Just goes to show you can’t always rely on a studio to catch lightning in a bottle twice. Though, as history has shown it was probably the Publisher that was at fault rather than the developers.
Just imagine if they had actually made any connection to the original prey with this reboot or rendition or w.e it is. Honestly probably no connection.
Usually I don't like amnesia stories, but Prey pulls it off. I also like the idea that the reason we can choose Morgan's gender is because Alex was curious whether the phantom would have a preference, because obviously he'd know whether he had a bro or sis
“Hmmm, well Morgan is dead…” *gets mom and dads DNA to make a template egg to then add the Morgans DNA to so you can get a cloneish thing without any Typhon contamination and to avoid DNA damage via age or at least mitigate it, then do Metal Gear Solid 4’s cellular memory* Clone: *can’t tell if its a boy of a girl due to the DNA from both of the parents.* Alex: uh… *quickly patches the problem.*
Something NOT talked about enough is how good the AI is. So many instances of phantoms or robots scouring and area looking in every nook and cranny to find your ass
It does have its quirks though, a nightmare watched me walk through a UNLOCKED DOOR into a room, he could’ve had my ass, but decided to taunt me by sitting just through the wall, in the hallway. Had me shitting bricks😂.
@@Red_Russki91 The Nightmare can't actually move through every door, so odds are it WANTED to pursue you as the Nightmare will do so relentlessly but it isn't allowed to go through that door, there are a ton of little areas where the Nightmare should be able to go but isn't allowed to.
@@Red_Russki91 I remember the Nightmare was waiting for me right at the entrance of room, and the room outside of the entrance had two fans of phantoms that could see me immediately, with not really any place to hide and if I could they would find me very quickly. The AI was so good it had me soft locked for like 2 hours 💀💀
I mean, it depends sometimes because in my first playthrough, the nightmare that spawns in the crew cuarters just stared at me for a good 20 seconds just to insta kill me after
I can't stop watching content on this game, or even playing the game, or trying to put into words WHY I love the game so much. I think WAY too hard, about everything. So when I have a game thay studies/presents the mind, ethical quandaries, the 'human condition' philosophy or putting that nagging feeling of "Am I doing the right thing?" It immediately goes towards the top of my list of favorites.
@tickledpickle5671 I agree 110% it's one of my favorite games of all time now. I love it to a degree it's hard to explain, but I tried in one of my videos on the game here: th-cam.com/video/9zRzPbpCM3U/w-d-xo.htmlsi=u50_az_uT54ZHjRx
8:13 thats so crazy, thats not how i got out at all. I smashed a window, but it was this small painting or something at the end of the hallway outside my room, and I was able to jump through that instead. I was still convinced my room was real, so i searched for the exit in the hallway and got out like that
To defend the kill all ending its only really unlockable if u are moral, I think it’s suppose to be the last bad ending that says yes they succeeded in giving a Typhon empathy but in doing so sent it into a killer rage cuz they tricked and deceived it with simulations with the other option being more or less the same but the Typhon forgives them, so in the end the Typhon always gets humanity you just have to decide if it is a positive or negative outcome for the personal characters.
my favourite weapon to upgrade has to be the stun gun, just because of quickly you can melt corrupted operators and technopaths. out of everything, being able to quickly incapacitate and enemy in one shot (unlike the gloo gun) and doing major damage against robotic enemies is so much more powerful than a bioshock level shotgun or a rapid fire artemis pistol. i wish the wrench could have been more powerful outside of chipsets, but i still love grabbing the disruptor from the hidden package in the neuromod division first thing
@@tiaanvanrensburg1032 I agree with you on that, I also love the stun gun in this game especially when fully upgraded. And funny, the first stun gun I get in the story is the one located on the second floor of the Neuromod Division lobby area. I choose to leave the one you mentioned in the secret package alone because of the side quest with December later. But yeah, the stun gun in Prey is amazing and very versatile
I love when anyone gives this game the credit it deserves. I'm truly saddened by the fact that this type of game tends to sell badly, thus giving studios no incentive to continue making them. Yet they have some of the most passionate cult followings of any games out there
n a world where even "monopoly go" a smartphone game which outsells even Witcher 3. its most likely that the new kind of "gamer"doesnt like to think too much. therefore. we can be happy if we even get a new Prey or Nier Automata. the chanches are very low.
@@wahtari03765 dont be so reductive. No one ever talks about "monopoly go" or other popular mobile games, unless if its about how much money they can get from suckets
@@vladimirakovarova8179 you missing the point what i was trying to say. an im not compairing. they are no even the same genre. but thats beside the point. which you didnt understand
"Colony" is a science fiction short story by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was first published in Galaxy magazine, June 1953. The plot centers on an expedition to an uncharted planet, on which the dominant, predatory alien life form is capable of precise mimicry of all kinds of objects. The size and complexity of the mimicked object can vary from simple doormats to whole spaceships with the larger objects usually attempting to trap and "absorb" humans similar to carnivorous plants.
I agreed on not liking the ending until i saw a video of someone talking about prey and eldritch horror and now i love it, maybe it wasnt intended but thinking of it from a point of alex's hubris in thinking if he just keeps testing and keeps making little changes he'll get what he wants eventually. one day after a a couple, no a dozen or even maybe a hundred terminations he finally creates a typhon with empathy. sadly its first act of consciousness after learning it's whole life was a simulation and none of it's memories are real is to return to those base instincts and kill. now alex has created the final monster, one smarter and with real intelligence and empathy that can now fully utilise all of its natural abilities to end humanity in it's entirety
I think it's just angry that it's life is a lie. Maybe it could be human but you have nothing, your brother isn't your brother, your gf isn't your gf, no one would care, even if you could integrate into humanity who would you have? They clearly see you as disposable and worth killing if need be. I hate that they try to take the high road when they did everything the previous morgan did to you but it's okay because you're a dangerous alien right? Nah GTFOH
The thing missing from this critique on the ending (yeah, you can choose any ending and that's kinda lame and it doesn't really matter) is the whole concept of empathy. The game goes out of it's way to be not just about morality, but empathy and to tell us that the typhons don't have empathy. So Alex has taken a creature that has never experienced empathy and injected them full of it. As someone who goes to therapy to help reduce my feelings of debilitating empathy I can somewhat appreciate how much empathy can be not just a good thing and how, as a new emotion, it could be a horror to behold, especially now that you can judge your past actions that were decided upon without empathy at all. I watched that same video you did and I love the comparison to Eldritch Horror. This is the only story I've come across that has had the twist of humans being the unknowable eldritch beings and have it actually work and hit so perfectly. We took a creature and introduced it to ideas and feelings that it could never describe to members of it's race. We decided it must be like us. To follow Lovecraftian horror it would make sense to me that even if it made the kindest decisions in game, when the full truth and horror dawned on it, that it's mind would break under all the weight.
Sadly, despite how fondly it's remembered, I don't think we would have gotten one anyway. It was expensive to make and didn't sell well. I think the latter point is due to a lot of issues Arkane didn't get to make though, but it happened anyway. Regardless, it sucks we lost them because Bethesda wanted them to make a live service open world action game (which is not something the studio had ever done nor were they interested in doing) because it'd look good to buyers and they wanted someone big to buy them up.
They were a shell of themselves. Companies don't act like individuals, they're made of individuals, and the great people who made Arkane great left or were chased out by others who wanted to wear their skin, the same people who drove its name to the ground. Arkane's old veterans are still around in the games industry, keep your had on a swivel and take note where the same names reappear.
The game in various places references mimics being able to well, mimic people. It was originally going to feature in the game as well, though the result was too buggy and prone to AI problems, which lead to the devs cutting the feature in the final hour. They did not remove the references to it existing though. It leads me to believe that there was indeed a mimic aboard the shuttle to Earth.
I listened to this whole video trying to fall asleep but the narrative you gave and your personability have kept me awake till 4 in the morning. Imagine my surprise when I visit your channel and see the criminally low recognition you receive for these projects. You make incredible work, and I hope you're doing well out there
That is huge praise, thank you! There's more to come for sure, I'm SO CLOSE (less than 2 weeks) until my next vid is done. I love making these vids, I just don't get as much time as I'd like to do it, hence the long upload gaps.
That is a nice feature, I love how it's incremental too so it doesn't happen straight away with the first install, but shows that Morgan is losing more human essence over time
On a pure Typhon build, use force or electric arrow on those turrets to either disable/destroy them. But this also increases the Nightmare Typon to hunt you more that the Pure Human build. Small spaces like vents or closets are your safe options to kill it, since this game is close to 7-years old, that monster WILL glitch through to eat you!
@@XSilver_WaterX no such thing as age when talking about bugs and glitches. Bioshock 1 from 2007 has less bugs than Prey from 10 yrs later, simply one game was made by competent people while the other is made by arkane under bethesda. Bethesda games, the only games were roofs and walls are merely a suggestion. You can literally vault over shelfs in prey and end up out of bound, cuz most ceilings got no collision at all.
My favorite comparison for Prey is Metroid. People don't often think of horror when they think of Metroid (or at least they didn't until Dread), but I would argue that cosmic horror was at the game's earliest roots (just listen to the main menu theme!). In the very first game, the eponymous creatures didn't appear until near the very end of the game, but they were absolutely terrifying. These creepy, floating, vampiric jellyfish things would appear out of seemingly nowhere and beeline straight toward you, latch onto you immediately, and rapidly drain your life as you helplessly tried to remove them. The only way to remove a Metroid was to morph into a ball and frantically plant bombs until one managed to blast it off. They were also virtually impervious. The only way to kill them was to freeze them and immediately follow up with five missiles before they thawed out. It was a lot like the feeling of encountering a new Typhon far beyond your capabilities. Metroid also had that same feeling of cloying isolation - this was the reclaimed ruins of a dead alien civilization after all - and mastery of your environment as you gained new traversal abilities and grew more familiar with the layout. It also had, in its own primitive way, a sense of problem solving as you discovered how your abilities unlocked new and hidden areas you might have been confounded by or missed entirely before. It even had the same sense of being inside a thriving ecosystem, as creatures would emerge from holes in the walls and floor, and rooms you left would become repopulated. I see a lot of Metroid influence in Prey. Heck, the box art even looks a little like a smoky Metroid floating in the back ground above Morgan.
I've never had a chance to play any of the Metroid games, but you do make it sound very apt. I'm familiar with the term 'Metroidvania' that it coined as well and in some ways, I'd class Prey under this banner - having to revisit areas with new powers to unlock new things and places.
@@thegavinside tl:dr you should play SOMA next, even if you dont end up talking about it. Do it. I'll become a Patron or whatever to pay u to do it. As far as games like PREY, I always think of SOMA. The questions of consciousness and humanity are nearly mirror image to PREY but SOMA doesnt allow much player choice. And the choices it does offer are pointless (not in a bad way, but the choices you make... are like 50 50 shot they matter... I will not say anything more). Its still a FANTASTIC EXPERIENCE though.
@n8zog584 I watched someone play Soma years ago but never got round to playing it myself, I'll pick it up when it goes on sale on Steam and play it on my gaming channel for you!
"Immersive sims"/Shock games can be considered in some aspects as an evolution to Metroidvania. The main aspects of metroidvanias are included into the comprehensive design of the settings, the backtracking, the upgrades providing new means of traversal, even the occasional sequence break.
