Why Was Prey (2017) So Forgettable? | Extra Punctuation
Вставка
- Опубліковано 6 кві 2022
- This episode of Extra Punctuation is brought to you by Ekster. Use our affiliate link to get 20% off your next smart wallet purchase. shop.ekster.com/theescapistma...
This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee discusses why the 2017 Prey video game from Arkane Studios was so forgettable.
Join UA-cam Memberships and support our content for Early Access to new videos, exclusive Discord perks & more for just $2 per month ►► / @theescapist
Join our growing Discord community: / discord
Subscribe to Escapist Magazine! ►► bit.ly/Sub2Escapist
Want to see the next episode a week early? Check out www.escapistmagazine.com for the latest episodes of your favorite shows.
---
---
The Escapist Merch Store ►►teespring.com/stores/the-esca...
Join us on Twitch ►► / the_escapist_official
Like us on Facebook ►► / escapistmag
Follow us on Twitter ►► / escapistmag
#ExtraPunctuation - Ігри
This episode of Extra Punctuation is brought to you by Ekster. Use our affiliate link to get 20% off your next smart wallet purchase. shop.ekster.com/theescapistmagazine
Were the other comment replies on here deleted? Lol
@@ichijofestival2576 You are correct! When a channel has been around as long as this one has, most of those 1M subs are inactive accounts at this stage.
What if prey's message was to be entirely forgettable, much like we forget our dreams? Wake up Neo!
I just gave prey 3rd chance and Im still bored to death and annoyed by this game. This game is not good, its empty, it's poorly balanced, it's unimaginative, it's absolutely non original, basically remake of system shock, non memorable, design of monsters is absolutely bland and non impressive, also there are no interesting characters and they are ugly, game also takes itself too serious and character don't have a character and don't speak too much and there are no characters on radio most of time and even there is no memorable music that plays often and sets mood. It feels like last few season of Walking dead, I mean boring dead.
One of the most memorable moments in Prey for me was the room covered in "Not a Mimic" sticky notes.
Yea, that was a really memorable bit with world building that even puts Souls games to shame.
I liked that part a lot too!
And then there’s a mimic with a sticker on it. The game is a masterpiece on so many levels.
The crew's Fatal Fortress game and the reployer-related emails were great. too. There was humor and world-building there, but it was easy to miss if someone was just playing the game like a regular shooter. The dead NPCs were more memorable than the still-alive ones.
@@bkgrila Yeah, Prey is one of the few games where I truly sought out every single audio log because I thoroughly enjoyed them. Literally the only other one that got me the same way was Control. Every other game, the Bioshocks included, I just cannot be fucked with audiologs
I personally will never forget Prey because I was gifted it at the same time that I'd been working as an overnight janitor at a college. So for a time my home life was exploring an assortment of unpopulated office spaces while being wary of unusual sounds and movements that would indicate there's a horrible monstrosity waiting to murder me, and my work life was exploring an assortment of unpopulated office spaces while jumping at any perceived unusual sounds and movements for fear of horrible monstrosities waiting to murder me. I only actually found horrible monstrosities one time, but it was a wonderfully coincidental immersion.
Was the monstrosity at your work? If so, what was it?
@@skeletonking2501 A room full of spiders that I never dared to open again. Like, all over the ceiling and walls. Big ol' nope.
@@DragonsGuy how the genuine FUCK does something like that happen
@@skeletonking2501 As far as I'm aware, they just weren't using the basement for that building at all while I was there. I hadn't been there before, so I gave it a look the first night, then never again.
@@DragonsGuy should have rid of the spiders, cleaned it out, and lived there rent free for a while.
The only line I remember from the game is:
"Don't touch anything without hitting it with a wrench."
"Wait! Check the wrench first."
"*sigh* He's right."
It's a good line.
I need to use that in a DnD game. Mimic chests are so standard they get overlooked, mimic tables/chairs/inns are forefront meme material, but what about the mimic sword that slithers up to the players gear and replaces the original?
@@edisontrent618 I feel like that's similar to the DM who made his entire campaign world made up of mimics, that just followed the players when they weren't looking. It kind of serves little purpose besides making your players pointlessly mistrustful of literally everything, which is a fantastic way of bogging your entire campaign down. Imagine never getting to reveal your BBEG because the players instead decide that they have to systematically destroy every mimic they can find, but are convinced that everything might be a mimic. OR they come across legendary loot, but because you tricked them once, they never trust their own gear and so only want to use what they already have. It's a kind of mindfuck that doesn't seem like it would play out well in most D&D settings.
@@edisontrent618 There's a great show that was sadly cancelled after the second season, "Dirk Gentley's Detective Agency," with a scene like this. They enter the holding facility for a shapeshifter, and when the mentally deficient boss starts to panic, he pulls his gun and aims it at his intelligent new partner. At first the partner starts begging him not to shoot... then he narrows his eyes. "Your gun... it's still in its holster..."
@@enderoctanus As if the BBEG isn't just the mimics they met along the way.
Obviously, yeah it wouldn't work in any sort of serious campaign, but it could definitely be a fun one-off session.
@@edisontrent618 Maybe I was too critical. I just think that while it would be funny if it happened once and was harmless, if it happened even just two times, you're going to kind of encourage a sort of paranoia that I don't think makes the game more fun if that makes sense. It's kind of like having traps in the middle of a city street when players are trying to shop. It would be too frustrating to get anything done due to how much caution you'd need.
