Prey (2017): A Part of You Again Someday

Let's have a look at Prey (2017), a famously underrated modern take on System Shock. Famous, in fact, for being underrated. If you google "prey 2017 game underrated" the general consensus is that it deserved to be more popular than it was, but for a variety of reasons the world passed it by.

Is underrated the right word? It actually got decent reviews. It was a quintessential eight-out-of-ten game, good but not great. It sold enough to justify an expansion pack, Mooncrash, which came out a year later. Almost a decade on Prey has a strong fan following, but the chances of a sequel are very slim. Part of the problem is the name, which is cursed.

See, there was another game called Prey. It was developed by Human Head Studios back in 2006. It was a sci-fi action game that used the Doom 3 engine. The developers started work on a sequel, with a plan for it to be published by Bethesda, but despite spending years on the project Bethesda pulled the plug in 2016 because they weren't impressed. Bethesda did however retain the rights to the name.

Meanwhile the Austin, Texas branch of Lyons-based Arkane Studios were working on a sci-fi follow-up to their parent company's popular open-world steampunk adventure Dishonored. For reasons known only unto themselves Bethesda mandated that Arkane's new game should be called Prey as well, even though it had nothing to do with the original Prey. There are a few similarities (a space station, variable gravity, portals, albeit of the vision-only kind) but they're just coincidence.

And so fans of the original Prey were irritated by the new Prey, because it wasn't the game they were expecting. I ignored the new Prey because I hadn't played the old Prey. And the mainstream gaming audience ignored Prey because it was a brand new franchise with a generic name. It apparently sold over a million copies across the PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, but not enough to stem widespread job losses at Arkane's Austin branch, which was eventually shut down in 2024.

Human Head, developers of the original Prey, closed in 2019, and as far as I can tell the rights to both the original and the latter-day Prey are now owned by Microsoft, the parent company of Zenimax Media, which owns Bethesda, which owned Arkane Austin. Perhaps one day Prey will live again in some form. And I will rewrite these paragraphs so that they have fewer clauses. That will be the day.

Is Prey any good? Yes. It's very good, although I have some reservations. It's fun to play but has a curiously inert plot that goes nowhere, and there isn't a strong central baddy. It doesn't really add anything to the search-drawers / read-emails / hack-computers / shoot-things genre but it has a high level of polish. I was struck by the graphic design, which takes inspiration from art deco, but in a much subtler way than BioShock. The technology is a blend of futuristic and old-fashioned, with tape reels and valves that coexist with flat panel displays and antigravity technology.

It struck me after a few hours that the recent remake of System Shock was largely pointless, because Prey did the same thing back in 2017. With just a few tweaks Prey could easily have been a new System Shock game, and perhaps in another world where it was called Something Shock - the internet suggests PsychoShock, after one of the in-game superpowers, or NeuroShock - it might have been a huge hit. But System Shock itself wasn't all that popular, so who knows.

What was System Shock? It was a first-person action-adventure game that came out in 1994. It popularised a style of video game storytelling whereby the player wakes up with amnesia in a disaster area and has to piece together the plot from audio logs and emails. This was a clever idea, because it meant that the game could tell a spooky, suspenseful story without having to animate masses of non-player characters. It had been done before (the ancient point-and-click game Portal seems to have put the genre on the map first) but Shock combined the idea with texture-mapped 3D graphics.

Shock was technically state-of-the-art, with a bunch of features that went on to become standard many years later. It had rudimentary physics puzzles, a freeform level structure that the player could explore at their leisure, voice acting for the CDROM version at a time when PC games had masses of text, some surprisingly complex maps - although they were still fundamentally two-dimensional planes with elevation rather proper 3D - and even prototypical VR support. On the downside the game only worked well on a monster PC, and it had a slow-paced, measured gameplay style that was falling out of fashion in the PC gaming world at the time.