1:07:00 love that framing, actually 1:15:00 actually you can repair or gloo up an elevator shaft next to the fabricator/recycler and just leave without fighting any of them. 1:46:55 also what's so interesting about the Dahl choice to me is its basically asking if you're willing to be Alex. it's asking if you're willing to do to someone what Alex did to you with the neuromod wipes because you deem it's for the greater good of saving people. it's essentially asking you if you'd gaslight someone on the potential of saving human lives. and does them being an enemy make it easier for you? like of the game's 5 endings (you either destroy and escape, you destroy and don't escape, you set off the nullwave and escape, you set off the nullwave and don't escape, Alex's secret ending), all the 4 real ones tell Alex the same thing (see: the next paragraph). the Dahl choice is also a reflection of the story (just like the Fake Chef story is a reflection of the actual story) that's asking you questions about itself and what you're willing to do. 2:00:12 I mean, it's partly there for role-playing purposes but also, it's giving you the ability to judge people one last time, and finally decide how you feel about Alex at the end of it. this is because of the clever way and deeply unscientific way that Alex has set up the simulation in the first place. the reason the fake escape pod is not a legitimate choice is not because it's just a funny haha ending, it's because Alex won't allow the typhon that he's experimenting on to have an out from the experiment, it's inherently unscientific, the only option for you to get to the ending is to let Alex win one way or another. if you kill every human, it's telling Alex that you're willing to do whatever it takes and that you're capable of following orders, especially ones you deem as saving people (also love how Dahl actually praises you for doing his job for him if you're killing everyone). if you don't kill everybody, it's telling Alex that you're willing to do what it takes for science and helping people advance to a better society. the first option tells Alex that you care about people on a larger scale and you're willing to sacrifice the few for the many, the second option tells Alex that you care about people on a more intimate scale and think about the future and won't let humans die whenever you can save them. either way, Alex wins. because the only way to get to the ending is by making sure Alex's experiment is successful. that's why the characters at the end tell you that your motivation for doing something are impossible to judge because no matter why you did something, Alex wins either way and he gets what he wants either way, it gives you a moral quandary at the end to decide how you feel about Alex and decide if everything that he did was justified. the whole reason humanity was doomed in the first place was because people like Alex wanted to play god and transcend their place in the world and he is just doing that again by experimenting on typhon again. he is just repeating the same thing in a different way hoping for a different result. you get to decide if his experiment worked or not. you decide if humanity survives, even if there's some bad people in it like Alex. that's why there's the question about the fat man in the opening quiz, the fat man is Alex. the simulation that Alex designed is asking you if you will kill him to save humanity. no matter which way you feel about the trolley problem, the game presents it to you one last time as a culmination of its themes. i can see why some people don't like it because it's a little too gamified but the whole game is a self-reflexive statement on the nature of games (and all fiction at large) and how seriously we take them even though we know they're fake. like a lot of people assume it's a simulation within a simulation as soon as they break through the glass in the opening but they still try to save people where they can and if they don't, then at the end they get given another opportunity, this time reassured that it's real and lives are actually at stake. it's asking you the same question the game has asked you with every choice so far and this time with actual consequences because this is the last decision you make in the game, it's the culmination of your entire experience. also the way Alex has set up the whole experiment tells us so much about his character like he's depicted himself as the bad guy in the story very clearly and he's even portrayed Talos 1 as a nightmare scenario and where the huge alpha eventually comes and kills everyone and like if the Talos 1 incident was anything like what we experienced, them escaping is what could have unleashed Typhons onto earth and caused what we see today. but we don't know if Talos 1 was like that or if it was even worse, Alex clearly managed to escape given his position of power, but what about the hundreds of crew working there? hell, Alex literally otherizes people in the simulation itself where he sees Russian prisoners as less than human and deems them worthy of being experimented on bc clearly nobody cares about them and they're expendable. and were all the characters we meet at the end actually people on Talos who uploaded their consciousness to their operators like Morgan did with October, December and January? was the only way they could escape the station by not being biomatter: something the Typhon clearly want? are they less than human because their consciousness is no longer attached to their body now? but also like the arrival of Dahl is literally asking you if you're willing to set aside your differences to work with Alex!! like will you unite to fight a common enemy or will you kill both enemies or will you just get the obstacles out of your way to your goals? I mean basically every choice in the whole game is self-reflexive and about the themes and a comment on both the game itself and games as a whole like it's extremely well done. 2:07:14 except you couldn't really sell that given the mental health implications. That was a marketing department decision. It just brings up images of electroshock therapy and no marketing department worth its salt would touch that. fun video tho!
Really loved this recap and breakdown. I just finished Prey for the first time and have been binging video essays about it - this has been one of my favorites. My thinking about the Shuttle: I was doing a “save as many humans as I can” playthrough and figured that if there was any chance that the humans onboard were ok they should be given the chance to survive. Moreover, I figured that the earth folks would be able to deal with any mimic outbreak anyway since I had no trouble dispatching them with my wrench :P
Fun fact! Limited Oxygen isn't entirely limited Oxygen. As long as you keep your suit integrity high(out of yellow range), you won't end up like Danielle.
Man, this has to be the most entertaining and informative Prey recap/discussion video I`ve seen. This game is truly a gem, love it! Great video, thank you!
Dahl and his infinite military operators were nice with my many turrets. I go to the database room, set up 4 fortified turrets, shoot the military operators to distract from the turrets, and once I have a pile, I strip them of spare parts, and then attach a recycle grenade until I have enough raw resources for a while. The most fun I have, haha. When I find a way to get a LOT of desirable resources, I go on and on. The infinite neuromods is great. Just getting the better extracting skill I can collect a lot of exotic material.
But exotic material wasn't an issue for me... Mined material was the issue since I used it for shotgun shells and gloo...I had way too much of the other materials
I love Prey. I recently played it again, with the New Game + options. I think it's better than other games that inspired it because of how alive it feels. Talos' inside matches the outside. They have different interior designs based on the purpose of the department. If you go to a worker's station and see an email chain with X, if you go to X's station, you will see that very chain from their point of view, aside from other emails that could give further context. If you find a corpse, you can quickly realize how they probably died, especially if they are linked to the main quest. Finding the GLOO snow man in hardware labs is also heart warming. The nerf huntress bolt caster is not just a told, but a toy for the emplyees; you can find stashes and areas were someone clearly was trying to annoy their co-workers with it. You can see romances starting between some of the employees, grudges or friendships. You mentioned the escape pods story line (there's also one of the employees trying to rig the giant screen outside to warn others, but who died attempting it. You can finish that for him) and the smuggling ring, but there's also the black box story line, where one of the employees accused his co-worker of basically stealing his work and later murdered him. Talos was alive, and it connected with me since it came out. BTW, regarding the ending where you can help everyone, but still murder Alex, I always read it as the Typhon realizing what was going on, actively learning how to use empathy to manipulate Alex and the surviving consciousness, to then be able to get a chance and murder them. The Tyhon is born to kill, and learning how to lower a person's guards to get the kill, is basically Alex making the situation even worse. I did have a couple of glitches, not as much as you, but the one I always had was the side quest involving Kirk Remmer. He almost never spawned, so I could never get his corpse to confirm he was turned into a phantom. I realized I had to quick save every once in a while and enter the area were he spawns in a specific time frame, otherwise, it bugs out. I love Mooncrash as well, it gives even more context and world building. It shows that regardless of what happened in Talos, Transtar had doomed the planet. Mooncrash shows how the Typhon canonically arrived to Earth.
I've played through Prey nearly half a dozen times now, both on PC and Xbox. Yet this review showed me new things I hadn't discovered before - both the trick with Calvino's mug and the bullet stash under the entrance to Life Support. This game is still full of surprises.
Prey is one of the most important games in my life, because it lead to me finding out I had and being diagnosed with autism. See... It was so immersive, that the big choice you make regarding whether or not you sacrifice yourself and others hit extremely hard for me. I realized during this game that I would doom the entire world if it meant the survival of myself and those I cared about. This terrified me. I genuinely worried that this made me a psychopath, some kind of monster. After all, everyone else I talked to would have saved humanity. So, I talked to my therapist about those feelings, and that's when he suggested I got tested. Learning that I wasn't in fact some kind of evil person, and instead centered my world around those I knew and myself was perfectly normal for those with autism. Anyway, unrelated, but the point you make about the difficulty is something I never ran into because, uncharacteristically for me, I played the game on the absolute hardest setting (due to a recommendation from a friend.) It makes it such an intense and terrifying experience the entire way through, and I genuinely think that it's how the game is "supposed" to be played. :D
Mind if I pin this as top comment? It's a great experience about how well-executed the idea of morality is in the game, as well as the impact games can have. Also, I'm planning on revisiting the fame on hardest difficulty with the survival setting turned on very soon!
Have I played Prey and Mooncrash to 100% completion? Yes. Did I watch this to 100% completion? Yes again, great video! I do think some of your complaints are resolved in Mooncrash. It introduced the traumas system and fixed the Nightmare issue with the Moon Shark
Excellent, very insightful video. Great job! This might be the push I needed to remake my own old Prey video. As a side note, if you hack the fake cook’s freezer door and discover his secret before you’re supposed to, he cowers in a corner. That’s what happened in one of my playthroughs. I usually just smoke the fucker as soon as I gain access to the kitchen
i think that no matter how many times someone has played prey, they will have missed atleast one thing. i learnt quite a lot from this video even after 4 of my own playthroughs, and i saw some things that you missed too. a game that can have not only replayability through upgrade choices, difficulty options, playstyle changes, pathing, AND meta knowledge, but also all of the little missable secrets on top? that’s something i will cherish forever
I've learnt, not just a ton of missed stuff from the commentors to this video, but also a ton of missed perspectives on the scenes and themes that i didn'trealise. I'm extra glad I made the video even more now because of the extra knowledge and discussions it's brought my way!
@@thegavinsideone of the biggest things i’d thought i’d mention is that i dont think halden graves tried to kill himself with those scissors. he knows what they’re made of, but i dont think he’s scared of the cells spreading, atleast not to that extent. with all of the writing and transcribe logs, i believe he was essentially trying to remove them himself. you know what the machine looks like that removes them, it’s not something you could do on your own, and surely alex would never authorise he do it and give up the head of neuromod development. dahl had the beta neuromods installed before the seizure of talos I and was able to have his memory wiped, but what if every single transtar crew member aboard the ship had something similar intentionally put in place. halden uses those scissors in an attempt to reverse lobotomise himself (?) praying it gets out all of the typhoon stuck in him, because that’s his only chance to do it without losing himself to the memory wipe, or worse, if alex thought he would have been too much of a threat
honestly this video is one of the best made video essays. you aren’t just reviewing a video game, show this to me before i bought prey and i damn well would have felt like i had played it. your choice of music and how you present the gameplay matches the tone of the game so well, and with how well versed you are in the story, you told it like you were there. just wanted to show my appreciation for this masterpiece of a video, because out of all of the prey reviews, none of them do it justice like you have. …also i really need to know how you got a high quality recording of Danielle’s Semi Sacred Geometry (the song in the bar), i can’t find a clean recording and wouldn’t know where it would be in the files
Those are such incredibly nice words, thank you. I do always want to inject more than just the lateral information on stuff in my essays and give them the subject matters the heart that I feel they had put into them by the designers. On the subject of Danielle's song, it's been a while so I can't remember exactly, but it was either A. There's a clean play of the song during the game's credits, without much sound effect or combat interference, or B. So tines when I want to capture music for a game to use in the background, I'll turn the SFX volume all the way down and the Music volume all the way up in the setting, if the game has the option. I know it's one of those because I too struggled to find that version! The version I listen to regularly is the production copy, with the male vocals instead, but I prefer Danielle's version!