HOWEVER. If the point of the campaign is an adventure centered around mimics, that could be pretty neat. Especially if it were done in a sort of psychological horror way. Have one of the players play a mimic for a session, while their real character is lost somewhere else and the party only figures it out after a few days of traveling and keeping their guard down around a mimic.
The ending to this episode reminds me of my favorite joke:
I killed many enemies and won many medals in the war, but do they call me war hero? No.
After the war I became a teacher and taught hundreds of kids, but do they call me teacher? No.
In retirement I bought a farm and cultivated thousands of acres full of crops, but do they call me farmer? No.
But you shag one sheep!
"Hey there, SheepFucker!"
There was a movie called The Big Bus (a bit like Airplane!), set on a nuclear powered bus, and the driver was bitter, because of the one time he'd driven a bus that got stranded in the desert, and the people on board had to eat what they could to survive.
He said; 'You eat one lousy foot, and they call you a cannibal! One lousy foot!'.
I, too, get called a welshman
One of my favorite graphic novels, "Transmetropolitan", did a similar joke:
"See that stage? Designed it myself. Do they call me Bill the builder? No. Been giving tours around this place, for years but do they call me Bill the guide? Nah. Been keeping the electricity running, too. But do they call me Bill the handyman? Well..."
(Character from off-picture) "Oi! Bill chimpfucker!"
The Reason is called Prey is that Zenimax came down from on high and told Arkane their next original game needed to be called Prey, it didn't matter what it was, it just needed to be called Prey, so they could keep the IP and it wouldn't return to Human Head studios, developers of Prey and Prey 2. The history of Prey 2 is worth researching if you want to feel dirty anytime you ever play something Zenimax has touched
Prey 2 needed to happen. Why did you remind me of this misery... I still have hope for its recovery, even tho all the plot twists and everything have been answered.
Straight up petty horse shit. That's why this game was named Prey...
@@h8today yep just treat is like a song that has the sane name as a different song. nothing to do with each other.
This comment made me feel physically ill.
That's dumb. If it's just a random game, it shouldn't retain the IP when it has nothing to do with the thing it used to associate with.
The meme-able moment in prey is when you can't find a password for a computer and it's written on a note under the desk. As a guy who works in IT, it really made me laugh.
Reading through the comments here, it's interesting that everyone's favorite moment is something different and specifically relatable to them. Maybe that's the issue Yahtzee is highlighting.
As someone who also (used to) work in IT, it made me cry, haha.
huh, I don't remember finding a password sticky note UNDER a desk. I remember several attached to the monitors......
@@Maxx__________ perhaps. I love terraria though rarely think of it, I loved parts of gmod and specific bits, like having a good base in darkrp or being good at bhopping deathrun. maybe yahtzees right, being tame and regular no matter how good it is, is bland - well no because if a game is perfect in everything (as yahtzee describes prey), its creativeness and character would also be perfected, think the fleshed out characters of team fortress 2 - which absolutely makes for memorable times.
maybe the genre was too boring?
or nothing to do but progress progress?
at the same time imagine hearing a story of someones perfect vacation at hawaii or some shit, compared to another story about some awful incident in a crackden. the crackden story would probably be more engaging, interesting, and memorable, not because its prettier but because it sparks interest
yeah, that last thought probably nails it. you know the debate that people want to negatively review games because it generates hate and debates, i.e creates activity
but then what makes interest? not imperfection, no one gives a flying fuck about shitty steam game no.48023, yet people are interested in really good arts, think lore about expertly crafted shit like half life or fnaf
so prey was forgettable probably because it was so bland. the game should have had more character and unique experiences such as having wild characters or a goofy enemy that mocks the player or having the enemies be more lively, and have them actively fear and hide and shiver from the player
Forgettable? I still remember the intro, ending and many of the bits between. Also the foam gun. NOICE game.
It didn't sell very well.
@@suddenimpulse030 we know.
By foam gun, do you mean the GLOO gun or the literal foam dart-shooting toy?
someone didn;t watch rthe entire video
Played it late in 2021 and I'm still trying to convince people to play it. I tried other isims and none compared to prey
Prey really is such a good game that is never talked about. There are a lot of memories of it for me. The first time you take the elevator, tapping on the glass with your wrench to find the person in space, The "Cook", the DnD character sheets you find. There is a lot of love sprinkled throughout the game but you might miss it if you don't take your time.
The "dance party" at the bar
Game was buggy, painfull and uninteresting for me for the first 10 hours. In second act, when you visit the crew quarters, it started to click. That's where all this cool stuff happens; tapping on glass, the cook, DnD...
I had this exact conversation with my friends when they recommended Prey to me about a year ago. I had slept on it when it came out as well, only to discover "what the fuck, this is basically System Shock 2 with a AAA polish budget". Nothing was compromised mechanically, it was rich and in-depth and beautifully designed and open ended. The GLOO gun is one of the best Gravity Gun chasers to come out for an FPS game as well, and the aesthetics of the setting were right up my alley. How come people weren't talking about this game with the same reverence as they do System Shock 2??? I couldn't get it. I'm not sure if I totally agree that Prey lacked a key "memorable" element as the culprit why (personally I did enjoy Alex Yu as a character and the moral complexity in which he's involved with the story as you unravel everything), but I definitely see the logic in it, as Prey does lack a certain degree of bombast. It's a very understated game, it doesn't really get in your face with anything it has, at least nothing on the lines of Andrew Ryan or SHODAN.
