thought paying for something kind of was the fee for getting what it is you're buying. Whatever.

I think you'll enjoy Prey.

Yeah, really looking forward to playing this.

I really liked the feel and the style of this (from playing the demo) but pretty much the first enemy encounter was like fighting Half Life headcrabs on crack so it got fucked off very quickly indeed.

There are a lot of fast moving head crabs, yes.

I've been cheerfully killing head crabs since 1998. I expect no problems in that department.

Let me know how that works you for you...

OK so I'm three hours in now and I've had to deal with a fair few head crabs, specifically with just my trusty wrench in the first couple of levels (I do have a couple of guns now, although even when I got the GOO GUN thing I was quite happy to eschew it in favour of pure wrench action).

Not sure what the big deal is with them though? Just track them round, strafe/backtrack as necessary, give them a few whacks, or a SUPER CHARGED WHACK if you're in the mood, and they die quite easily. I had three of the buggers on me at one point and didn't feel particularly pressured. (Half Life 101, really.) Plus you get to loot them for things now as well. Progress!

I am very much liking the game, although amusingly it's a Bethesda/Arkane production just like Dishonored 2 so the splash screens are (mostly) the same and the controls are mostly the same and the art direction has a very familiar feel etc.

Anyway, head crabs, no big deal, total Level 1 hit them on the head and they die baddies.

Heh, fair enough. I found them a wee bit harder to deal with because they move quite fast and hit quite hard. Maybe I'm just a bad shot with the GLOO gun though (which is my favoured tactic.)

The reveal
is pretty cool. Have you gotten as far as the January and December protocols yet?

It reminded me of Bioshock a lot, in that the opening is really strong... and then (outsde of a few set pieces) it really went downhill. But at least Splicers and Big Daddies were (mostly, those late game bullet sponges can fuck right off) fun to fight.

I didn't get anywhere near completing the game, because I just couldn't be arsed with the combat anymore.

I do remember one review, maybe in RPS comparing this to Metroid Prime. Is it true in any way?

I liked System Shock 2 which apparently is the other point of comparison, but Dishonoured did nothing for me.

Play Prey Today. It's a good thing. But if you don't like difficult things, play it on Easy.

I'm not feeling a huge amount of love for the combat in this. I've got a decent selection of weapons, including a powerful shotgun and a not very powerful silenced pistol, as well as the GLOO GUN, a stun pistol type thing, and a selection of grenadey type things (EMP/stun/etc) - but none of them appear to be much good.

I'm playing on NORMAL skill level.

The headcrabs I'm fine with, I can kill those all day with my wrench alone no problem and take zero damage in the process.

The bigger baddies are arseholes though. The shotgun makes decently quick work of them but fuck me ammo is in short supply, so if I want to keep it supplied with shells I have to constantly feed mountains of junk into the recyclers to get cubes, and then I can put the cubes in fabricators to make more shells - which is basically just a slow, shit version of ammo crates.

As such I've tried to find other ways to take them down, using a combination of some or all of the environment (things I can make blow up for example), stuns, GLOO and so on - but none of these seem very effective, for example the GLOO keeps them in place for about 4 seconds which is scarcely enough time to run up and hit them once with the wrench, plus they fucking teleport all over the place, and have ranged attacks, which makes it even more annoying, and they're bastard tough as well. (And if they get a hit on you, BANG, half your health is gone.)

Therefore every combat encounter ends up feeling scrappy and messy, seems to expend far more resources than I would want, and leaves me having taken damage to both my health and suit, which I have all the necessary things to heal/repair, but after the ability to plan and execute 'clean' takedowns (either lethal or non-lethal) in Dishonored 2, it all feels quite clunky and frustrating.

I've been collecting all the neuromods and spending them judiciously, and indeed doing my 'completionist' style play, finding everything, doing the side missions, finding all the goodies etc - so it's not like I've missed key stuff to improve my character.

The game has been advising me to try stealth attacks to do more damage, which works to a point but after the first sneaky attacks you still have a big bastard alien with a large health pool remaining, teleporting all over the place shooting death bolts at you.

Also the graphics are rubbish, I can tell it's not even remotely taxing my PC as the fans on my graphic card hardly spin up at all, and this is with everything totally maxed out. I know graphics don't make the game, but sometimes this looks like a game that's travelled in time from a decade ago. The graphic style is great, but it needs more shinies. I love the audio design though.

Thinking about it I do have some weapon upgrade kits, which I wasn't wanting to start using yet, but it seems like I might have to.

I dunno, it's entirely possible I'm just shit and/or missing some simple mechanics, but after the towering majesty of Dishonored 2 (which, it has to be said, I was pretty fucking handy at), Prey seems rather limited in the combat department.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like it's far too difficult and I can't get anywhere, but I can't seem to get into my groove with the combat and it frustrates me - I have an aversion to having to heal up after fights and repair my suit and shit like that, it says to me I'm not doing it properly and it feels bad.