@@thegavinside mind games plays during the credits, so i think it’s B, but i am also looking for danielle’s version because i too prefer hers. good tips for getting it though！ oh and dont sweat it, you really do deserve it, and i’m sorry your video isnt more recognised. out of all the prey video essays, i guess you were just late to the party? doesn’t feel like a good reason, with how good it is, should still have popped off in my mind. probably just the algorithm. but yeah, i know you’re probably busy, but i look forward to anything you might make in the future, you’ve set a high standard for yourself！
I love Prey 2017 so much, it has become my favorite casual game at this point. And even though I have played this game many times , I never get bored of it as every single play through for me ends up being unique and I always seem to find something new about the game each time.
It is possible to get many neuromods early, before going to hardware labs or even watching the first video. Once you acquire a recycler charge in the lobby, you can go back to the neuromod division and recycle the crates blocking the back entrance to Halden Graves office, where you'll find the neuromod fabrication plan and plenty of exotic materials. You will have to deal with the technopath guarding it, but that can be done.
The greatest aspect to the game in my opinion where the many things u could do in it. From harvesting materials, choosing ur build, choosing how u fight. The fact that gloo could be used for environmental changes aswell as combat. The fact that u could control turrets. And the cool ways to fight using the typhoon powers. Don’t get me wrong the atmosphere is good but i find the gameplay overwhelmingly more present in the back of my head is what i remember most about it.
It is really good for play variety, that's another reason why I'm 7 playthroughs in. It's just got the variety to be fresh each time. The DLC seems to add to that a lot as well and really make you think outside the box.
@@thegavinside i didn’t know there was dlc, atleast i didn’t remember so thx for telling/reminding me :). Also i came from reddit, and i liked ur video.
Thanks for coming to watch :) and yeah, I'd never played the DLC either, it has some really interesting roguelike elements though. It's called Mooncrash.
@@thegavinside Uhh my comment got deleted because of the links I guess, so here's the video titles for what you asked: The System Shock 3 we never got. - The Nth Review Prey (2017) - The Best Immersive Sim? - Mister No Life Prey - A Critique of the Mind Game - Joseph Anderson Why Prey 2017 Deserved More Attention - Gingy Why Prey Is Arkane's Masterpiece - Boulder Punch
if you haven't seen them, a few of my favorites are: Critical Values: In Defense of Prey and those who made it by Ludocriticism Prey | Fictional Empathy by Leadhead Prey | Designing Meaningful Choices by Leadhead Prey: how an ending no one picked contextualizes eldritch horror by NewtC Arkane Lore: Prey and the power of Empathy by Eric Crosby Prey vs Prey by Noah Caldwell-Gervais. highly recommend the one by Ludocriticism especially (and all his other videos), it's the one i feel gets the game the most out of anyone i've seen discussing the game's ambitious metatextual ideas. Noah's video is also great in that regard, and just a great exploration of the Points™ of the game.
What I hated about bioshock is the fact that it only gives you the illusion of making a choice. It was a glorified moral slider. In prey you can just opt out of the game rather soon and thats an ending. In bioshock you cant say duck this ans then bail. Prey has multiple great endings.
But that was the whole point of Bioshock; you can´t choose. You are a salve, after all. And everything you can do is decided by nothing but a few lines of coding.
this was a great video, really good to put on while I cried over getting my knitting wrong. a bit of constructive criticism: captions are super important for accessibility. some people are deaf or hard of hearing or have auditory processing issues and rely on captions. i know they would have improved my watching experience. automatic captions are only like 70-80% accurate on average, but those are still better than nothing most of the time.
Glad it helped, sorry about the knitting! I'm gonna sound super dumb, but I forgot you can have automatic captions, I thought I'd have to write it all by hand.
Thank you mate, I hope to! Life's changed quite a bit in the past 6 months but I've got a handful I really want to make over the next while when I get chance
Head of The Production Department: "Hm, I wonder where those exotic materials, we use for creating neuromods, come from?" Tanks full of Phantoms in the room next to his office:
The last few characters corpses I have to find are the ones in the IT room that is Locked unless you kill literally everyone in the game. I cant do that. I cant let any characters die by my hands in any game lol.
@@sam11182 I remember not realizing how to get into that room but then found a method of glitching inside by using a bunch of gloo on the door and then throwing a recycler grenade. In clearing the gloo it somehow also removes the door itself
@@EvilTim1911 XD that is hilarious! I have the PC version and that method was removed in the updates and I spent countless hours trying over and over to get in using that method but no. I had to give up. The Cheat Engine got me in! But it was not really worth it. I expected to find the bodies of the crew members but it was just their Id's. The countless hours and the 10 refills of the Gloo gun and the recycle grenades were wasted.
@GangsterFrankensteinComputer only a few hours, I am not the best at Metroidvania with a game that you can spend Many hours on and be able to build each time, but I am not saying that it's BAD, Just not my cup of tea
OH MY GOD THE BEGGINING BIT WHEN YOU SAID HAPPY HALLOWEEN WAS SO SMART AND CRAZY!!!! Also you talk about how underrated games are, we need to talk about how underrated you are. ❤💯
I love your choice of the soundtracks for this video, it fits the vibe of Prey perfectly. Ambient Fallout tracks to match the desolation of the station, the Flood theme from Halo kicking in during the scene with Captain Marks and the Advent, good shit.
This video is terrifyingly underrated thank you. See what I did there used your own gag. Great video definitely deserve more views and subs. Having just finished prey for the first time myself I dived into online discourse about it and im glad to see im not alone in calling a masterpiece of a game.
Thank you! I've seen thos game get a lot more recognition lately than what it got at release, thankfully. From what I've played so far, I've enjoyed the Mooncrash DLC too and would recommend it!
I bought this game in January of 2018... Played an hour of it and then stopped. Didn't play it again until Feb of 2024 and I can't believe I passed on this game for so long.
One of the stories that touched me in ways my uncle never could, was in looking through Calvino's transcribe records, I know most people think he was dealing with some mental issues but he got some neuromods removed and he forgot a lot of stuff including how his wife looked like plus he constantly had a lot of nightmares because of the phantom material residuals in his brain and had to seek psychological treatment on the base but because he was soo scared of them he stopped getting therapy.
Well, I disagree with your sentiment about the two choices ending, although I understand your viewpoint. I played this game only once and I am mostly playing as a nice gal, but as soon as I realizes it is a trick by Alex Yu, I decide my character felt so tricked, outraged, and decide to kill them. There are other reasons why a creature may be nice to each others beside empathy.. the typhoon attacks my character in the simulation so they are enemies, but the humans seems not and my character looks like one of them. For survival reason, it is better to stick with them, maybe they have more ideas of what been happening or perhaps my character have gone through this more than once and subconsciously learned what didn't work. Also, in the simulation my character have to kill a lot of typhoons, her actual people, and learn how humans been exploiting her race, a big reason to feel enraged. Anyway, keep doing what you are doing, I enjoyed the essay from beginning to end!
That's an interesting perspective that I've never thought of before. These are my favourite kinds of comments, thank you! Perhaps only because the typhon Morgan now also has the emotional humanity of Morgan, but still identifies as a Typhon, it causes this middle ground of an emotional response in favour of their typhonkind. Interesting thought!
Also 2:05:43 you can solve this problem by listening to the logs in the Talos Exterior, since the Nightmare can't appear there. This marks them as listened to and stops them from autoplaying without using up the satellite.
1:32:54 Its not just that, but if you check the crew tracker log, you'll see that only one person is not on the stations, the only survivor of the incident you never see. You can read in an email later that its a pregnant woman. The ship with the charges, is almost guaranteed to be the same ship that holds the only inhabitant of the station who isnt actually on, or floating around, the station, and its a pregnant woman. If this is not a literal trolley problem of 'save humanity but kill a pregnant woman' then i dont know what is.
It always kills me when people talk about breaking the window to the balcony because I went for the aquarium fish in the hall instead so I actually missed such a big moment that was for a smaller but still trippy moment in its place.
The way our earlier self ended up in the mental head space where it was deemed necessary to destroy the station is the exact same way they deemed it necessary to abandon the station and the exact same they they deemed it necessary to use the nullwave. Personality drift. The nightmares. Being an 'outside' perspective into your own work. All of it leads to different conclusions as time and research goes on. First backup plan was simple. Nullwave the typhon if they escape. Second plan was escape with the data to explain what happened. Third plan, blow it all up. Nothing can survive. Remember removing the neural mods resets your memory to the point you put in the neural mod. So the process is usually; install the mod, go to bed, wake up, do the tests, get truth bombed, read your notes from your self and understand. You never remember but you understand. You do your work, repeat. Sometimes you set up your backup plan in case the typhon escape, remove mods, repeat.
Thank you for the kind words! ✌️ I promise I'll have more vids on the way to make your sub worth it haha, hard to work on stuff over winter but I'll be back at it soon
1:16:37 i know the video is already released, but at least in OBS there's a plugin (downloaded separately) to capture sound only from a specified application, instead of system as a whole.
Great video, been binging Prey video essays ever since i finished the base game around a week ago. Interestingly enough, prior to playing Prey, i thought id never enjoy playing fps games simply because it just wasnt my thing, but the immense enjoyment i got out of this game and its worldbuilding and immersion has proven me otherwise :) Also, a bit of a tip regarding the Nightmare satellite lure/repellent transmissions for your possible future runs of Prey, you can actually listen to both of them while out in space after setting up the satellite and it will neither use up any of the limited uses, nor attract the nightmare (probably because you're out in the vacuum of space so where the hell is that thing gonna spawn, right?) while also letting the game know you've listened to those "unlistened" transcribe messages
Damn, that's a really good tip! 😁 I'll remember that for next time, thanks yo! And glad you enjoyed the vid. I'm not super into FPS's myself, so if you like Prey I suggest looking more into the immersive sim genre. I think it's first person more for the effect of immersing you more, but very often it's more about story and variety, with shooter combat being secondary to the player choice.
@thegavinside Yea, I'll certainly have to look at that genre more, seeing as Prey was my first imsim. For starters, i still have Mooncrash to try once the winter sale hits Steam on the 21st of Dec
kingdom come deliverance has a great blacksmithing minigame, but its accentuated by quantity, you dont need to make it every time, and you can completely ignore it. You can do it to make interesting upgrades, but you will only do it A LOT if you want to, to make money or different styles of weapons, to become a better blacksmith or whatever objective. And its not your only (or even the best way) to make money, but its a fun way to do it that immerse you in the game. Kingdom Come is very fun in the sense you literally do what you want with a lot of options, the closest to a medieval simulator I've seem.
I got that free on Epic Store and have been meaning to play it, I liked the opening that I did play but didn't have free time for an RPG at the time. Will have to revisit!
yes the nightmare will only appear once per main level and the aggressiveness of it's spawning will be decreased. another interesting fact is if you acquire many typhon abilities the gibberish that phantoms speak will start to sound like English.. your essentially becoming a typhon. stuff like that is why i love prey
2:07:30 I saw someone suggest Psychoshock as a name, and while im partial to Neuroshock myself, thats a good alternative. Still much better than 'Prey but not really'
Prey is easily in my all time top 5 favorite games. I'm a sucker for shock-like exploration immersive-sim RPGs, and I don't think any of them have crafted a more cohesive world with such flexibility in the number of ways you can approach every challenge. Prey 2017 is GOAT. In fact, I'm almost certainly going to do another play through after watching this.