Love your analysis and agree - I adored Prey (and it's one of the best stories I've ever come across in a game, told properly through the world, the people and the mechanics and them all being intertwined), but even thinking about it from an advertising perspective - it's very hard to pin down what makes it special and *show* that to others. I think that's why.
@@bobsprock that does make sense. You'd have to find a way to effectively encapsulate it. And the only common denominators are the beginning and ending. That's hard to push. I'd say rapid fire market all the weird stuff you can get into. All of the minute esoteric details, and then advertise that there are hundreds of them.
It had Shodan. Prey has you, you from a month ago, you from a couple months ago, sack-of-potatoes brother, Russian-airplane-manufacturer-named friend, and that guy stuck on a container no one likes for some unexplained reason.
I agree that prey 2017 has the feel of the system shock 2 with the AAA polish budget. as prey 2017 a successor to system shock 2 & the game has some parts of system shock 2 put in. There a system shock connection that prey 2017’s story does start on a space station. As system shock has citadel station. With a wrench that system shock 2 & bioshock have to use as a weapon. As prey 2017’s wrench is different & is used as a weapon also.
@@yungoldman2823 I think the typhoon at the end was Morgan though. Which makes a lot of what happened relevant and real in a way.
Alex says they’ll shake things up like old times, as if the typhoon were really Morgan.
I think the simulation was to see two things, how much he was really Morgan, and how humane he was.
Morgan is constantly losing his memory, getting reset, and then caught up again, and he had personality drift going on. It being Morgan is consistent with those ideas and themes.
I think he got turned into one or something happened from putting so many typhoon nuromods in him, or both.
The most memorable moment of Prey is the song blaring at full volume while fighting monsters attracted to it. And it's fantastic!
That song f*cking slaps!
Semi Sacred Geometry! Blasting monsters with a shotgun to the beat of an absolute banger. That part was great
Honestly, the track I remember most was "Everything Is Going To Be Ok", since that track also slaps.
@@EgotisticalSlug That part blew my mind, especially how unexpected it was even though I should have expected it. I mean, I expected a trap, I just didn't expect a great song with it.
That song was amazing
I danced
The table danced
I shot the table
Fun times
i think the mimics were actualy pretty good enemies, making you distrustful of your environment even if you cant see anything hostile
They reinforce the theme of the game, that being “things are not what they initially appear to be.”
Mimics were cool. And then you get a magical mimic-identifying hat 45 minutes into the game.
the one thing i didn’t like about the mimics is that they never seemed to stay mimicked long enough to actually surprise me. Like they would see me, run off, spend half a second as a really obvious copy, then turn back into a regular enemy that was mildly annoying to fight. I wish they were coded to use mimesis longer and more often
@@dc8836I'm 4 hours in and the game hasn't given that yet.
It depends on which areas you try to get to first. On my first playthrough I also only got it a few hours into the game but on my subsequent playthroughs, knowing where it was, I would do the mission related to it earlier in the game.
One of my all time favourite games. Moment I smashed through the glass I couldn’t believe it as I stayed away from all spoilers. An unforgettable experience and an incredibly under appreciated game
The game had a bunch of incredible moments for me. When you first get the foam gun, the ability to turn into a coffee mug, going into space with the jetpack, getting a grenade that eats physics objects... all moments where I said "There's NO way you're just gonna give me this ability completely unrestricted"
The biggest issue was how the game was released, Bethesda was going through its angsty "we hate games media phase" where it refused to give out game release codes before release, and didn't buy adspace on said publications limiting its exposure before release. A lot of reviewers were not incentivised to review it, and being told they had like 24 hours to play and write a review to meet a deadline and most refused. Eventually Bethesda realised their anti-game reviewer policy hurt them and game sales and reversed it.
Then comes Prey Mooncrash, they released the DLC the same day they announced it on stage at E3... while all the games media and critics were too busy at E3 to play it, cause they all got backstage passes to see the Cyberpunk 2077 guided demo of two in-game missions.
Its weird when you see all the critic reviews on Deathloop, and it by many Arkane fans pales in comparision to Prey or Dishonoured... so why did Deathloop get reviewed so highly when its less memorable and even more generic than Prey, mostly cause none of them remember playing Prey... CAUSE THEY DIDNT! Bethesda didn't give them time to, so they ignored it.
I think Deathloop kinda strengthens Yathzee's point. Deathloop may be a worse game, but it also has a fun and vibrant retro aesthetic, it has likeable and memorable characters, and it has a concept which you can sell to people in a single sentence: "you have to kill all your targets in a single day, but every time you fail, the day resets".
I think we've got it folks. It's this. I should have been anticipating Prey like no other game, but I only knew it had come out when it appeared on the frontpage of the Steam store. I didn't even learn it was System Shock adjacent until I FUCKING PLAYED IT.
at the end of the day, sometimes it is style over substance that gets you noticed. and also a competent game publisher.
@@rkrokberg Deathloop was also a game we were hearing about for like four years, so most people were like "just come out already".
See, I really enjoyed Deathloop. By time I was lining up for the golden day, it was definitely feeling long in the tooth (this is because every single Arkane InSim I have ever played tends to be extremely easy if you spend enough time looting and exploring... I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing), but even through that point, I really enjoyed it.
Funny thing - it's basically Mooncrash, if they iterated on some of the concepts a little more and then wrote it large as a fully fledged independent game, rather than a tack-on DLC mode. Most of the complaints about Deathloop honestly just seemed to be "it's not Dishonored 3."
