…and I’ve played Persona 5 and Yakuza 0 (loved them both, obv)<\/p>\n
But gosh do I love me a good sci-fi story. I don’t need some massive, sprawling epic. What I like in my sci-fi stories is a central idea which makes you go, “woo!”. This is why I favour collections of short stories over multi-book epics – they don’t have time to get bogged down – they present their premise, run with it, and it’s over leaving you to ponder it for months to come. There are exceptions – I loved the entire of Asimov’s Foundation series including the bits which don’t have the name “Foundation” written on them. In fact, it’s those bits which are my favourites. But beyond the first book, I found Dune to basically run horribly off the rails and turn into a bit of a mess and\u00a0Altered Carbon should’ve\u00a0just been a single book, no sequels. Don’t hate me.<\/p>\n
And this is Prey in a nutshell. It’s like one of these tremendous short-stories made into a videogame that, as icing on the cake, also happens to have some really compelling gameplay, visuals, and level design. I won’t spoil the events because I\u00a0strongly<\/em> recommend the game if you’re even vaguely into good sci-fi and prefer the more thoughtful slower FPS than the run-in-guns-ablazing type. It’s basically System Shock, mixed with Bioshock, mixed with a little bit of Alien Isolation with a teaspoon of Portal for good measure. So, in a sense, it’s quite formulaic – nothing about the gameplay is terribly novel or unique, but it’s all implemented perfectly. There are genuinely<\/em> multiple approaches to the game – but they’re much more freeform than picking route A or B.<\/p>\n My strategy of choice was plonking down\u00a0a turret and hiding,\u00a0letting it do its thing, picking it up before it got too hurt, running away and hiding, before rinsing and repeating (gotta save those repair items – no sense letting a turret get needlessly damaged). I finished the game with over 1000 rounds of ammo each for two guns of which I never fired a single shot – one was a stun gun, the other the closest the game gets to a super-gun. Didn’t need them – I had turrets \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n I adore the design of the station itself, and the way everything feels believably connected. You’re still going through loading screens – each of these areas is, essentially, a level like any other game. But the way its designed, it doesn’t\u00a0feel<\/em> like that. It feels like one big solid thing, where all these areas are genuinely connected to one another.\u00a0It’s solid, it becomes familiar, it feels like it genuinely\u00a0could<\/em> exist and that when you see it from the exterior, all those levels and rooms within them are actually there. There are no PUZZLE SEQUENCES, there’s just\u00a0puzzles interwoven neatly into the level design.\u00a0I can’t get through that door, but maybe I can get around it, or find another way through it, or think about who is most likely to have access to it. Or just ignore it. Whatever, it’s your choice – the game’s entire purpose is in letting you play it how you want to.<\/p>\n Also the sound design is flupping marvellous (apart from the – I assume – bug where voice recordings would play too quietly so I had to pay attention to the subtitles). On that note, yeah, there were a few bugs. A few bodies fell through the floor and I’m pretty sure my inability to complete one minor sidequest was bug-related.\u00a0Nothing game-breaking for me, though, so nothing beyond forgivable little blemishes on an otherwise flawlessly executed concept…<\/p>\n Because, above all else, the way the story has been designed and woven into the fabric of the game is, I would argue, approaching genius.\u00a0Everything makes sense within the context of the game – and I mean\u00a0everything<\/em>. Perfectly. I’ll explain fully after you’ve played it (although I won’t have to at that point).<\/p>\n I may have built this up too much now but, crikey, it was good. It could have all been horribly clich\u00e9 – and this is what impresses me so much about the game and Arkane Studios. Take a basic idea\u00a0that, in someone else’s hands, could easily<\/em> be b-movie schlock and elevate it. And then elevate it some more. And some more. And now it’s my Game of the Year.<\/p>\n If you want another opinion I recommend John Walker’s piece over at RPS<\/a>\u00a0of which I agree with most except, especially, the bit about hating the ending which I can’t wrap my head around at all \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n