The abigail-danielle relationship and its grim conclusion hit me hard emotionally, piecing all together. I found Danielle's tracker removed and hoped, even despite the vital signs being negative, that maybe abigail was alive and just removed her bracelet. While at the computer, i checked the cook and confirmed he was indeed dead. Then i saw with sinking feeling that abigail's tracker led into the kitchen and just knew at that point. Towards the end of the game, i returned and found the key card to abigail's room, as well as some more audio logs. Standing in her room, listening to one of their last audio logs end with "i love you," evidence of two people habitating the room, playing games (two controllers), I'll admit I got teary.
I always feel so weird when people talk about Thalasophobia and then fear of space. Because I completely get fear of ocean, but god I just love space. Yes, existencial terror of the size and all is known to me but generally there is not many things I would not do to go to space. As I always say, the Interstellar quote "Born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore space" is basically story of my life. Anyway, I consider Prey one of the greatest games ever made and I am so, so sad Arkane Austin will never have a chance to create another sci-fi masterpiece.
Prey is immense fun.My preferred ending is to blow the station.. and escape. I activate it, shoot January, then run for the shuttle. (It's more fun than using Alex's pod, as the garden is under Zero-G rules, and als obecause you get to see some of the people you saved!)
I think that one of the worst things about this game is the enemy design, especially the aliens, Just these Black blobs and spikes (the exeption of the mimic with its cool and scary fast movement), in my opnion they are not Very scary or interenting (like the necromorphs for exemple) after the First time you meet them, still Very good (and scary asf) game. Btw great video too, cant belive you dont have more popularity, cant wait for the DLC video (Sorry for any bad english 🇧🇷🗿)
That's actually a really good point, and I'm inclined to agree. What I do like about their design is the heavy use of darkness and how they lean into that sense of dark unknown that space is made of too, but for such flexible creatures there's really only five designs - the mimics, phantoms, telepaths, technopaths and weavers (the nightmare is basically just a giant phantom.) I like to think the phantom looks kind of humanoid because it's a mimic evolving as it tries to imitate a human. But their variations are basically just electric and fire versions. It'd be cool if they imitated different looking humans over the course of their destruction, like early cosmonauts in gooey spacesuits, or zombie-like US researchers.
@@thegavinside yeah they do feed into the fear of the unknown and blend Very well into the enviroment, but the potential was kind of wasted by making just 5 creatures, i didnt played the DLC but i Hope they have more cool desings in there. The Idea of mimics evolving like that is incredibly cool ( and disturbing) maybe If they evolved to try imitating big machinery, making something like that boss from RE Village, that uses that kind of organic gell combined with metal parts (i cant realy explain my Idea but in my Head It sounds Nice💀)
@@AndreSilva-oi5ug There are new enemy types in the DLC, unfortunately so far it seems they follow the same basic design pattern. It's mostly just their behaviour that changes (like one that burrows underground)
1:14:20 There is no evidence that proves the Nightmare will "prefer" any given spot in the station in a playthrough, however we do more or less know how it's spawning works. Inbetween encounters if Avoided the next Nightmare cannot spawn for a guranteed 20 minutes or 30 if Killed, and the Nightmare will typically announce it's spawn with a subtle shaking of the station and a faint roar if it's not in the same area as you, with under roughly 50% of the Typhon skills a Nightmare takes about an hour to spawn in again on average after Avoid or Kill is up, so 80 minutes for Avoiding and 90 for Killing, the spawn rate increases the more Typhon abilities you unlock. Essentially you get 20 or 30 minutes of freedom after a Nightmare encounter and a random amount of downtime before it spawns again somewhere in the station and we do not know how it chooses which section to spawn into, but I do know you can force it to spawn into the top floor of Life Support by climbing the pipes in the Grav-Lift room should it decide to spawn there, useful if you need to do stuff in Water Treatment but not much else, and that it will prefer to either spawn in the same area as you or in the room your closest to the entrance of (barring the GUTS and the Exterior), I've had the Nightmare intercept me in the Lobby multiple times as a result of this. As for the Reactor area woes you experienced, I think I can explain it, as well there is only really one viable entrance for it to consider when spawning and that is Life Support, so it's likely that you were just deep enough into the area that the Nightmare decided to Spawn in the area with you in it instead as from what I have noticed actually trying to properly breakdown how it spawns to something more then "it arrives quicker with more Typhon powers and prefers to spawn ahead of you", it's spawning seems to prefer "interceptions" over "pursuits" like other people have already noted, so to reiterate, by being deep enough in Reactor your essentially forcing it to use a "pursuit" spawning choice rather then an "interception" choice because both will result in an encounter in the same spots meaning that it is likely the spawn location repeatedly being the Reactor is somewhat your fault just as it being constantly in the Lobby in my playthrough is my fault, this does not mean it will NEVER spawn in "pursuit" if it can do an "interception", as I've had it "pursuit" spawn a few times right beside the entrances to rooms, like I was going to Hardware Labs once and I was almost at the door but it still spawned behind me by the main lift in the Lobby and bolted straight at me, but in the instance where it spawned at the top of the Grav lift in Life Support it was clearly trying to spawn ahead of where the game thought I was going. There is a ton of uncertainty still behind how the Nightmare spawns as it is relatively undocumented (I think I may be literally the only person to even attempt to deep-dive how it spawns and I have to do it on Xbox so I can't even dig into the game files let alone read the code to try and see if it backs up my findings) but this is the most that I have managed to deduce about it's spawning from my own tests on the spawning of the Nightmare.
1:56:26 IIRC, both of them can shoot the other one dead/incapacitated. I think I saw both outcomes through reloading. Not sure what affects it. Could be random chance…
I love the final choice at the end. You still get validation for all the choices you made in game, through the operators' commentary. And then you get offered new context about how YOU feel about those choices and the environment in which you made them. How can you trust that any of that was true? And even if it was, it's still being used to essentially brainwash you. Maybe you do feel more human, but maybe instead of empathy, you feel rage. I did a 100% non-typhon, pacifistic playthrough and that made it an even more interesting decision. I killed them. Maybe, in an imaginary epilogue, my typhon feels guilt about it. Maybe Alex succeeded after all and I've been irrevocably altered, infecting the rest of my species. It's fun to think about the ripples.
Barely started the video and just to add: first, Prey 2017 is one of my favorite games of all time and one that I try to replay at least once a year. Second, the very first time I played it? For some reason the glass I broke to leave the apartment was the aquarium in the corridor lol. I think its neat that you can leave it through more than one place, because it ties in heavily with how this game allows the player agency with how to solve things and explore it. It didn't even crossed my mind to break the balcony glass the first time I played. As a result, my first experience was literally the backdoors of the simulation where we have one to two mimics (they gave me a nice scare that first playthrough) and having to circle all around, and it was awesome, seeing the helicopter and getting to see how the simulation and its environments were done.
I think that it would be beneficial to up the video resolution from 720P to 1080P, but overall the video is of superb quality and hope to see more from you in the future :) also to just add to this video. I think that the scene after the ending is also a simulation. You can see the same "white flash" (a bug in the simulation) in the ending that you can also see in the helicopter ride which could be used to signal that it is also just a fake to make you think that you finally got out of the sim and can either still side with the humans or kill them all after finding out that you've been tricked/the human neuromods didnt work and your nature overpowered them. What do you think about this? also you very overhyped the limited O2 setting as it is extremely inconsequential and does basically nothing. And you also asked about what type of comments January would make about the nightmare on a no neuromod run/if a nightmare would even appear and the answer to that is....... that he makes no comment about it and nightmares still DO appear just at a significantly lower rate (I had just a single actual nightmare spawn on my no needles run)
Thanks for giving such in-depth feedback! Unfortunately my computer really goes to pot trying to export at 1080p, otherwise I would've really liked to, especially seeing as some of my other essays were exported at 1080p when my PC was new. I never considered that with the ending, interesting! 🤔 I'll have to go back and watch it again with that in mind. Thanks for the fresh perspective!
Just imagine what a Prey 2 could've been like. But no, we got Redfall instead. What a waste of an incredible studio.
Eh with Raphael gone it wasn’t going to work out.
I would've settled for another immersive sim period from them.
Just goes to show you can’t always rely on a studio to catch lightning in a bottle twice. Though, as history has shown it was probably the Publisher that was at fault rather than the developers.
Just imagine if they had actually made any connection to the original prey with this reboot or rendition or w.e it is. Honestly probably no connection.
Imagine if we got OG prey 2 instead of prey.
Usually I don't like amnesia stories, but Prey pulls it off.
I also like the idea that the reason we can choose Morgan's gender is because Alex was curious whether the phantom would have a preference, because obviously he'd know whether he had a bro or sis
“Hmmm, well Morgan is dead…”
*gets mom and dads DNA to make a template egg to then add the Morgans DNA to so you can get a cloneish thing without any Typhon contamination and to avoid DNA damage via age or at least mitigate it, then do Metal Gear Solid 4’s cellular memory*
Clone: *can’t tell if its a boy of a girl due to the DNA from both of the parents.*
Alex: uh… *quickly patches the problem.*
Something NOT talked about enough is how good the AI is. So many instances of phantoms or robots scouring and area looking in every nook and cranny to find your ass
It does have its quirks though, a nightmare watched me walk through a UNLOCKED DOOR into a room, he could’ve had my ass, but decided to taunt me by sitting just through the wall, in the hallway. Had me shitting bricks😂.
@@Red_Russki91 The Nightmare can't actually move through every door, so odds are it WANTED to pursue you as the Nightmare will do so relentlessly but it isn't allowed to go through that door, there are a ton of little areas where the Nightmare should be able to go but isn't allowed to.
@@Red_Russki91 I remember the Nightmare was waiting for me right at the entrance of room, and the room outside of the entrance had two fans of phantoms that could see me immediately, with not really any place to hide and if I could they would find me very quickly. The AI was so good it had me soft locked for like 2 hours 💀💀
@@mx.ollieoxenfreeJust use your crossbow with sound bullets they will go there
I mean, it depends sometimes because in my first playthrough, the nightmare that spawns in the crew cuarters just stared at me for a good 20 seconds just to insta kill me after
Nearly 3 hours of Prey? count me in!
Haha my kinda guy
I can't stop watching content on this game, or even playing the game, or trying to put into words WHY I love the game so much. I think WAY too hard, about everything. So when I have a game thay studies/presents the mind, ethical quandaries, the 'human condition' philosophy or putting that nagging feeling of "Am I doing the right thing?"
It immediately goes towards the top of my list of favorites.
@tickledpickle5671 I agree 110% it's one of my favorite games of all time now. I love it to a degree it's hard to explain, but I tried in one of my videos on the game here: th-cam.com/video/9zRzPbpCM3U/w-d-xo.htmlsi=u50_az_uT54ZHjRx
8:13 thats so crazy, thats not how i got out at all. I smashed a window, but it was this small painting or something at the end of the hallway outside my room, and I was able to jump through that instead. I was still convinced my room was real, so i searched for the exit in the hallway and got out like that
To defend the kill all ending its only really unlockable if u are moral, I think it’s suppose to be the last bad ending that says yes they succeeded in giving a Typhon empathy but in doing so sent it into a killer rage cuz they tricked and deceived it with simulations with the other option being more or less the same but the Typhon forgives them, so in the end the Typhon always gets humanity you just have to decide if it is a positive or negative outcome for the personal characters.