I thought Prey was pretty memorable, though I'm the type of player who explores obsessively and reads everything. It might not have technically have done much new, but it is still a very unique game. There aren't many other games that mix old-school System Shock/Deus Ex immersive sim design with modern polish. I loved the level design, the GLOO gun, the crew backstories, and even the crafting. I did feel the gameplay and story completely fell apart 2/3 of the way through, which soured me on replaying it. Exploring the first time was a joy, though.
you talking about the whole military operator part? god that shit sucked
@@Burger19985 Why do you say that?
Forgettable? Fuck, I love this game. Haven't played it in going on 2 or 3 years and still remember it very well, especially stuff like your first encounters with specific monsters.
Same I played it in 2021 and it's one of the top tier games that come to mind for me like Returnal, god of war 2018, hollow Knight, Prey and some others. Can't believe I didn't play it earlier I loved every second
games like this i play once and then again after a year or two to feel the same way i did the first time. Prey was kinda forgettable because no one talks about it but that just enhanced my second playtrough, its a perfect game.
Theres not that many first enemy encounters and the value in that had gone by the time of meeting first poltergeist - the scanner that works as an exposition device doesn't really help the tension with them. Or the nightmare which has a magical arcade timer and a guy giving you exposition straight up what it is instead of finding the info on some terminal or something its just flat out told to you that here we put in this tension device into the game so you can either shoot it or go sit in a pipe for 2 minutes.
I played it just recently and.. Why didn't they just get a system shock license? Why did use the prey license, when the game is nothing like prey, beyond being a space station and having some flying around sections?
The game makes good use of reusing environments though. Its decent enough but kinda just feels like they ran out of time or money with the antagonists and plots. The obvious connections to the thing is there too but.. Imagine the thing but fuzz out over every special fx with black. You'd think they ran out of money and it'd be less of an impact.
I guess what i'm trying to say is that its like system shock(1) with explicit exposition told to you but also nothing to really stand in for shodans role making it less memorable, still a fine enough game though. The enemies being black fuzz could've been a budget thing. Animating every object to have teeth and morphing features and morphing between them would've been really expensive.
The good endings a bit of a cop out too that shuts doors and makes it a bit more forgettable too, feels like a cop out - a b-movie copout that doesn't even check out.
@@lasskinn474 They already made the game and the publisher told them to name it Prey. And i think it's perfect.
@@Narko_Marko yea i could see it not being a bad name if one doesn't have context of late 90s canceled prey hype and the previous prey game(it's not that special but its a fine game for what it is)
and them talking constantly about looking glass in the game which was the studio that made system shock(the game being basically a tribute to system shock but made more lets say 2000's accessible and straight forward) - like you're constantly being bombarded with the name of a studio that made killer games from your childhood if you played uw and ss in 90s, one of which is an open world 1st person game on a space station gone awry where you wake up with no knowledge of what happened and have to piece together what happened from emails, audio logs and such and what you should do, finding enhancements to plug into your body as the level up mechanic, with a creepy atmosphere, with a lot of the former crew turned into cyborgs who've lost control of their mind and body
Seems like everyone forgot about the bit where Bethesda canceled the near complete Prey 2 because it "didn't meet their standard" and decided to reboot the Prey name with THIS instead. People who cared about Prey 2006 refused to play this and the people who didnt care about it weren't interested in another reskin of a biohock game that plays like dishonoured.
Prey was an amazing game to me, so good even that I played it 10 different times. It was so good in my opinion that whenever I'm looking at the storyline of a game I compare it to how much fun and how in depth Prey was able to make me feel. I loved that game.
Yahtzee did too, watch the actual video.
I forgot I played it
@@sleepscience_ I did, I was giving my opinion. Maybe read the actual comment.
Would you consider it better than RE2 remake?
It took me a solid 5 minutes of effort to start remembering basically anything about the game. Once I did though, I also remembered just how good that game was!
That's the point of the video though. How the hell did I forget so much about such a wonderful game. I absolutely loved that whole thing with January and December, and not knowing which to trust, and yet completely forgot about it until just now...
Prey 2017 is one of my favorite games of all time. It's a shame it was lost in the mix due to a clouded and controversial release but I loved it when I finally got around to playing it and I think it's a game that you get out what you put into it
It wasn’t forgettable at all - it was just under appreciated. It was easily one of the best games of the year.
Why didn't you mention the then?
@@ptownspazz7587The what?
@@djlethargic I'm kind of embarrassed. I literally have no idea.
@@ptownspazz7587 Hahaha you're good, I appreciate the honesty
It's one of my top 5 favorite and most memorable games
I have no idea why more people don't play it
Same, I still replay it
Oh sully Yahtzee everyone remembers passcode "0451", a immersive sim just isn't a true immersive sim if it's 1st passcode isn't 0451
Guardians of The Galaxy had the first code as 0451 and it got a chuckle out of me.
deathloop literally has an achievement for inputting 0451, even though it's not a passcode anywhere
Imo the biggest "flaw" of Prey was it's enemy design. The mimics were really cool with their spindly, stretchy, amorphous black masses... but then every other enemy was a big humanoid black mass or somesuch of lesser impact. I quite enjoyed Prey, but it's hard to vividly recall an entire race of black amorphous blobs -- those could've used a bit more to latch onto, for sure.
What? They had a few unique enemies for sure.
There's one that corrupts and controls tech (can hack turrets to become hostile), the invisible poltergeist that fucks with you, the big spawner one that resurrects dead bodies as enemies, and of course the gigantic Nightmare boss enemy. Just off the top of my head.