Developers Looking Glass polished up the gameplay style with System Shock 2, which came out in 1999, but despite attracting good reviews the sequel didn't stop the company from running out of money and closing a year later. In tribute to the company Prey has lots of little references to Looking Glass, ranging from the very first keycode to the game's environmental camera system, which is also called Looking Glass.

During its short lifespan Looking Glass attracted a tonne of top talent, who went on to develop classic games of their own. Warren Spector went off to head up Deus Ex for Ion Storm Austin, and a few years later Ken Levine masterminded BioShock, which came out in 2007. BioShock was essentially System Shock 2 set underwater instead of in space. Neither of those games sold in huge numbers, although BioShock was pretty popular, but they regularly appear in best-of-all-time lists and were popular enough to spawn franchises. They are the quintessential "your favourite games developers' favourite games".

On paper Prey has no formal connection with System Shock and its heirs. One member of the development staff worked as a playtester for the original System Shock, but that's about it. But it's the same thing, really. I'm going to describe a game, and I want you to guess which game I'm talking about. I begin.

I'll clear my throat. I begin. I'm going to do it now. I begin. "The player wakes up with amnesia in a ruined space station surrounded by corpses and deadly monsters. The first door's keycode is 0451. The space station has a bunch of vertically-oriented floors that the player can visit at will. There's a garden level, a shuttle bay, a power plant, a command deck. Some parts of the game involve floating in a zero-gravity environment. The player has a novelty gun that fires rubber bullets. The storyline is told with a mixture of emails and audio logs. When confronted with a door the player can either gain access by hacking the computerised lock, or finding a keycode, or doing a bit of exploration and finding a maintenance access hatch. The game ends with the player setting the space station to self-destruct and then escaping. Towards the end of the game the maps become infested with a kind of electronic fungus."

No, the answer is not Mastertronic's 1986 volleyball game Bump, Set, Spike. It's Prey. But also System Shock. But also Prey. And also System Shock. 

Prey is essentially an updated System Shock, with the superpowers and item crafting of the sequel. Let's talk about the good stuff. Let's talk about that. The storyline begins with a clever twist. The player wakes up in an apartment in what appears to be San Francisco. They are helicoptered to a testing facility. After carrying out some science experiments that double as a means of teaching the player how to use the controls the player falls asleep. The game then seems to start again, but something has gone wrong.

"Icarus found you. Run while you can."

It turns out that the apartment is fake. The windows are a big television screen. It's a studio setup built inside a space station. The station itself is being used to conduct experiments on alien creatures that can disguise themselves as everyday objects, and also human beings, because it turns out that the mimics can be used to boost the power of the human mind. If just one of the mimics reaches Earth the consequences would be disastrous.

From that point onwards the player has to escape the test centre. They're quickly contacted by a voice on the radio - games of this nature always have a voice on the radio - who advises them to blow the whole place to kingdom come, killing everybody aboard, including the player. A drastic solution but it seems the only way. At least initially.

Unusually for this genre Prey has living non-player characters. Not all of the staff of Talos 1 die in the initial disaster. The player can meet and interact with some of his co-workers, including his brother, Alex Yu, who suggests an alternative course of action that involves lobotomising the baddies with a special transmitter. The game also presents a third solution that involves simply getting into an escape pod and flying off to call for help, which actually sounds quite reasonable, although in practice it's treated it as a non-standard game over.

Almost from the beginning I was struck by the game's polish. Prey was one of the few games outside the Crysis franchise to use Crytek's CryEngine, which copes with a range of indoors and outdoors environments with aplomb. The maps are far more detailed than Shock etc, without becoming horribly confusing, although the multi-level shuttle bay baffled me for a while. If you ever find yourself hankering to play a game where you can obsessively search every cupboard, crack every safe, and hack every computer, Prey is the game for you.

Prey takes place on a large multi-level space station, Talos 1. The player is free to explore the whole place from the very beginning of the game. The player can even go outside, and impressively the outside model of the station is more or less congruent with the inside map, so at times it's quicker to take a shortcut from one airlock to another rather negotiate the interior of the station. One issue is that the maps take a while to load, but then again my computer is ancient.