Bro completely forgot he could use nullwave transmitters, stun guns, and emp grenades on technopaths
my favourite weapon to upgrade has to be the stun gun, just because of quickly you can melt corrupted operators and technopaths. out of everything, being able to quickly incapacitate and enemy in one shot (unlike the gloo gun) and doing major damage against robotic enemies is so much more powerful than a bioshock level shotgun or a rapid fire artemis pistol. i wish the wrench could have been more powerful outside of chipsets, but i still love grabbing the disruptor from the hidden package in the neuromod division first thing
@@tiaanvanrensburg1032 I agree with you on that, I also love the stun gun in this game especially when fully upgraded. And funny, the first stun gun I get in the story is the one located on the second floor of the Neuromod Division lobby area. I choose to leave the one you mentioned in the secret package alone because of the side quest with December later. But yeah, the stun gun in Prey is amazing and very versatile
frrrrr technopaths are just squishy lil guys if you dunk an emp or nullwave at em, and theyre basically just free typhon materials with a stungun xD
Using a fully decked out stun gun on a technopath is satisfying as hell
I love when anyone gives this game the credit it deserves. I'm truly saddened by the fact that this type of game tends to sell badly, thus giving studios no incentive to continue making them. Yet they have some of the most passionate cult followings of any games out there
n a world where even "monopoly go" a smartphone game which outsells even Witcher 3. its most likely that the new kind of "gamer"doesnt like to think too much. therefore. we can be happy if we even get a new Prey or Nier Automata. the chanches are very low.
@@wahtari03765 dont be so reductive. No one ever talks about "monopoly go" or other popular mobile games, unless if its about how much money they can get from suckets
@@wahtari03765 Nier Automata spawned from where like aint no way u compared Prey to Nier Automata
@@vladimirakovarova8179 you missing the point what i was trying to say. an im not compairing. they are no even the same genre. but thats beside the point. which you didnt understand
@@wahtari03765 nier Automata is mediocore game why would u be happy abt it
"Colony" is a science fiction short story by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was first published in Galaxy magazine, June 1953. The plot centers on an expedition to an uncharted planet, on which the dominant, predatory alien life form is capable of precise mimicry of all kinds of objects. The size and complexity of the mimicked object can vary from simple doormats to whole spaceships with the larger objects usually attempting to trap and "absorb" humans similar to carnivorous plants.
I agreed on not liking the ending until i saw a video of someone talking about prey and eldritch horror and now i love it, maybe it wasnt intended but thinking of it from a point of alex's hubris in thinking if he just keeps testing and keeps making little changes he'll get what he wants eventually. one day after a a couple, no a dozen or even maybe a hundred terminations he finally creates a typhon with empathy. sadly its first act of consciousness after learning it's whole life was a simulation and none of it's memories are real is to return to those base instincts and kill. now alex has created the final monster, one smarter and with real intelligence and empathy that can now fully utilise all of its natural abilities to end humanity in it's entirety
I think it's just angry that it's life is a lie. Maybe it could be human but you have nothing, your brother isn't your brother, your gf isn't your gf, no one would care, even if you could integrate into humanity who would you have? They clearly see you as disposable and worth killing if need be.
I hate that they try to take the high road when they did everything the previous morgan did to you but it's okay because you're a dangerous alien right? Nah GTFOH
The thing missing from this critique on the ending (yeah, you can choose any ending and that's kinda lame and it doesn't really matter) is the whole concept of empathy. The game goes out of it's way to be not just about morality, but empathy and to tell us that the typhons don't have empathy. So Alex has taken a creature that has never experienced empathy and injected them full of it.
As someone who goes to therapy to help reduce my feelings of debilitating empathy I can somewhat appreciate how much empathy can be not just a good thing and how, as a new emotion, it could be a horror to behold, especially now that you can judge your past actions that were decided upon without empathy at all.
I watched that same video you did and I love the comparison to Eldritch Horror. This is the only story I've come across that has had the twist of humans being the unknowable eldritch beings and have it actually work and hit so perfectly. We took a creature and introduced it to ideas and feelings that it could never describe to members of it's race. We decided it must be like us. To follow Lovecraftian horror it would make sense to me that even if it made the kindest decisions in game, when the full truth and horror dawned on it, that it's mind would break under all the weight.
I’m so fucking MAD AND SAD, Arkane Austin shut down. We will likely NEVER see more Prey :((((
Same here, I will always remember them though for giving us this amazing game.
F for our Beloved
Sadly, despite how fondly it's remembered, I don't think we would have gotten one anyway. It was expensive to make and didn't sell well. I think the latter point is due to a lot of issues Arkane didn't get to make though, but it happened anyway. Regardless, it sucks we lost them because Bethesda wanted them to make a live service open world action game (which is not something the studio had ever done nor were they interested in doing) because it'd look good to buyers and they wanted someone big to buy them up.
I don't know if Prey was made by Austin or their main studio so it's still possible
They were a shell of themselves. Companies don't act like individuals, they're made of individuals, and the great people who made Arkane great left or were chased out by others who wanted to wear their skin, the same people who drove its name to the ground.
Arkane's old veterans are still around in the games industry, keep your had on a swivel and take note where the same names reappear.
The game in various places references mimics being able to well, mimic people. It was originally going to feature in the game as well, though the result was too buggy and prone to AI problems, which lead to the devs cutting the feature in the final hour. They did not remove the references to it existing though. It leads me to believe that there was indeed a mimic aboard the shuttle to Earth.
I listened to this whole video trying to fall asleep but the narrative you gave and your personability have kept me awake till 4 in the morning. Imagine my surprise when I visit your channel and see the criminally low recognition you receive for these projects. You make incredible work, and I hope you're doing well out there
That is huge praise, thank you! There's more to come for sure, I'm SO CLOSE (less than 2 weeks) until my next vid is done. I love making these vids, I just don't get as much time as I'd like to do it, hence the long upload gaps.
i love how when u install typhon abilities turrets will try to kill u
That is a nice feature, I love how it's incremental too so it doesn't happen straight away with the first install, but shows that Morgan is losing more human essence over time
make sure you have hack and if nothing else, the Typhon neuromods to change their allegiance with your mind
On a pure Typhon build, use force or electric arrow on those turrets to either disable/destroy them. But this also increases the Nightmare Typon to hunt you more that the Pure Human build. Small spaces like vents or closets are your safe options to kill it, since this game is close to 7-years old, that monster WILL glitch through to eat you!
If you install the Machine Mind Neuromod you can stop the turrets from attacking you at least long enough to go to each and hack it manually
@@XSilver_WaterX no such thing as age when talking about bugs and glitches. Bioshock 1 from 2007 has less bugs than Prey from 10 yrs later, simply one game was made by competent people while the other is made by arkane under bethesda. Bethesda games, the only games were roofs and walls are merely a suggestion. You can literally vault over shelfs in prey and end up out of bound, cuz most ceilings got no collision at all.
My favorite comparison for Prey is Metroid. People don't often think of horror when they think of Metroid (or at least they didn't until Dread), but I would argue that cosmic horror was at the game's earliest roots (just listen to the main menu theme!). In the very first game, the eponymous creatures didn't appear until near the very end of the game, but they were absolutely terrifying. These creepy, floating, vampiric jellyfish things would appear out of seemingly nowhere and beeline straight toward you, latch onto you immediately, and rapidly drain your life as you helplessly tried to remove them. The only way to remove a Metroid was to morph into a ball and frantically plant bombs until one managed to blast it off. They were also virtually impervious. The only way to kill them was to freeze them and immediately follow up with five missiles before they thawed out. It was a lot like the feeling of encountering a new Typhon far beyond your capabilities.
Metroid also had that same feeling of cloying isolation - this was the reclaimed ruins of a dead alien civilization after all - and mastery of your environment as you gained new traversal abilities and grew more familiar with the layout. It also had, in its own primitive way, a sense of problem solving as you discovered how your abilities unlocked new and hidden areas you might have been confounded by or missed entirely before. It even had the same sense of being inside a thriving ecosystem, as creatures would emerge from holes in the walls and floor, and rooms you left would become repopulated.
I see a lot of Metroid influence in Prey. Heck, the box art even looks a little like a smoky Metroid floating in the back ground above Morgan.
I've never had a chance to play any of the Metroid games, but you do make it sound very apt. I'm familiar with the term 'Metroidvania' that it coined as well and in some ways, I'd class Prey under this banner - having to revisit areas with new powers to unlock new things and places.
@@thegavinside tl:dr you should play SOMA next, even if you dont end up talking about it. Do it. I'll become a Patron or whatever to pay u to do it.
As far as games like PREY, I always think of SOMA. The questions of consciousness and humanity are nearly mirror image to PREY but SOMA doesnt allow much player choice. And the choices it does offer are pointless (not in a bad way, but the choices you make... are like 50 50 shot they matter... I will not say anything more). Its still a FANTASTIC EXPERIENCE though.
@n8zog584 I watched someone play Soma years ago but never got round to playing it myself, I'll pick it up when it goes on sale on Steam and play it on my gaming channel for you!
@@thegavinside heck yeah
"Immersive sims"/Shock games can be considered in some aspects as an evolution to Metroidvania. The main aspects of metroidvanias are included into the comprehensive design of the settings, the backtracking, the upgrades providing new means of traversal, even the occasional sequence break.
1:07:00 love that framing, actually
1:15:00 actually you can repair or gloo up an elevator shaft next to the fabricator/recycler and just leave without fighting any of them.
1:46:55 also what's so interesting about the Dahl choice to me is its basically asking if you're willing to be Alex. it's asking if you're willing to do to someone what Alex did to you with the neuromod wipes because you deem it's for the greater good of saving people. it's essentially asking you if you'd gaslight someone on the potential of saving human lives. and does them being an enemy make it easier for you? like of the game's 5 endings (you either destroy and escape, you destroy and don't escape, you set off the nullwave and escape, you set off the nullwave and don't escape, Alex's secret ending), all the 4 real ones tell Alex the same thing (see: the next paragraph). the Dahl choice is also a reflection of the story (just like the Fake Chef story is a reflection of the actual story) that's asking you questions about itself and what you're willing to do.