@@helenzlazzli They all lack character. Cool designs and battle tactics, yes, but no character to remember.
@@helenzlazzli But the issue is that they are all just "monsters". They don't really have any character. Just staying within the genre, basic enemies in System Shock were forcefully mutated/augmented people who were yelling you to get away from them and telling you they were sorry, or begging you not to shoot them because they weren't in control of their actions. Splicers in Bioshock were normal people who became junkies from overdoing gene splicing, and now they need ADAM to survive, so they try to kill you to get yours. Tyohons in Prey are just monsters. They don't have a clear goal or motivation, and they only serve as obstacles to the player.
Similarly, the presence of memorable characters, and especially the lack of a villain, also doesn't help. Shodan is remembered because they're always present and taunt you. Ryan and Fontaine were memorable because they not only interact with you, but you can see their influence in every environment you travel through. Elizabeth, Comstock, and the Luteces are memorable because they are always present and form the chains that keep the whole multiversal plot together.
On the other hand, I can't remember any characters in Prey. Yes, there was the MC's fat brother, but he had almost no presence until the endgame, and there were a few survivors and that one mercenary guy, but they weren't exactly complex characters. Now, I'm not saying this game needed something like a Handsome Jack, but a clear antagonist you had to struggle against from the beginning, or a support character who was helping you throughout the game and gave some context to what was going on, instead of the fairly vague cosmic horror and one-note quest givers, would've helped a lot.
Wait'll you see God of War 2018 with its copy pasted monsters.
Interesting contrast is with the Ing from Prime 2. Like the Typhon they're black masses, but they're infinitely memorable due to having distinct visual design on top of that and due to their tedency to just outright corrupt regular things. I vividly remember the Emperor Ing from Prime 2, while I have trouble recalling the biggest scary Typhon from Prey.
Oddly enough, I LOVED this game. It was very intelligent, the gameplay was incredibly creative and interesting, and the theme raised so many interesting philosophical questions. I think Yatzee's third theory is the correct one - there simply aren't any memorable characters in the game. Without memorable characters and quotes, you don't have much to meme with.
...I remembered the characters:(
That’s the problem i think, Prey is a current game for gamers of a gone by era. Back when gamers were educated nerds that were knowledgeable of basic science, and loved to delve into philosophical questions. Today’s gamers are self immersed, mediocre at best, ignorants.
@@mordinsolus9414 When was that, exactly? During the halcyon days of Pac-Man and the Atari? The early Metroid days of the NES? Was it when Master Chief first came along to shoot enemies by the dozen?
Oh, don't get me wrong. I loved the classic Ultima series (particularly the second trilogy), and there were always some excellent games for people wanting things to explore and learn about. But there are still lots of gamers looking to delve and explore and learn. The success of Cyberpunk 2077 is a prime example of that.
@@Archone666 probably talking about late 90s and early 2000s gaming. Look up errantal signal's channel he really digs into games like they're a real art form. He compares the original deus ex with the revolution and points out how the original tackled it's cyberpunk philosophy than revolution does.
@@Zen-rw2fz Oh, I know - I've played Deus Ex, Invisible War, and Revolution. I've also played the Ultima games. When I was in preschool I played on my parents' Atari, until one december when my brothers and I pooled our present money to buy an NES - that came with R.O.B. and Gyromite. I played the Sega Genesis in middle and high school. After I bought a PS2 I gave my PS1 to my niece and nephew. I've played PC games since the days of the Apple IIe.
My point is that there are indeed some WONDERFUL games that are considered classics for a reason... but that doesn't mean the new stuff is automatically worse. The 1990s and 2000s were a time when games were going from sprites to polygons, and then beginning to add on the skins over those polygons. There were some awesome games... and some horrible games. "Hidden Invasion" for the PS2 was so awful it LITERALLY made us nauseous (not even the storyline. The way the game's POV would immediately spin 180 degrees when you walked through a door... and since you were probably still holding down the stick you would go back through the door, making it spin AGAIN... and again... and again... while the enemies keep respawning and attacking... )
I actually played Prey about 6 months ago and I was amazed by it. I was so enthralled I played it 3 times through back to back, then played all the DLC, then played the story campaign one more time. I had a blast all through it. I was sorry to put it down, I only stopped because I felt I had finally seen everything it had to offer. Fantastic game, I hope I remember it a few years from now.
I feel like calling the characters unmemorable or the monsters generic perfectly answers your question as to why people don’t remember it. Humans love stories and love to remember stories but stories need something for the imagination. Can you see many people writing fanfic for prey characters? I can’t. I mean, undertale doesn’t have too many flaws to latch onto, but its writing is so memorable regardless. People can project lives upon the characters outside of canon, too. There’s room for imagination.
I think "People can project lives upon the characters" is the perfect way to sum it up.
The webcomic "Shortpacked" mentions that Batman is inherently funny because no matter what you envision him doing, it's comedy gold. Then it cuts to Batman gardening or beekeeping (I'm pretty sure it was one of those. Or maybe both). Sure enough, it's hilarious.
If you can instantly imagine what a character would do if their pizza arrived five minutes late, or if they were roped into participating in a sword duel, or if they were a geography teacher in High School - that's how you know you have a good character.