I did say it was hard! I've dropped the game to Easy and I find the gunplay more enjoyable there. Like you, I want to micro-optimise every encounter, and was finding that annoying. On easy I can improvise knowing the game won't punish me for small missteps.

The Combat Focus (slow time) ability helps a lot with keeping stuff under control.

Have you got the Psychscope yet? That'll open the game up a lot.

Also get the "20% more material for recycling" buff as early as possible.

I used the Psychoscope's zero-cost SUPERHOT slowmotion to get around, above and through so many obstacles the game might as well be turn based for me.

Zero cost slow mo? What?

Aiming a PSI power halts time ("LIKE TIME ITSELF HAD BENT ITS KNEE WAITING FOR YOU TO DECIDE, MORRRGAAAAN"), from there it advances while you move at the speed you move. You don't have to fire your PSI... you can just stay in aiming and creep around with time flowing however you please.

Oh, right... Yes, true!

Completed. Loved it.

Some thoughts: writing was superb, plot was great and moved to a conclusion I found both surprising and satisfying. The major characters' backstories were very well written and it had some plot beats that really made me feel something and have stayed with me (for a start, I could name half a dozen characters off the top of my head -- how many games can you say that about?) Danielle Sho and Abigail Foy were highlights for me.

Mechanically, it's all very Bioshock with a touch of other modern-day System-Shock-me-dos like Dishonored and Deus Ex: lots of ways to build your character's arsenal, and lots of ways to make that arsenal and the environment work together to bring the pain. You can sneak and you can fight sneaky and you can charge in and you can solve puzzles in multiple ways.

Possibly the most impressive thing, though, is the architecture. Most of the game takes place on (and occasionally outside) a massive space station, and it's just a lovely piece of game design: a really spatially coherent place. As I type this, I can imagine all the various sections of the station, and I could tell you how to go from one to the other: that to get from the shuttle bay to my office, you go along the corridor, turn left, up two flights of stairs, door on the right. Details abound: hidden maintenance shafts to bypass obstacles, shattered remains of people where they made a last stand and died where they stood, whiteboards with cryptic hints about secret research (and, impressively, never reuses textures: each department has unique scrawls related to the work it does.) When you do an EVA outside, you can actually relate the exterior of the station with the interior, you can see where the arboretum is and look at the outside of the cargo bay's massive doors. Plus it's all covered in a lovely sheen of '40s Art Deco design (a nod to Rapture, I am sure.) It's bloody marvellous.

One minor ding: load times on PS4 are fucking painful (like, up to a minute) when you change areas. For most of the game, you do these one at a time, and it takes several hours to clear one if you play like me (slowly, cautiously, picking everything clean.) Each area is small, but it's dense and packed with things to do, so it takes a while. That spreads the load times out. But the late game suddenly starts throwing you missions that involve traipsing all over the place and by this point you know the station really well so you can get through a section very quickly so it gets really irritating.

Some advice if you're gonna play this (criminally overlooked) game (and you should if you like this sort of thing):

• I almost stopped playing because the combat was quite hard at first. In the end, I dropped it to easy and blasted through, and had fun the whole way. You could always increase the difficulty again later on when you're more powerful. It doesn't change the structure of the game, it's just a debuff to your damage and a buff to enemy damage.
• You're not going to earn enough XP to see every ability in one playthrough, but you can do most of them so you don't need to agonise too much over your decisions. I suspect you'll be more powerful if you specialise your powers to one playstyle, but I was playing on easy so I could afford to be a jack-of-all-trades and try lots of approaches. I liked this.
• An entire second skill tree will open up a couple of hours in, so you're not seeing even half the toybox until then. If you're wondering why I'm so full of praise the game's openness but haven't gotten there yet, that's probably why.
• There's a lot of rock-paper-scissors with various enemies and various weapons and abilities you have. For example, I realised far too late that the stungun is enormously powerful against the annoying hostile flying robots. Experimenting and paying attention to find these weaknesses is very useful.
• Be careful about spoilers on the internet. It's not a story you want to know much about.
• Some of the most interesting writing happens in subplots, and in particular smallish quest lines can be closed down if you don't help people when you get the chance. So maybe do that.
• Similarly, know that the game has a hidden morality system that tracks your decisions at various points and it influences the ending you see, although there are also multiple explicit endings you can select. Being "good" gives you the most options and a hard-to-get trophy, although it's not always simple to figure out what good is...
• There's more ending after the credits. So stick around.
• Edit to add -- the mimic ability has a slightly unobvious use in that it lets you get into areas via small gaps. Well worth taking early.

I bought this on that recommendation. On current playing schedule it'll get inserted into my PS4 around this time next year...