2:00:12 I mean, it's partly there for role-playing purposes but also, it's giving you the ability to judge people one last time, and finally decide how you feel about Alex at the end of it. this is because of the clever way and deeply unscientific way that Alex has set up the simulation in the first place. the reason the fake escape pod is not a legitimate choice is not because it's just a funny haha ending, it's because Alex won't allow the typhon that he's experimenting on to have an out from the experiment, it's inherently unscientific, the only option for you to get to the ending is to let Alex win one way or another. if you kill every human, it's telling Alex that you're willing to do whatever it takes and that you're capable of following orders, especially ones you deem as saving people (also love how Dahl actually praises you for doing his job for him if you're killing everyone). if you don't kill everybody, it's telling Alex that you're willing to do what it takes for science and helping people advance to a better society. the first option tells Alex that you care about people on a larger scale and you're willing to sacrifice the few for the many, the second option tells Alex that you care about people on a more intimate scale and think about the future and won't let humans die whenever you can save them. either way, Alex wins. because the only way to get to the ending is by making sure Alex's experiment is successful. that's why the characters at the end tell you that your motivation for doing something are impossible to judge because no matter why you did something, Alex wins either way and he gets what he wants either way, it gives you a moral quandary at the end to decide how you feel about Alex and decide if everything that he did was justified. the whole reason humanity was doomed in the first place was because people like Alex wanted to play god and transcend their place in the world and he is just doing that again by experimenting on typhon again. he is just repeating the same thing in a different way hoping for a different result. you get to decide if his experiment worked or not. you decide if humanity survives, even if there's some bad people in it like Alex. that's why there's the question about the fat man in the opening quiz, the fat man is Alex. the simulation that Alex designed is asking you if you will kill him to save humanity. no matter which way you feel about the trolley problem, the game presents it to you one last time as a culmination of its themes. i can see why some people don't like it because it's a little too gamified but the whole game is a self-reflexive statement on the nature of games (and all fiction at large) and how seriously we take them even though we know they're fake. like a lot of people assume it's a simulation within a simulation as soon as they break through the glass in the opening but they still try to save people where they can and if they don't, then at the end they get given another opportunity, this time reassured that it's real and lives are actually at stake. it's asking you the same question the game has asked you with every choice so far and this time with actual consequences because this is the last decision you make in the game, it's the culmination of your entire experience.
also the way Alex has set up the whole experiment tells us so much about his character like he's depicted himself as the bad guy in the story very clearly and he's even portrayed Talos 1 as a nightmare scenario and where the huge alpha eventually comes and kills everyone and like if the Talos 1 incident was anything like what we experienced, them escaping is what could have unleashed Typhons onto earth and caused what we see today. but we don't know if Talos 1 was like that or if it was even worse, Alex clearly managed to escape given his position of power, but what about the hundreds of crew working there? hell, Alex literally otherizes people in the simulation itself where he sees Russian prisoners as less than human and deems them worthy of being experimented on bc clearly nobody cares about them and they're expendable. and were all the characters we meet at the end actually people on Talos who uploaded their consciousness to their operators like Morgan did with October, December and January? was the only way they could escape the station by not being biomatter: something the Typhon clearly want? are they less than human because their consciousness is no longer attached to their body now? but also like the arrival of Dahl is literally asking you if you're willing to set aside your differences to work with Alex!! like will you unite to fight a common enemy or will you kill both enemies or will you just get the obstacles out of your way to your goals? I mean basically every choice in the whole game is self-reflexive and about the themes and a comment on both the game itself and games as a whole like it's extremely well done.
2:07:14 except you couldn't really sell that given the mental health implications. That was a marketing department decision. It just brings up images of electroshock therapy and no marketing department worth its salt would touch that.
fun video tho!
Really loved this recap and breakdown. I just finished Prey for the first time and have been binging video essays about it - this has been one of my favorites.
My thinking about the Shuttle: I was doing a “save as many humans as I can” playthrough and figured that if there was any chance that the humans onboard were ok they should be given the chance to survive. Moreover, I figured that the earth folks would be able to deal with any mimic outbreak anyway since I had no trouble dispatching them with my wrench :P
Fun fact!
Limited Oxygen isn't entirely limited Oxygen. As long as you keep your suit integrity high(out of yellow range), you won't end up like Danielle.
Man, this has to be the most entertaining and informative Prey recap/discussion video I`ve seen. This game is truly a gem, love it! Great video, thank you!
That's huge praise, thank you!
Dahl and his infinite military operators were nice with my many turrets. I go to the database room, set up 4 fortified turrets, shoot the military operators to distract from the turrets, and once I have a pile, I strip them of spare parts, and then attach a recycle grenade until I have enough raw resources for a while. The most fun I have, haha.
When I find a way to get a LOT of desirable resources, I go on and on. The infinite neuromods is great. Just getting the better extracting skill I can collect a lot of exotic material.
This is what's great about this game and immersive sims, I would've never thought to do that. There's so many options.
But exotic material wasn't an issue for me... Mined material was the issue since I used it for shotgun shells and gloo...I had way too much of the other materials
I did the same. Id gather every item recycle it then pile every object and body in the game in a corner and use a recycler charge.
@@crossgear3042 yeah lmao, I once spent 20 minutes moving every body and bit of furniture in an area into a big pile. Was pretty fun ngl.
I love Prey. I recently played it again, with the New Game + options. I think it's better than other games that inspired it because of how alive it feels. Talos' inside matches the outside. They have different interior designs based on the purpose of the department. If you go to a worker's station and see an email chain with X, if you go to X's station, you will see that very chain from their point of view, aside from other emails that could give further context.
If you find a corpse, you can quickly realize how they probably died, especially if they are linked to the main quest. Finding the GLOO snow man in hardware labs is also heart warming. The nerf huntress bolt caster is not just a told, but a toy for the emplyees; you can find stashes and areas were someone clearly was trying to annoy their co-workers with it. You can see romances starting between some of the employees, grudges or friendships. You mentioned the escape pods story line (there's also one of the employees trying to rig the giant screen outside to warn others, but who died attempting it. You can finish that for him) and the smuggling ring, but there's also the black box story line, where one of the employees accused his co-worker of basically stealing his work and later murdered him.
Talos was alive, and it connected with me since it came out. BTW, regarding the ending where you can help everyone, but still murder Alex, I always read it as the Typhon realizing what was going on, actively learning how to use empathy to manipulate Alex and the surviving consciousness, to then be able to get a chance and murder them. The Tyhon is born to kill, and learning how to lower a person's guards to get the kill, is basically Alex making the situation even worse.
I did have a couple of glitches, not as much as you, but the one I always had was the side quest involving Kirk Remmer. He almost never spawned, so I could never get his corpse to confirm he was turned into a phantom. I realized I had to quick save every once in a while and enter the area were he spawns in a specific time frame, otherwise, it bugs out.
I love Mooncrash as well, it gives even more context and world building. It shows that regardless of what happened in Talos, Transtar had doomed the planet. Mooncrash shows how the Typhon canonically arrived to Earth.
I've played through Prey nearly half a dozen times now, both on PC and Xbox. Yet this review showed me new things I hadn't discovered before - both the trick with Calvino's mug and the bullet stash under the entrance to Life Support. This game is still full of surprises.
Prey is one of the most important games in my life, because it lead to me finding out I had and being diagnosed with autism.
See... It was so immersive, that the big choice you make regarding whether or not you sacrifice yourself and others hit extremely hard for me. I realized during this game that I would doom the entire world if it meant the survival of myself and those I cared about.
This terrified me. I genuinely worried that this made me a psychopath, some kind of monster. After all, everyone else I talked to would have saved humanity.
So, I talked to my therapist about those feelings, and that's when he suggested I got tested. Learning that I wasn't in fact some kind of evil person, and instead centered my world around those I knew and myself was perfectly normal for those with autism.
Anyway, unrelated, but the point you make about the difficulty is something I never ran into because, uncharacteristically for me, I played the game on the absolute hardest setting (due to a recommendation from a friend.)
It makes it such an intense and terrifying experience the entire way through, and I genuinely think that it's how the game is "supposed" to be played. :D
Mind if I pin this as top comment? It's a great experience about how well-executed the idea of morality is in the game, as well as the impact games can have.
Also, I'm planning on revisiting the fame on hardest difficulty with the survival setting turned on very soon!
26:50 That SOMA music hit me hard
Have I played Prey and Mooncrash to 100% completion? Yes. Did I watch this to 100% completion? Yes again, great video!
I do think some of your complaints are resolved in Mooncrash. It introduced the traumas system and fixed the Nightmare issue with the Moon Shark
I did really like the Moon Shark encounter. I still need to complete Mooncrash but already think it's one of the best DLCs I've played
Excellent, very insightful video. Great job! This might be the push I needed to remake my own old Prey video.
As a side note, if you hack the fake cook’s freezer door and discover his secret before you’re supposed to, he cowers in a corner. That’s what happened in one of my playthroughs. I usually just smoke the fucker as soon as I gain access to the kitchen
I did not know you could do that with the freezer! 😱
This video is making me want to go back for like my 5th *Prey* through
yay, now I can this video to my other long video reviews i can rewatch. Great job
i think that no matter how many times someone has played prey, they will have missed atleast one thing. i learnt quite a lot from this video even after 4 of my own playthroughs, and i saw some things that you missed too. a game that can have not only replayability through upgrade choices, difficulty options, playstyle changes, pathing, AND meta knowledge, but also all of the little missable secrets on top? that’s something i will cherish forever
I've learnt, not just a ton of missed stuff from the commentors to this video, but also a ton of missed perspectives on the scenes and themes that i didn'trealise. I'm extra glad I made the video even more now because of the extra knowledge and discussions it's brought my way!
@@thegavinsideone of the biggest things i’d thought i’d mention is that i dont think halden graves tried to kill himself with those scissors. he knows what they’re made of, but i dont think he’s scared of the cells spreading, atleast not to that extent. with all of the writing and transcribe logs, i believe he was essentially trying to remove them himself. you know what the machine looks like that removes them, it’s not something you could do on your own, and surely alex would never authorise he do it and give up the head of neuromod development. dahl had the beta neuromods installed before the seizure of talos I and was able to have his memory wiped, but what if every single transtar crew member aboard the ship had something similar intentionally put in place. halden uses those scissors in an attempt to reverse lobotomise himself (?) praying it gets out all of the typhoon stuck in him, because that’s his only chance to do it without losing himself to the memory wipe, or worse, if alex thought he would have been too much of a threat
honestly this video is one of the best made video essays. you aren’t just reviewing a video game, show this to me before i bought prey and i damn well would have felt like i had played it. your choice of music and how you present the gameplay matches the tone of the game so well, and with how well versed you are in the story, you told it like you were there.
just wanted to show my appreciation for this masterpiece of a video, because out of all of the prey reviews, none of them do it justice like you have. …also i really need to know how you got a high quality recording of Danielle’s Semi Sacred Geometry (the song in the bar), i can’t find a clean recording and wouldn’t know where it would be in the files
Those are such incredibly nice words, thank you. I do always want to inject more than just the lateral information on stuff in my essays and give them the subject matters the heart that I feel they had put into them by the designers.
On the subject of Danielle's song, it's been a while so I can't remember exactly, but it was either A. There's a clean play of the song during the game's credits, without much sound effect or combat interference, or B. So tines when I want to capture music for a game to use in the background, I'll turn the SFX volume all the way down and the Music volume all the way up in the setting, if the game has the option. I know it's one of those because I too struggled to find that version! The version I listen to regularly is the production copy, with the male vocals instead, but I prefer Danielle's version!
@@thegavinside mind games plays during the credits, so i think it’s B, but i am also looking for danielle’s version because i too prefer hers. good tips for getting it though！
oh and dont sweat it, you really do deserve it, and i’m sorry your video isnt more recognised. out of all the prey video essays, i guess you were just late to the party? doesn’t feel like a good reason, with how good it is, should still have popped off in my mind. probably just the algorithm. but yeah, i know you’re probably busy, but i look forward to anything you might make in the future, you’ve set a high standard for yourself！
I love Prey 2017 so much, it has become my favorite casual game at this point. And even though I have played this game many times , I never get bored of it as every single play through for me ends up being unique and I always seem to find something new about the game each time.
It is possible to get many neuromods early, before going to hardware labs or even watching the first video. Once you acquire a recycler charge in the lobby, you can go back to the neuromod division and recycle the crates blocking the back entrance to Halden Graves office, where you'll find the neuromod fabrication plan and plenty of exotic materials. You will have to deal with the technopath guarding it, but that can be done.