Honestly, Prey's most memorably character was the main character. Except he's characterized by the multiple split personalities of him that manifest as different AI characters who help you out, the personality assessments and drift catalogued by the psych profiles read out by other characters. Morgan's backstory and motivations are interesting because he's a fundamentally broken individual trying to put him mind back together. But it's told in a way that leaves a lot to the imagination. Prey did a lot of show don't tell in the best possible ways, but at times it was almost too subtle.
@@oddtail_tiger ... Hey, can I quote you on that? "If you can instantly imagine what a character would do if their pizza arrived five minutes late, or if they were roped into participating in a sword duel, or if they were a geography teacher in High School - that's how you know you have a good character." Cause I feel like that is like... the most solid character writing advice I have ever seen
@@Mirro18 sure, knock yourself out! I don't mind at all.
I don't claim credit for the thought itself. I'm obviously far from the first person to say this.
But if you like the particular way I put it into words, and want to use that specific phrasing, I'm glad to be of some small help.
Also the environment was bland. I mean think of an important moment in the game. What is around you? Metal walls and glass. What was unique? No sense of place or taste. The whole game could be remade in the in between scenes of better games.
This game is dry toast, with plain oatmeal, multivitamin, and a glass of water. Everything you need except flavor.
I think the most memeable moment is a room filled with sticky notes with "THIS IS NOT A MIMIC" or just "NOT A MIMIC". I see it from time to time in meme sites or D&D content.
I DO remember there was a d&d themed side quest where if you cheated then you got a BAD item, but if you actually went through the locations it gave you a very good item.
@@drollfurball2863 I remember that "NOT A MIMIC"-room too. Regarding the RPG-themped sidequest, I'm kinda annoyed that so far I haven't figured out how to finish it early enough into the game for the payoff to really make3 a difference.
@@taln0reich Just gotta save your resources I guess for a mass-scrapping.
I'm so glad Preys being mentioned again. It's one of my favourite games ever, despite my hatred for scary games. It's a masterpiece of writing level design and what I call, 'adaptive horror' I.e if you play with the mimic sounds off in a well lit room, it won't scare you at all, apart from maybe 1 scene hidden in a projector screen somewhere. On the other hand If you play in a dark room with high sound it will scare you shitless
TLDR Prey is amazing, go play it now
Prey is amazing, yes. Scary? No.
Except for that one area set in complete darkness.
@@mimicry5713 I've seen this discussion again and again am I'm just convinced it's a difference of imagination.
The idea of being in space or on sea far away from everything else is enough to scare me because I completely imagine being there. Add lethal aliens without a clear goal and I'm scared shitless.
@@807D14M0ND5 Oh, existential dread is absolutely an emotion Prey invokes. The space station has these occasional rumbles and makes this tearing sound and gives you this feeling of panic for a few seconds until you remember it's just random audio playing.
The problem is that, for me, I can't remember anything Prey did over a long period of time that really gave me the shivers. The game just let me become way too powerful, way too fast, to ever feel out of control after the first few hours of play.
Also, no clear goal? The game slathers you in side and main quests constantly, to the point where I got tired of picking them up.
@@mimicry5713 repetition can be fun tho
@@donkeykongisbetterthanmari7495 It can also become boring very quickly.
I was literally having a discussion with some friends the other day about how lots of big studio modern games these days get big advertising campaigns and promotion and then the game comes out and vanishes into the void like it never existed and i brought this game up, described it to them, but actually couldn't remember the name of the game. spooky that this got posted so soon after.
Ah yes, Prey 2017's ending. To me it was one of the most ballsy design choices I've ever seen in a AAA game. For the mostly everyone who didn't get obsessed with Prey's lore, the ending was pretty much designed to appear like the dumbest 'we wasted your time, none of that actually happened' ending UNLESS you paid a lot of attention to various small details and thought about the philosophical questions the main story was bringing up. This is the sort of thing that developers usually put in for their own sakes, and Prey is the only AAA game I know of that possibly damaged its own reception because of this desire.
I don't know I found every note and entry in the game and still felt rather unhappy with the ending, but that was more to do with "that choice" (you know what I mean) rather then the whole "it did but it didn't happen" sort of thing.
I can totally agree with this, especially in the context of the, let's say, _hidden_ ending. It's not actually hidden of course, but the game is very clear that isn't the ending it wants, and the tone of confused, vaguely _unsettled,_ disappointment it slaps you with for choosing that route makes so much sense in conjunction with 'proper' ending.
I think firewatch is another example of a game with a risky ending.
Oh dark souls actually do the same thing. Most players think of them as a resident evil game where you beat one hard levels after another and look at some bombastic set pieces. The thematic elements are all subtext with everybody engage in them whether intentional or not. Even the lore community are more obssessed with putting together a coherent history, cosmology and over different characters than trying to looking for the thoughts behind each narrative/design elements by devs. Those games also have intentionally anticlimatic ending and always borderline on cliffhanger. The final decision the player can make in those games are also similar to Prey, they could be the culmination of their thoughts and discovery during gameplay, or just the whim of an overpowered, unbeatable god.
However, souls games are more memorable to the vast majority of its players: the quirkiness of the characters, enemies having much more personalities, areas with more hostile designs, more weird, out there visual design... Prey isnt forgetable due to its refusal to hand hold the player down to the ending, but it played its hands too early and the mid late game were pretty uneventful.
I also liked the ending. I didn't feel that I wasted my time because nothing I did mattered...because it's a video game which are wastes of time(which I am passionate about) and nothing I do in them matters. That ending caught me completely off guard and I loved it.
I think it's okay for a game to come out, be enjoyed, and then forgotten. I'm okay with us not remembering everything everywhere for all time.