Doc, what did you think about the It was the other thing that made me say "I can't be arsed with this game other than the combat.

Worst spoiler ever! It's not really a spoiler anyway so I wouldn't worry about it.

The combat is what put me off this game, faffing about making bullets and then stressing if you were supposed to use the resources for other things or if you were doing the encounters 'wrong' somehow. The combat always seemed fiddly and unsatisfying, and I found myself wishing they'd just put fucking ammo crates in it.

I will return to it at some point, swallow my pride and whack it onto EASY mode as DocG suggests. I loved the setting and the characters, the writing, the graphical style (although the graphics themselves were really quite shonky in places), the audio design and so on. The combat was plain poor though.

In Dishonored 1 and 2 for example, there were all kinds of elegant ways you could approach the baddies, both lethal and non-lethal, but if you brought it down to brass tacks the game entirely accommodated simply picking off your enemies one at a time with a nice clean slit of the throat, and that felt satisfying to execute - there's no such sense in Prey.

Re: the spoiler

Nice piece about this game here.

NOTE - Bit spoilery if you haven't played the game, at least the first couple of hours of it.

I've seen some rumours today that there's an expansion on the way for this. Still haven't got around to playing it yet, as I still haven't finished Horizon ZD — well, the Frozen Wilds expansion.

This is pretty cheap at the moment (£11.99 on Amazon). Hmmmmm.

You could probably borrow it off one of the peeps here for free.

I have Doc's copy I can let you have assuming he doesn't mind

If DLC comes out MrsDoc will want it back sharpish, I suspect. But Curio can have it afterwards. Did you finish it, Cras?

No, I stalled it and won't pick it back up I expect.

You're a bad person. It's great.

I liked lots of things about it, but just didn't enjoy the combat at all, and everything felt like a drawn-out exercise in conserving and building ammo.

Were you playing on Easy?

Yep. I'm bad at stuff, don't forget.

You can borrow my copy, Curio.

I’m enjoying this but I want to moan about a few things:

I’m playing on Xbox One X, the most powerful console in the known universe, but the 30FPS cap isn’t very good despite it not being that graphically demanding and not a lot happening on screen even during busy times. There’s not much in the way of intensive particle effects or giant baddies or multiple enemies or whatever it takes to tax your console these days. I am disappoint.

The enemy variety is very disappointing. All different shapes of black gloop. There’s nothing visually to identify a bog standard phantom vs a phantom that spit yellow balls vs purple phantoms. The electric phantoms have an electric effect but again they’re the same as all the other phantoms. Telepaths and mind controllers are both just the same floating blobs. I am disappoint.

It’s hard. I’m not too bothered about that cause I love a good survival horror (which this flirts with) but there’s a huge discrepancy between bullet sponge enemies and the scarcity of bullets. It feels like bullets/powers should have more of an effect given how scarce resources are but, say, the floating blobs take an immense amount of bullets. Mind you, it led to a good battle and many restarts in Deep Storage as I had literally nothing left and ran about tossing explosive canisters at a telepath and a phantom and two corrupted robots.

Give me more stuff by the time I get to Crew Quarters. I had a load of stuff earlier and about 200 9mm bullets but now I’ve got nothing. All I’ve got is a spanner and the GLOO gun and 2 health kits. I’ve got no food and no PSI. I haven’t had any ammo for the big laser gun since, I dunno, 5 hours ago, and I’ve been I’ve got 11 hours clocked up on the campaign. It’s not like I’ve been rushing through either. I’ve been taking my time, exploring, trying to rinse each area before moving on, recycling my stuff when I can and even throwing those recycling grenades at stuff in my desperation. It really feels like something has gone wrong with the balancing cause it’s not like I can stealth my way through the game or avoid a fight. I had to pelt it through the lobby earlier because I was overwhelmed.

The loading times. Man alive, the loading times are SOOOOOO slow. Jesus Christ, I’m scared to change areas until I’ve finished exploring just because going back and forth between loading areas would probably make me hurt someone. And it’s not like the areas are that big either. They’re densely packed with some decent level design but I’m really surprised that it takes so painfully long to load an area, and I’m even more surprised that the devs couldn’t have avoided loading times altogether. Just stick in a long corridor to walk between and keep me immersed. It breaks up the flow of the game and, honestly, it makes me lose track of the internal layout of the space station in my head which is a shame because the aesthetics are consistent and nice.

It’s still pretty good, I like it and I’m enjoying myself but the above points really make it difficult to love the game.

Yup:

I beat a nightmare to death with a spanner. MTFU, fewlz.

I left it on normal and suffice to say it started giving me more resources, or at least I started playing smarter and accumulated more resources. So the difficulty was more of a spike that a barrier.

Urgh, it’s got shit again.

“Military Operators”

Remind me to have a moan about enemy types again, someone.

Have a moan about the enemy types