The greatest aspect to the game in my opinion where the many things u could do in it.
From harvesting materials, choosing ur build, choosing how u fight.
The fact that gloo could be used for environmental changes aswell as combat.
The fact that u could control turrets.
And the cool ways to fight using the typhoon powers.
Don’t get me wrong the atmosphere is good but i find the gameplay overwhelmingly more present in the back of my head is what i remember most about it.
It is really good for play variety, that's another reason why I'm 7 playthroughs in. It's just got the variety to be fresh each time. The DLC seems to add to that a lot as well and really make you think outside the box.
@@thegavinside i didn’t know there was dlc, atleast i didn’t remember so thx for telling/reminding me :).
Also i came from reddit, and i liked ur video.
Thanks for coming to watch :) and yeah, I'd never played the DLC either, it has some really interesting roguelike elements though. It's called Mooncrash.
If only the game was bigger 😢
I liked this game more than Bioshock. Sue me.
The sections where you are outside the station in low G...absolutely terrifying.
I'm just gobbling up these Prey analysis ain't I. Great video dude
Thank you, and hey, I'd be happy to watch more of them too if you can point me to some great ones!
@@thegavinside Uhh my comment got deleted because of the links I guess, so here's the video titles for what you asked:
The System Shock 3 we never got. - The Nth Review
Prey (2017) - The Best Immersive Sim? - Mister No Life
Prey - A Critique of the Mind Game - Joseph Anderson
Why Prey 2017 Deserved More Attention - Gingy
Why Prey Is Arkane's Masterpiece - Boulder Punch
if you haven't seen them, a few of my favorites are:
Critical Values: In Defense of Prey and those who made it by Ludocriticism
Prey | Fictional Empathy by Leadhead
Prey | Designing Meaningful Choices by Leadhead
Prey: how an ending no one picked contextualizes eldritch horror by NewtC
Arkane Lore: Prey and the power of Empathy by Eric Crosby
Prey vs Prey by Noah Caldwell-Gervais.
highly recommend the one by Ludocriticism especially (and all his other videos), it's the one i feel gets the game the most out of anyone i've seen discussing the game's ambitious metatextual ideas. Noah's video is also great in that regard, and just a great exploration of the Points™ of the game.
What I hated about bioshock is the fact that it only gives you the illusion of making a choice. It was a glorified moral slider. In prey you can just opt out of the game rather soon and thats an ending. In bioshock you cant say duck this ans then bail. Prey has multiple great endings.
But that was the whole point of Bioshock; you can´t choose. You are a salve, after all. And everything you can do is decided by nothing but a few lines of coding.
this was a great video, really good to put on while I cried over getting my knitting wrong. a bit of constructive criticism: captions are super important for accessibility. some people are deaf or hard of hearing or have auditory processing issues and rely on captions. i know they would have improved my watching experience. automatic captions are only like 70-80% accurate on average, but those are still better than nothing most of the time.
Glad it helped, sorry about the knitting! I'm gonna sound super dumb, but I forgot you can have automatic captions, I thought I'd have to write it all by hand.
Great video, you should definitely continue making them!
Thank you mate, I hope to! Life's changed quite a bit in the past 6 months but I've got a handful I really want to make over the next while when I get chance
Head of The Production Department: "Hm, I wonder where those exotic materials, we use for creating neuromods, come from?"
Tanks full of Phantoms in the room next to his office:
I have almost 300 hours in this game
loved every one of them
The last few characters corpses I have to find are the ones in the IT room that is Locked unless you kill literally everyone in the game. I cant do that. I cant let any characters die by my hands in any game lol.
@@sam11182 I remember not realizing how to get into that room but then found a method of glitching inside by using a bunch of gloo on the door and then throwing a recycler grenade. In clearing the gloo it somehow also removes the door itself
@@EvilTim1911 XD that is hilarious! I have the PC version and that method was removed in the updates and I spent countless hours trying over and over to get in using that method but no. I had to give up.
The Cheat Engine got me in! But it was not really worth it. I expected to find the bodies of the crew members but it was just their Id's. The countless hours and the 10 refills of the Gloo gun and the recycle grenades were wasted.
how many hours do you have in Mooncrash?
@GangsterFrankensteinComputer only a few hours, I am not the best at Metroidvania with a game that you can spend Many hours on and be able to build each time, but I am not saying that it's BAD, Just not my cup of tea
A 2-hour video about Prey that opens with Subnautica music? Uhhh YES PLEASE, SIGN ME UP!
OH MY GOD THE BEGGINING BIT WHEN YOU SAID HAPPY HALLOWEEN WAS SO SMART AND CRAZY!!!!
Also you talk about how underrated games are, we need to talk about how underrated you are. ❤💯
That's very kind of you to say 😁
The golden gun DEF is more powerful than the standard gun. At max I think it does like 50% more dmg
This was a very good video and you have convinced me to give Prey another try.
Such a great game! Thanks for the video! I enjoyed it a lot, and it definitely makes me want to play it again.
Dude this video is actually so underrated, extremely well done!!
this game took away the og prey 2 i’ll never forget that
With the convict morality choice i saved him to get the code, reloaded a save, killed him and got the stuff from the room
damn...
I love your choice of the soundtracks for this video, it fits the vibe of Prey perfectly. Ambient Fallout tracks to match the desolation of the station, the Flood theme from Halo kicking in during the scene with Captain Marks and the Advent, good shit.
Awesome video dude. You deserve way more subs! Subbed.
Thank you, I've had a lot of new subs recently and it's very nice to see! 👍
"what do you mean you weren't listening ive been talking for two hours" was the perfect sendoff to this video totally caught me !
Absolutely amazing work here
This video is terrifyingly underrated
thank you. See what I did there used your own gag. Great video definitely deserve more views and subs. Having just finished prey for the first time myself I dived into online discourse about it and im glad to see im not alone in calling a masterpiece of a game.
Thank you! I've seen thos game get a lot more recognition lately than what it got at release, thankfully. From what I've played so far, I've enjoyed the Mooncrash DLC too and would recommend it!
Ive been putting off this game for so long and you got me into this game so thank you and can't wait for more good content
Aww, thank you Jaxi, I hope you have as much fun with it as I do!
I bought this game in January of 2018... Played an hour of it and then stopped. Didn't play it again until Feb of 2024 and I can't believe I passed on this game for so long.
One of the stories that touched me in ways my uncle never could, was in looking through Calvino's transcribe records, I know most people think he was dealing with some mental issues but he got some neuromods removed and he forgot a lot of stuff including how his wife looked like plus he constantly had a lot of nightmares because of the phantom material residuals in his brain and had to seek psychological treatment on the base but because he was soo scared of them he stopped getting therapy.
The station psychiatrist is terrible tbh all the audio logs of his sessions result in the patient getting angry
@@logansinclair7488 I think it was on purpose anyway, they were test subjects to him, even morgan to a degree, even tho he was his boss.
Can’t wait to have some more time to watch this in its entirety.
Thank you, I hope the chapters help for easier viewing!
"The captain fell PREY -- thank you"
subscribed
Well, I disagree with your sentiment about the two choices ending, although I understand your viewpoint. I played this game only once and I am mostly playing as a nice gal, but as soon as I realizes it is a trick by Alex Yu, I decide my character felt so tricked, outraged, and decide to kill them. There are other reasons why a creature may be nice to each others beside empathy.. the typhoon attacks my character in the simulation so they are enemies, but the humans seems not and my character looks like one of them. For survival reason, it is better to stick with them, maybe they have more ideas of what been happening or perhaps my character have gone through this more than once and subconsciously learned what didn't work. Also, in the simulation my character have to kill a lot of typhoons, her actual people, and learn how humans been exploiting her race, a big reason to feel enraged.
Anyway, keep doing what you are doing, I enjoyed the essay from beginning to end!
That's an interesting perspective that I've never thought of before. These are my favourite kinds of comments, thank you! Perhaps only because the typhon Morgan now also has the emotional humanity of Morgan, but still identifies as a Typhon, it causes this middle ground of an emotional response in favour of their typhonkind. Interesting thought!
I hope you keep doing these great essays! ^^@@thegavinside
I haven't played Prey since 2018 but loved every bit of it. This vid helped me to relive it. Good stuff man!!
Also 2:05:43 you can solve this problem by listening to the logs in the Talos Exterior, since the Nightmare can't appear there. This marks them as listened to and stops them from autoplaying without using up the satellite.
Fantastic video! Love Prey so much. Sad about the recent closure of Arkane Austin.
1:32:54 Its not just that, but if you check the crew tracker log, you'll see that only one person is not on the stations, the only survivor of the incident you never see.
You can read in an email later that its a pregnant woman.
The ship with the charges, is almost guaranteed to be the same ship that holds the only inhabitant of the station who isnt actually on, or floating around, the station, and its a pregnant woman.
If this is not a literal trolley problem of 'save humanity but kill a pregnant woman' then i dont know what is.
It always kills me when people talk about breaking the window to the balcony because I went for the aquarium fish in the hall instead so I actually missed such a big moment that was for a smaller but still trippy moment in its place.
weird movies with mark reference... autolike. great taste and loved the video.
One of my favourite channels!
This makes me wish I spent more time reading the in-game lore. I just don't have the patience.
Fantastic video. Thank you. X
The way our earlier self ended up in the mental head space where it was deemed necessary to destroy the station is the exact same way they deemed it necessary to abandon the station and the exact same they they deemed it necessary to use the nullwave. Personality drift. The nightmares. Being an 'outside' perspective into your own work. All of it leads to different conclusions as time and research goes on. First backup plan was simple. Nullwave the typhon if they escape. Second plan was escape with the data to explain what happened. Third plan, blow it all up. Nothing can survive.
Remember removing the neural mods resets your memory to the point you put in the neural mod. So the process is usually; install the mod, go to bed, wake up, do the tests, get truth bombed, read your notes from your self and understand. You never remember but you understand. You do your work, repeat. Sometimes you set up your backup plan in case the typhon escape, remove mods, repeat.
Your intro speech was as underrated as Prey itself. How this has so few views, even by the standards of a Prey video is beyond me. Subbed.
Thank you for the kind words! ✌️ I promise I'll have more vids on the way to make your sub worth it haha, hard to work on stuff over winter but I'll be back at it soon
The only people who underrated prey are people who didn't play it.
1:16:37 i know the video is already released, but at least in OBS there's a plugin (downloaded separately) to capture sound only from a specified application, instead of system as a whole.
I feel like a hack how I got a channel to 1,000 subs while you are so close. This is the production quality of at least 100,000 subs.
Thank you, you must be a lucky omen, I passed 1000 shortly after you commented!
@@thegavinside cool.
Great video, been binging Prey video essays ever since i finished the base game around a week ago. Interestingly enough, prior to playing Prey, i thought id never enjoy playing fps games simply because it just wasnt my thing, but the immense enjoyment i got out of this game and its worldbuilding and immersion has proven me otherwise :)
Also, a bit of a tip regarding the Nightmare satellite lure/repellent transmissions for your possible future runs of Prey, you can actually listen to both of them while out in space after setting up the satellite and it will neither use up any of the limited uses, nor attract the nightmare (probably because you're out in the vacuum of space so where the hell is that thing gonna spawn, right?) while also letting the game know you've listened to those "unlistened" transcribe messages
Damn, that's a really good tip! 😁 I'll remember that for next time, thanks yo! And glad you enjoyed the vid. I'm not super into FPS's myself, so if you like Prey I suggest looking more into the immersive sim genre. I think it's first person more for the effect of immersing you more, but very often it's more about story and variety, with shooter combat being secondary to the player choice.