Agreed. Not every game/movie/entertainment product can stand out as 'one of the unforgettable greats' or 'unforgettable shitheaps', just like how everyone can't always be special or exemplary for one reason or the other. Heck, titles like Prey that are perfectly serviceable but unmemorable help those titles that do strike out into the cultural zeitgeist stand out all that more - Otherwise it's the "If everyone's super, then no one will be." quote from the Incredibles be put into practice.
That makes sense, but I think what yahtzee is getting at is that prey hypothetically SHOULD have been remembered better, considering it's overall quality, and now he's taking a poke at why it wasn't.
@@clev7989 Oh absolutely. I'm not disputing his points or saying that we shouldn't have a think about why a game like Prey didn't leave as much of an impact as it probably should - I'm just saying that it's okay for a game like Prey to simply exist without being as big of a name as Dark Souls or TES.
Idk man rafel colantonio lost his job at bethesda because of this game and he's one of the most innovative designers and now he's out of the AAA game sphere. I feel like that's a big loss tbh.
@@brendanlyttle7614 fair point!
Honestly for me the most memorable parts were the voice logs, after 100%ing the game you end up hearing all of them and it really adds to the world building as you learn about these now dead crew members who were living their lives and you get to hear about the outbreak happening through people's interactions and calls which can then be seen when you visit their rooms or places mentioned in voice logs. It's truly a memorable game for the sheer amount of immersion it makes you feel. Also Dr Dayo Igwe's interactions are some of my most memorable moments, from the time i had to keep reloading a save in order to stop him dying from a Nightmare, to the constant huming when i shot him with glue.
I feel like one problem that Prey's storyline had was that it was too straightforward. At the end we got that twist of it all being a dream, but the problem is that was the only twist in the story.
As soon as I learned that this universe has the technology to deepfake human voices, I immediately thought back to those videos we were shown of the protagonist talking early in the game. I was so sure that if I went back and tried to read his lips, it would show he was saying something completely different. Nope.
Without being a massively telegraphed twist villain, January, the pc's main confidant, is just bland.
I swear when you first meet January, it was like "If you dont do anything I approve of! I am going to kill all of us!"
The real fun Twist is you can shove Alien goo up your nose, get 2 minutes to escape and actually do it. Instead of the game being like "Suffer!"
It's not the same thing at all of "it's all a dream", first of all it's based of thing that did happen, it's like you play a game that was a flashback or narrated by someone, lot of game like this and it's never something to complain about.
Also , the choice you make during the game are important, it just reverse the situation where usually your choice will affect your surrounding, in prey your choices affect how you'll be judged in the end.
It's kinda strange that a massive amount of this game's failure can be blamed on the name. Prey 2006 wasn't a big game, but was remembered enough to cause confusion of "Is this a remake? A sequel? A reboot? A new game entirely?". I'm pretty sure they were originally deciding between Typhon and Neuroshock, but they had to switch it when Bethesda stepped in.
There was a documentary about making prey, and if i remember correctly when they started two things the upper management wanted: to be called prey and i think it must take place in space. They wanted to use the name since they had the rights to it and it was just collecting dust. Personally i don't care, i love the game.
I would have approved of the Neuroshock title
Not just the name, but the hype for Prey 2 created a cult following around the title and when people found out it had been cancelled and this other game had taken it's name, they weren't too happy about it.
@@c4cypher Just like "The Evil Within" should have been called "Psychohazard"
I remember hearing someone say it was supposed to be called psycoshock
a question that has bugged me ever since I learned about its existence: does Yahtzee know about the expandalone? from what I've seen it's deathloop but better.
Aye. I watched Mark Brown's piece on it and it looked pretty cool.
Didn't Yahtzee say timeloop games were his favourite? Or was that another dev
The dlc is kinda weak imho, prey is a pretty story heavy game, yet its dlc is very barebones.
@@studentt6064 Imo the DLC was stronger than the rest of the game. While the main game definetely had lots of story and lore, what's been most memorable for me were the mechanics and the ways it let me play however I wanted. Mooncrash was just an extension of that for me, letting me try stupid stuff out until that one "perfect" run. Haven't tried Deathloop yet, but I'm excited to just because of how stupid fun Mooncrash was.
@OmniGundam777 Do you have a link? I can't seem to find it.
6:30 I think this is the main thing. Prey (2017) is like a perfectly round, smooth stone you find in nature: Very interesting when you first find it because that's fairly rare, but once you've seen it, you've seen the whole thing. Maybe you put it on a shelf but you don't dwell on it (you probably even forget you have it until you happen to look directly at it.) There's nothing to dwell on.
If the station had a cartoon-y mascot like many Japanese rail stations, if the Mimics would do more than just turn into objects and wait--heck, if the Mimics would have imperfect transformations 10% of the time, so the chair-sized coffee mug stuck out, or the Mimic that couldn't decide if it wanted to be a desk or a wrench was a tell. These would have made it stick in minds more, but because the game is so polished everything flows and interacts with a tight cohesion such that nothing of note sticks out from the smooth sphere it is.
This whole video could be about The Witness, I think: When it came out it was fairly well received IIRC, but no one remembers it. The name is unremarkable and tangentially related (Heck, I had to go through my Steam library to remember the title when I thought of the game.) Aside from the odd video found at the end of the Developer Room (which few found and even fewer bothered to sit through, I assume), it's incredibly straightforward. There are odd things but, within the game, they are _common_ odd things. The ending was also kind of a nut-punch. Enjoyable while played, but once done it doesn't even stay in your short-term memory.