For the record I built my PC from parts in 2011. I've uploaded it to a point where it would have been a supercomputer circa 2013. It runs Prey just fine, although the game starts to chug towards the end, at which point the space station is infested with the aforementioned glowing fungus.

This kind of game usually has a mass of background posters, stickers, cruft and so forth, Prey likewise, but impressively the rooms have posters that actually make sense in context. At one point I read an email from a character who was a fan of a pianist, and after searching the room I found a poster for that very pianist, and then later in the game his name even popped up on a whiteboard, because the developers took the trouble to work out where each and every one of the station's 200-odd crew were located at the time of the disaster. This actually leads to a plot hole - there should only be a finite amount of baddies, because there were only a finite number of people on board the station to serve as raw material for the alien mimics - but I'll let that slide.

The gameplay is essentially vintage System Shock / BioShock / Deus Ex. It involves exploring the map for keycodes and quest items, with the player either hacking or unlocking or bypassing doors. Instead of giving the player experience points the reward comes from neuromods which give the player a specific perk, and also weapon upgrades that improve the player's firepower. The game gives the player all the guns early on, but they're pea-shooters until they are upgraded. I spent the whole game expecting a scene in which the player is captured and the guns are taken away, but to my surprise that never happened.

BioShock's chief innovation was that the combat was entertaining. Shock and Deux Ex were notorious for their unimpressive combat. Everything else was great, but the combat was an afterthought. Prey follows a similar path to BioShock, in the sense that it's perfectly playable as a straightforward action game, with the player having a choice between conventional weapons or psychic powers, plus a separate tied of alien-derived psychic abilities.

As with BioShock the game also encourages the player to string weapons into a combo, particularly the GLOO gun, which is the game's signature weapon. It fires rapidly-solidifying foam that can be used to create climbable steps, or alternatively it can encase the baddies, giving the player time to whack them with a wrench. Alternatively the player can use their powers to slow down time while they pump the enemy full of buckshot, or they can simply throw large objects at the monsters. How does amplifying the human mind allow a person to carry enormous weights? Again, let's move on.

Prey also adds a bunch of entertaining busywork. There's a dearth of ammunition, but the player can feed environmental waste into recycling units that turn it into raw materials, which can then be fed into a replicator to make bullets, or grenades, or health packs. This part of the game is surprisingly addictive. I found myself compulsively picking up discarded lemon peel and burned-out circuit boards so I could recycle them, and memorising the location of fabrication stations so that I would never run out of munitions.

Which reminds me of something. Games of this ilk, going back to System Shock, tend to give the player different types of bullet. Armour-piercing, explosive, coin shot and so forth. Prey doesn't have this, perhaps because it has a grounded, realistic tone. It's one of a small number of games that accounts for the fact that using firearms on board a pressurised space station is a bad idea. As such it doesn't have any conventional explosive grenades, and the firearms are designed to be weak and short-ranged.

Of the other mechanics, the hacking mini-game is unimpressive but at least straightforward. The zero-gravity sequences inside the station are annoying, but again they only last for a short while - shades of Crysis - whereas in contrast exploring the outside of the station is surprisingly fun. In a clever piece of verisimilitude the game's reployers actually work, although they're all offline.

The original System Shock was notable for its lack of player assistance. It predated quest markers. The player had to sift through a lot of background chatter to find the actual quest objectives, and then listen to another audio log to work out where they had to go. Prey on the other hand has objective markers.

Wouldn't it be great if real life had objective markers? It would save a lot of time. I reckon that most people would click on "find true love" in their quest list. Imagine following the quest marker to a graveyard somewhere, and finding that your true love died seventy-five years ago. Imagine if the quest marker pointed at yourself.