@thegavinside Yea, I'll certainly have to look at that genre more, seeing as Prey was my first imsim. For starters, i still have Mooncrash to try once the winter sale hits Steam on the 21st of Dec
kingdom come deliverance has a great blacksmithing minigame, but its accentuated by quantity, you dont need to make it every time, and you can completely ignore it. You can do it to make interesting upgrades, but you will only do it A LOT if you want to, to make money or different styles of weapons, to become a better blacksmith or whatever objective. And its not your only (or even the best way) to make money, but its a fun way to do it that immerse you in the game.
Kingdom Come is very fun in the sense you literally do what you want with a lot of options, the closest to a medieval simulator I've seem.
I got that free on Epic Store and have been meaning to play it, I liked the opening that I did play but didn't have free time for an RPG at the time. Will have to revisit!
your video is underrated,also i didnt used any typhon implant because i was scared turrets going to shoot me
Interesting! We're there any changes to the Nightmare introduction without implants?
yes the nightmare will only appear once per main level and the aggressiveness of it's spawning will be decreased. another interesting fact is if you acquire many typhon abilities the gibberish that phantoms speak will start to sound like English.. your essentially becoming a typhon. stuff like that is why i love prey
The cystoids can actually be killed/redirected with the nerf bow. Even in the GUTS.
2:07:30 I saw someone suggest Psychoshock as a name, and while im partial to Neuroshock myself, thats a good alternative. Still much better than 'Prey but not really'
1:57:18 - does the intro music start to play when you're about to detonate Talos 1? That's quite epic moment.
Bro I need more of this guy. 1 year ago is too long he’s so good 😢
Don't worry, I'm still active! Life has gotten in the way, but I am working on a new vid when I can 😀
@@thegavinside Understandable. Hope it’s going okay for ya my man you rock! Patience is a virtue they always so I shall bide my time. 🫡
I love love LOVE this game, and I think you made so many awesome points around it.
Prey is easily in my all time top 5 favorite games. I'm a sucker for shock-like exploration immersive-sim RPGs, and I don't think any of them have crafted a more cohesive world with such flexibility in the number of ways you can approach every challenge. Prey 2017 is GOAT. In fact, I'm almost certainly going to do another play through after watching this.
This was awesome!!!
The abigail-danielle relationship and its grim conclusion hit me hard emotionally, piecing all together. I found Danielle's tracker removed and hoped, even despite the vital signs being negative, that maybe abigail was alive and just removed her bracelet. While at the computer, i checked the cook and confirmed he was indeed dead. Then i saw with sinking feeling that abigail's tracker led into the kitchen and just knew at that point.
Towards the end of the game, i returned and found the key card to abigail's room, as well as some more audio logs. Standing in her room, listening to one of their last audio logs end with "i love you," evidence of two people habitating the room, playing games (two controllers), I'll admit I got teary.
I always feel so weird when people talk about Thalasophobia and then fear of space. Because I completely get fear of ocean, but god I just love space. Yes, existencial terror of the size and all is known to me but generally there is not many things I would not do to go to space. As I always say, the Interstellar quote "Born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore space" is basically story of my life.
Anyway, I consider Prey one of the greatest games ever made and I am so, so sad Arkane Austin will never have a chance to create another sci-fi masterpiece.
Prey is immense fun.My preferred ending is to blow the station.. and escape. I activate it, shoot January, then run for the shuttle. (It's more fun than using Alex's pod, as the garden is under Zero-G rules, and als obecause you get to see some of the people you saved!)
That Amy Schumer joke cured my depression
I think that one of the worst things about this game is the enemy design, especially the aliens, Just these Black blobs and spikes (the exeption of the mimic with its cool and scary fast movement), in my opnion they are not Very scary or interenting (like the necromorphs for exemple) after the First time you meet them, still Very good (and scary asf) game.
Btw great video too, cant belive you dont have more popularity, cant wait for the DLC video
(Sorry for any bad english 🇧🇷🗿)
That's actually a really good point, and I'm inclined to agree. What I do like about their design is the heavy use of darkness and how they lean into that sense of dark unknown that space is made of too, but for such flexible creatures there's really only five designs - the mimics, phantoms, telepaths, technopaths and weavers (the nightmare is basically just a giant phantom.)
I like to think the phantom looks kind of humanoid because it's a mimic evolving as it tries to imitate a human. But their variations are basically just electric and fire versions. It'd be cool if they imitated different looking humans over the course of their destruction, like early cosmonauts in gooey spacesuits, or zombie-like US researchers.
@@thegavinside yeah they do feed into the fear of the unknown and blend Very well into the enviroment, but the potential was kind of wasted by making just 5 creatures, i didnt played the DLC but i Hope they have more cool desings in there.
The Idea of mimics evolving like that is incredibly cool ( and disturbing) maybe If they evolved to try imitating big machinery, making something like that boss from RE Village, that uses that kind of organic gell combined with metal parts (i cant realy explain my Idea but in my Head It sounds Nice💀)
@@AndreSilva-oi5ug There are new enemy types in the DLC, unfortunately so far it seems they follow the same basic design pattern. It's mostly just their behaviour that changes (like one that burrows underground)
pros: cool story
cons: it was all In Le Head
Just great! This game deserves more attention and love.
1:14:20
There is no evidence that proves the Nightmare will "prefer" any given spot in the station in a playthrough, however we do more or less know how it's spawning works.
Inbetween encounters if Avoided the next Nightmare cannot spawn for a guranteed 20 minutes or 30 if Killed, and the Nightmare will typically announce it's spawn with a subtle shaking of the station and a faint roar if it's not in the same area as you, with under roughly 50% of the Typhon skills a Nightmare takes about an hour to spawn in again on average after Avoid or Kill is up, so 80 minutes for Avoiding and 90 for Killing, the spawn rate increases the more Typhon abilities you unlock.
Essentially you get 20 or 30 minutes of freedom after a Nightmare encounter and a random amount of downtime before it spawns again somewhere in the station and we do not know how it chooses which section to spawn into, but I do know you can force it to spawn into the top floor of Life Support by climbing the pipes in the Grav-Lift room should it decide to spawn there, useful if you need to do stuff in Water Treatment but not much else,
and that it will prefer to either spawn in the same area as you or in the room your closest to the entrance of (barring the GUTS and the Exterior), I've had the Nightmare intercept me in the Lobby multiple times as a result of this.
As for the Reactor area woes you experienced, I think I can explain it, as well there is only really one viable entrance for it to consider when spawning and that is Life Support, so it's likely that you were just deep enough into the area that the Nightmare decided to Spawn in the area with you in it instead as from what I have noticed actually trying to properly breakdown how it spawns to something more then "it arrives quicker with more Typhon powers and prefers to spawn ahead of you", it's spawning seems to prefer "interceptions" over "pursuits" like other people have already noted,
so to reiterate, by being deep enough in Reactor your essentially forcing it to use a "pursuit" spawning choice rather then an "interception" choice because both will result in an encounter in the same spots meaning that it is likely the spawn location repeatedly being the Reactor is somewhat your fault just as it being constantly in the Lobby in my playthrough is my fault, this does not mean it will NEVER spawn in "pursuit" if it can do an "interception", as I've had it "pursuit" spawn a few times right beside the entrances to rooms,
like I was going to Hardware Labs once and I was almost at the door but it still spawned behind me by the main lift in the Lobby and bolted straight at me, but in the instance where it spawned at the top of the Grav lift in Life Support it was clearly trying to spawn ahead of where the game thought I was going.
There is a ton of uncertainty still behind how the Nightmare spawns as it is relatively undocumented (I think I may be literally the only person to even attempt to deep-dive how it spawns and I have to do it on Xbox so I can't even dig into the game files let alone read the code to try and see if it backs up my findings) but this is the most that I have managed to deduce about it's spawning from my own tests on the spawning of the Nightmare.
1:56:26 IIRC, both of them can shoot the other one dead/incapacitated. I think I saw both outcomes through reloading. Not sure what affects it. Could be random chance…
Prey is my favourite immersive sim of all time. It’s exceptional, and so is this video!
And Microsoft disbanded the studio that made this masterpiece. Pure insanity
Making great games unfortunately isn't great business. If you play 3 hours of this or 3000 hours of this, Arkane Studios got just as much money.
Criminally underrated channel and video holy shit. Definitely going into my videos I rewatch several times a year. Great work.
Thank you mate, I'm glad I made something for you to enjoy so much! I've got tons of similar essay ideas I'd love to develop soon
27:42 I mean it is possible to hack that safe if you do a NG+ from a save file where you have just about every power
the new vegas background music fit so well!
Common gavinside banger 🙏
💪💪
I love the final choice at the end. You still get validation for all the choices you made in game, through the operators' commentary. And then you get offered new context about how YOU feel about those choices and the environment in which you made them. How can you trust that any of that was true? And even if it was, it's still being used to essentially brainwash you. Maybe you do feel more human, but maybe instead of empathy, you feel rage.
I did a 100% non-typhon, pacifistic playthrough and that made it an even more interesting decision. I killed them. Maybe, in an imaginary epilogue, my typhon feels guilt about it. Maybe Alex succeeded after all and I've been irrevocably altered, infecting the rest of my species. It's fun to think about the ripples.
Barely started the video and just to add: first, Prey 2017 is one of my favorite games of all time and one that I try to replay at least once a year. Second, the very first time I played it? For some reason the glass I broke to leave the apartment was the aquarium in the corridor lol. I think its neat that you can leave it through more than one place, because it ties in heavily with how this game allows the player agency with how to solve things and explore it. It didn't even crossed my mind to break the balcony glass the first time I played. As a result, my first experience was literally the backdoors of the simulation where we have one to two mimics (they gave me a nice scare that first playthrough) and having to circle all around, and it was awesome, seeing the helicopter and getting to see how the simulation and its environments were done.
There is only one Prey. There ever gonna be one Prey. ...2006.
Alex is Benedict Wong. It's Kublai Khan! :o
I can't believe I never clocked that, he's one of my favourite actors too. To paraphrase him, I'm not so good at putting two and two together
I think that it would be beneficial to up the video resolution from 720P to 1080P, but overall the video is of superb quality and hope to see more from you in the future :)
also to just add to this video. I think that the scene after the ending is also a simulation. You can see the same "white flash" (a bug in the simulation) in the ending that you can also see in the helicopter ride which could be used to signal that it is also just a fake to make you think that you finally got out of the sim and can either still side with the humans or kill them all after finding out that you've been tricked/the human neuromods didnt work and your nature overpowered them. What do you think about this?
also you very overhyped the limited O2 setting as it is extremely inconsequential and does basically nothing. And you also asked about what type of comments January would make about the nightmare on a no neuromod run/if a nightmare would even appear and the answer to that is....... that he makes no comment about it and nightmares still DO appear just at a significantly lower rate (I had just a single actual nightmare spawn on my no needles run)
Thanks for giving such in-depth feedback! Unfortunately my computer really goes to pot trying to export at 1080p, otherwise I would've really liked to, especially seeing as some of my other essays were exported at 1080p when my PC was new.
I never considered that with the ending, interesting! 🤔 I'll have to go back and watch it again with that in mind. Thanks for the fresh perspective!