It's lonely in the future. Believe me, I've been there. For the past few weeks, I've been playing Arkane Austin's Prey, an immersive simulator where you explore a space station orbiting the moon. You're trying to figure out what went wrong and why the whole place is overrun by hostile aliens. It's an interesting tone though. Even though the space station is full of unpleasant life, you spend a lot of time alone, and that still doesn't mean the game has no sense of humanity.
Sure, for most of Prey's runtime, interacting with other living people is relatively rare, especially in the opening hours, when anyone with a pulse you run into usually doesn't stay that way for more than a few seconds. The advanced space station Talos I, once seen as a shining beacon of human brilliance and scientific advancement, now effectively serves as a floating prison for all those trapped on board, including the main character and TranStar's nepo-baby. , Morgan Yu. (TranStar is a no-holds-barred ultra-capitalist conglomerate on a quest to research alien creatures known as Typhon. Every sci-fi game needs a company like this.)
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Because of this relative isolation, you learn more about the TranStar team (largely made up of scientists and engineers) by digging into their DMs as if you were the nosy parent of a teenager. Not just direct messages, but also emails, logs, reports, and other written ephemera. Of course, this wasn't a new concept when Prey came out in 2017. It's practically a staple in the immersive simulation genre. What makes Prey special in this regard, however, is how its writing brings the characters to life before you have a chance to meet them.
TranStar equipment is more than just a collection of bodies used to make narrative points or serve as visceral ambient decoration. They are people. For example, let's look at Abigail “Abby” Foy and Danielle Sho, the space station's lead healthcare engineer and technical systems manager, respectively. Abby and Danielle have to be in the top three on my list of romantic subplots in games, if not a firm number one. With everything Prey likes to throw at you, from the evil of corporate greed to the infinite arrogance of humanity, a romance between two co-workers always made me smile when I stumbled upon their communication devices, known as 'transcribes'. in the language of the game. In one audio log, titled Dear Future Us, Abby even describes their joint messages as a form of “mental scrapbook.” Together, they “save the moments that matter.”
Things like this give off a warm glow, even if we later learn that this relationship didn't last. All it took was a relatively lighthearted joke from Abby for Danielle to end things with an oppressively distant, “Get out, we're done.”
I should have expected this. Prey is a game where the small positive moments shine because they exist in contrast to the dark backdrop of space and its lonely horrors. And yet, ever the optimist, between aliens who scare me by imitating every object they can and hiding in plain sight from the monstrous giants known only as Nightmares who hunt me for sport, I hoped for a happy ending to Abby and Danielle's story. But as I hunkered down and made my way through the main campaign, that hope began to fade. Danielle's inevitable pleas for anyone to answer about Abby's condition practically echoed through the cold, empty hallways of Talos I. Again: I should have expected this.
Anyway, not everyone is in love. Luka Golubkin, another member of the Prey cast, is the definition of a shady character. Facial scars that suggest he's all too familiar with knife fights, combined with his thick-rimmed glasses and unfortunate hairline, make him look almost like an evil math teacher from an '80s teen sitcom, one who was locked up. to finally explode. After just a few seconds of conversation, I knew I could only trust him as far as I could throw him. His aggression towards his robot assistant, the awkward… pauses in his speech as he talked about himself, the fact that he refused to offer Morgan shelter in his barricaded kitchen until he got what he wanted? Clearly something was wrong. As someone who had been furiously combing through every transcript and email I could find, his performance as “the cook” wasn't all that convincing.
Even without realizing that his tone of voice and mannerisms were not the same as those transcribed from the ship's real chef, Will Mitchell, I've simply seen too many horror movies to believe that dealing with someone like Luka would end without a knife in my back But when he (unsurprisingly) betrayed me and left me to die in a freezer, the only emotion I felt was pain. I realized that his previous victim was Abby. Sitting limp in a pool of her own frozen blood, she clutched at a transcript, one with a message from Danielle asking if she was okay and asking to meet her at the gym.
But the real blow was meeting Danielle face to face after all this and making her realize that my presence meant Abby was gone. After all, that meant I received his message. In other words, there was no going back from what had been said: only a bitter hope that Abby could be avenged.
Real talk: At this point in the game, Danielle is floating on a spacewalk outside of Talos I doing her best to prevent the Typhon crisis. He's slowly losing oxygen and his cognitive senses are starting to weaken, and as I'm exploring, he sends me a final message: “The last thing. The O2 is almost gone. […] Don't let him get away.” Jeepers.
It's easy to forget that the entire arc involving Abby, Danielle, and Luka Golubkin is optional. Your decisions here have no impact on the ending of the plot; in fact, it's possible to miss this thread entirely and finish the game without resolving the story of a murderous cook.
This is fascinating, because immersive simulators are playgrounds of emergent play and player choice. Prey shines brightest when it builds a world where you care about the decisions you make and the results they bring. You could give someone more options than stars in the sky, but if you're not interested in lasting impact, what's the point? Yo sought To save the crew of Talos I, the plot gives you the option to do so, and Morgan doesn't seem to remember enough to care one way or the other. Even after getting what is considered the best ending, I couldn't help but mourn the lives of those I couldn't save.
Despite not being a huge commercial success, I really hoped that Arkane would get another chance to make a Prey sequel. I felt that the community sentiment was too strong and that its status as an underrated gem would one day lead to a continuation of this rich fiction, and that we would learn more about the history of the Yu family, TranStar, and the end. so many different branching possibilities. But with the unfortunate closure of Arkane Austin in 2024, the likelihood of that happening is sadly close to zero. Prey has an atmosphere and feeling that cannot be replicated. It was something really special and I won't forget a word of it.