Imagine finding that your true love had been killed by a physics glitch. Prey has a few glitches. I found a corpse embedded in a chair, a broken computer that wasn't actually broken, and at one point I managed to mantle over a bunk bed and clip through the edge of the level, after which I fell to my death. But otherwise the game feels tight.

The game has a number of surprisingly smart puzzles. One perfectly legitimate way to open security doors is to shoot the door button through a narrow gap in the security glass, which works. If the player runs out of certain resources they can use a recycling grenade to transform background objects, including corpses, into raw materials. One quest involves being given some instructions by a suspicious character who becomes even more suspicious if the player actually pays attention to the character's apartment. A couple of the quests can be deliberately botched in lethal ways if the player has a sadistic sense of humour. And so on.

Do I have anything else to say about the gameplay? It's a cliche, but if you enjoyed BioShock you'll enjoy Prey. Combat has very mild stealth elements, made easier with special neuromods, but it also rewards an athletic, slow-down-time-and-jump-about approach. Mid-way through the game the player encounters THE NIGHTMARE, a huge monster that hunts the player throughout the level. It can only be vanquished temporarily. By the time it appears it's more of a psychological threat than an actual threat, but the sound design in particularly is fantastic. The creature sounds like an angry dog shouting into a plastic tube.

The score was mostly composed by Mick Gordon, who went on to do the music for Doom and Doom Eternal. In comparison Prey is subtler and creeper, more synth-heavy.

Am I damning you with faint praise, mostly-Mick-Gordon's-soundtrack-for-Prey? The thing about creepy atmosphere is that it's low-key, so for the most part it tickled my nerves rather than grabbing me by the throat.

Bad stuff? I don't want to give away the plot, but it's simultaneously clever and a little bit flat. There's no central villain. System Shock had SHODAN, and Deus Ex had Bob Page, but the baddies in Prey are just alien animals. They're rendered as sinister, ghostly shadows, which has the unfortunate side-effect of making them look more or less the same. There are only really four alien types - tiny, bigger, floating, huge - but although they have different abilities none of them really stand out. There is in theory a central boss, but it's just a larger animal. We learn very little about them.

The fact that the baddies can disguise themselves as coffee cups leads to a clever gameplay mechanic where the player can scan rooms with a special visor that reveals mimics, but it feels underutilised. Only the smaller creatures can imitate objects. The larger creatures are just generic alien baddies. They never use the shapeshifting mechanism to mess with the player. Imagine exploring a storage room, and then turning around to find that the boxes have moved. Or have they? Sadly that never happens.

A second issue is that the game spends a lot of time discussing memory, but this doesn't go anywhere. Transtar, the company that owns Talos 1, has managed to find a way to turn the alien mimics into neuromods that give the user super-powers, with the side-effect that removing a neuromod resets the player's memory to the point when the mod was installed. It makes sense and fits into the plot, but it seems to exist only to make the ending of the game work, and also so that the player can role-play as the lead character without being distracted by their actual personality. Otherwise it just feels like background detail.

I'm going to digress a bit. Horror exists on a spectrum of plausibility. Shock and Deus Ex included some objectively revolting elements, but it was hard to be disturbed by them because the presentation was so cartoonish. That was why Deus Ex: Human Revolution was so effective. By toning down the melodrama and giving the storyline an air of plausibility Human Revolution had a genuine emotional impact, because the horrific elements stood out more.

Prey on the other hand has such a realistic, low-key tone that the horror falls flat. During the course of the game the player learns that Transtar isn't just sinister, it's utterly vile, but no-one seems to care. The plot reveals that the player character is a futuristic Josef Mengele, but this is just brushed aside. The ending implies that the player's brother is a callous maniac who treats the world as his personal laboratory, with disastrous results, but nothing comes of it.

The game's ending is in theory incredibly bleak. Prey has essentially the same underlying message as Spec Ops: The Line, that sometimes the best thing to do is stop and walk away, but the game's restrained, low-key approach to drama means that it has very little emotional impact. Furthermore I kept expecting a twist. In theory the alien mimics are the good guys. The human characters treat them as a disposable resource. Their revenge on humanity is perfectly justified. I expected a twist in which the player would switch sides, or even a twist in which it would turn out that the player was a mimic all along - playing a long game of revenge - but no, nothing of the sort happens.

There are other, minor problems. For all their faults Bethesda's role-playing games, such as Fallout 4 or Skyrim, have some clever environmental storytelling. Bethesda's developers have a knack for using props to give locations life, so that a ruined bedroom with some corpses, props, and scattered notes tells a story. Prey attempts this a few times, but it very rarely works. Part of the problem is that the physics-based combat often resulted in rooms being wrecked before I had a chance to check them out. Notably the most effective bits of environmental storytelling - a double suicide, and a sequence involving a suspicious cook - take place in areas set apart from the main map.

Littered around the levels are gun turrets that can be used to block off areas from the slowly-respawning mimics. The player can upgrade them, but after a while it dawned on me that it was pointless. When the player goes through a loading zone the game seems to roll dice to determine whether the turrets have been destroyed, or not, with the result that no matter how cleverly the player positions them the turrets inevitably end up broken. They're useful for raw materials but not much else.

At the risk of second-guessing the developers it would have been nice if, Skyrim-style, parts of the map could be "cleared". Some parts of the game suggest that there might have been an ending in which the player led a bunch of survivors to retake the station, which would have been an interesting twist on the genre's conventions. But not, the surviving NPCs generally stick to one location, and despawn when the player leaves the map.

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution the hacking minigame took place in real time, which led to some tense moments where the player had to get the hack done before a guard came along, but in Prey the hacking takes place in hyperspace, so it never feels tense. The emphasis on combat rather than stealth means that the creepy atmosphere dissipates after a while, because the player ends up is strong enough that they don't have to bother hiding, they can just run straight at the enemy while blasting away.

And perhaps it's just me, but after playing so many games of this genre I'm becoming jaded by stories in which an evil corporate with a staff of evil people performs evil experiments in an evil world. That kind of storytelling was hot in the 1990s, when comics were invariably dark and edgy, but who do you root for? Prey has a couple of sympathetic characters, but even they are corporate lackies.

And that's Prey. Clever but shoulder-shrugging plot, really solid System Shock gameplay, runs well on modest hardware, fun, memorable, takes about forty hours to finish if you do most of the side-quests. Less slam-bang actiony than BioShock, but a perfectly valid modern System Shock albeit that 2017 isn't modern any more. The DLC, Mooncrash, is apparently great, but I haven't played it.

On the downside neither Prey nor Mooncrash answer the question of why The Melvins weren't more popular. Obviously they were never going to be a mainstream pop band, but they never appear in "best metal albums of all time" lists either. Is it because they didn't release a consistently good and also diverse album? Are they too weird for the mainstream, but not weird enough to tickle the fancy of people who enjoy The Dillinger Escape Plan? Do people just dismiss them as a throwback to the grunge era? I don't know.

Ode to a Bag

I don't often write about bags. But in a moment of reflection it came to me. Who has been my closest companion for as long as I remember? Who has carried my material possessions without ever faltering or asking for compensation? Who went with me to Chernobyl and Greenland without moaning about being mutated, or attacked by a musk ox?

Helena Bonham-Carter? No, sadly not. Sydney Sweeney? Again, sadly no.

Who? NO, NOT WHO. WHAT. THIS:

What is it? It's a backpack made by Airwalk. I have no idea when it came into my life. I can't remember buying it. The bag seems to have sneaked up on me. It's one of those things, like combs and pens and mirrors and towels, that just appeared. Like those little sachets of salt and pepper that accidentally fall into your bag when you visit Wetherspoon. Where do they come from? Wetherspoon, obviously, but I was trying to make a wider point about the detritus that becomes caught in our gravitational pull. For some people - for hoarders - the debris becomes so dense that there is no escape, because it takes a hard heart to reject unconditional love.

Well, dear reader, my heart is hard, but I don't want to get rid of this bag. It still functions. And no-one has ever tried to steal it, or from it, because it looks grotty. In the pictures it appears to be a deep crimson, but that's because my camera is sensitive to infrared. In visible light it's as black as the colour of my true love's heart. I don't often photograph it, but here it is, in Greenland, piggy-backed onto a bigger bag, in shadow:

It's lashed to the back of an Exped Lightning 60 rucksack. I used the little bag whenever the Lightning was packed away.

Why am I writing about it? Because it's disposable. I don't value it. I wouldn't miss it if it was damaged. But I feel guilty, because after all the abuse it has suffered it held up surprisingly well. The shiny coating is coming off but the underlying fabric is strong.

One of the zips has broken, necessitating a quick fix with some string:

What is Airwalk? Like so much of the modern world Airwalk was inspired by Jazzercise. It was one of many ripples that spread from the initial big bang of Jazzercise. We live in a world shaped by the echoes of Jazzercise. Back in the 1970s a pair of chaps in Southern California called George Yohn and Bill Mann owned a business called Items International Inc. The business imported cheap shoes from the Far East, but no-one cared until Jazzercise.

And skateboarding. I don't want to suggest that Jazzercise was the only thing that shaped the modern world. Skateboarding also played a crucial role. In the mid-80s Yohn and Mann decided that the future lay in trainers - sneakers, in the United States - so they attended a bunch of Jazzercise classes and studied a bunch of skateboarders and came up with Airwalk, a brand name that sounded a little bit skateboard-y. The company made a fortune from the trainer market, and then another fortune from the market for snowboarding and mountain biking.

Now, I'm not a businessman, so I have no idea what happened next. In 1999 the company was sold to Sunrise Capital Partners, at which point Yohn and Mann left the company. Yohn died two years later. It appears that sales collapsed, and three years later the only worthwhile part of the business was the brand name, and from that point onwards Airwalk became one of those businesses - like Atari, or Polaroid, or Kodak - where only a team of corporate lawyers can't tell if it's real or just a name. The Airwalk that made my bag almost certainly has no connection whatsoever with the Airwalk of the 1980s and 1990s.

I think the lesson is that if you want your legacy to survive and have meaning, don't sell it to a business that has "capital" in the name.

When was my bag made? I have no idea. None whatsoever. My hunch is that modern Airwalk's business model consists of buying up cheap, generic stuff from a variety of unconnected manufacturers in the Far East and slapping an Airwalk logo on it, so trying to trace a design lineage is basically impossible. Antiques experts can spot "tells" that date tables and chairs, little design elements that were fashionable one decade and unfashionable the next, but my bag is thoroughly generic.

I can find plenty of bags that have the same basic configuration, but none that look exactly the same, and despite scouring eBay and Google I can't find another bag like it. Perhaps it's not even an official Airwalk bag; perhaps it's a knock-off. Early 2000s?

It has the configuration of an office bag, with a separate pocket on the front for documents, a pocket inside for a laptop, a little zipped-up compartment below the grab-handle for earbud headphones. Beyond that the interior is one big space, which is handy for holidays. Purely by coincidence it's slightly undersized for EasyJet cabin baggage, although as of a couple of years ago it's too big for Ryanair, but stuff Ryanair. Did I take it with me to Hong Kong? No, I took a more substantial bag.

Now, over the last few months I've been learning how to ride a motorcycle, and I'm not convinced the bag will stand up to the rigours of being blasted by 50mph wind and rain, so it tends to sit unused for longer and longer periods. What will happen to this unloved, possibly-knockoff by-product of globalised capital management? It'll probably become fustier and grottier until I throw it away, or use it to dispose of hazardous waste (and then throw it away).

Or I may cut holes in it and use it as a Halloween slasher mask, but the point still stands. It is mortal, as are we all, doomed to die unmourned, but it existed, and it lived a life.