I don't think that The Witness was actually all that good, honestly. It was pretty bland. The puzzles were alright but the whole thing felt pointless and like it was trying to be deep but wasn't. It wasn't a terrible game but it didn't excel in any way.
@@TitaniumDragon I thought the gameplay (the puzzles, including environmental ones) were excellent, though they had little context and did get a bit repetitious. There was a story hinted at but never expanded upon, just some recordings that were spoken quotes. (Maybe there is specific lore you have to really analyze the environment to find; I didn't care enough to nor bother to look up if someone else had.) Regardless, I would place Prey (2017) well above it.
Can't speak for anyone else but for me it's one of the best and most memorable modern games I've played in the 2010s
I actually thought the reason prey was tossed to the back of the mind was because it's characters where so forgettable. Honestly I can't remember the name of any named character.
I loved it for the gameplay personally, everything was meh
I think it was Morgan Yu? and I'm not sure how I know that. Perhaps I'm remembering it from the ZP review.
As someone who has only watched the odd snippet of the game, it has named characters aside from you- yu?
Yeah, you have a yu brother
Some named robots that aid you towards an ending. January and December maybe another
Why then was half life such a hit? Gordon Freeman and the ensemble of scientists and guards that nudged him to the next objective were hardly memorable or well fleshed out.
I watched someone play it on UA-cam and the characters I vaguely remember are:(spoilers)
-Your brother
-the npc version of the mc
-The crazy criminal that was pretending to be the chef
-some robot briefcases named after the months of the year
-some criminal that the player could attack with mimics
-... some engineers? I think they kept dying before you get to see them.
That's all I got. No names.
Most of the interesting character stuff is in the emails and audio logs, like System Shock. The dead crew members often have a lot of backstory scattered around that's easy to miss.
I thought the story with the two gay engineers was pretty good. I don't remember names, but honestly that isn't a big deal for me.
All the human staff on board the Talos 1 had full names, even specific jobs. Maybe that didn't help to make them stand out, but they did have them.
@@NAJALU Danielle Sho and something something. They were both asian. Also, I found out that the voice actor for Danielle is the same one who voiced Katara in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Whenever I think of Prey I think of what could have been, some of you might know, that game that you saw when Prey 2 was first announced and the subsequent gameplay showcase of it. An immersive sim where you play as a space bounty hunter from Earth, similar but not really to High on Life if that game put more thought into the being a bounty hunter part of the game. It looked like it could be some serious fun, the game from my memory was said to be completely done with development too. Then some corporate bullshit happened that I can't really see through and the plug got pulled on it. Now we have Prey (2017). I liked Prey (2017), I liked it a lot, but it didn't have to be called Prey, this game deserves more than to just be a reboot of a series that everyone was waiting for the sequel on. That and I just want to play Prey 2.
except that's ALL bs prey 2017 was already in development LONG before prey 2 was canceled in fact it was ALREADY pretty much done when the name prey was FORCED upon it by Bethesda onto Arkanes game, not just that but the game was NEVER a spiritual succesor or reboot NOR was it labeled internally or marketed as that it was fucking Retarded ass game Journalists who called it that. Keep in mind by the time prey 2 was already canned Prey 2017 was OVER half way done if not almost done, Also the prey 2 game wasn't an insim it was an action bounty hunting fps basically
Honestly this has to be one of my favorite games of all time. It never got the respect it deserves
People seem to be confused he didn't say it was bad he said it's forgettable and didn't gain mass appeal which is true
Glad you actually watched AND listened to the video.
Then he proceeded to mischaracterize the game's plot, characters, ending and all we love about it. Yeah sure. Not to mention the amount of people in the comments saying they haven't even remotely forgot anything about the game. The only reason its "forgotten" is because it was never that well known in the first place, and the reason it wasn't is because its 1: immersive sim, and 2: was heavily advertised as Doom in horror tentacle decorations, which the game isn't.
I found Prey far from forgettable. I remember it pretty clearly, and I look forward to finally getting around to the expansion content.
I played it for the first time a few weeks ago when it was free on Epic, and honestly its one of the most fun I've had in an FPS that didn't have Doom in the title in years.
I think its biggest problem is honestly lack of marketing and fucking up the title so bad.
I love how games being free on Epic tends to revive them out of multiple people playing them
I read some comments suggesting something along "Neuroshock" I'm so dissapointed that this wasn't the actual title
I absolutely love this game. I'm still surprised it didn't get more attention and appreciation.
Two things, "would you kindly" and Shodan.
Both Bioshock and System Shock 2 had a great build up, story and twist.
Prey never had that "grab" I remember playing it, and the story but not the characters, or missions.
Like the garden mission in Bioshock or System Shock 2, you remember having to keep yourself alive. Did that happen in Pray? Not sure....
Yes I believe that is what is missing from Prey, the main "narrative" being though two characters driving you on, and the plot and game. Both had likable and memorable voice. I can even remember both of them speaking now. Did Prey have someone speaking to you? I played it 6 months ago thinking I'd give it another play through, yes I completed it and enjoyed it. But can I remember anyone speaking to me? Only my potato twin brother.
Bro did you have a stroke?
@@pete2097 Prey generally had the January AI speaking to the player throughout the game (unless you killed them, and then potentially you could've been guided by the much glitchier and weirder December)
@@pete2097 Prey did have someone speaking to you, but if you played the male version of Morgan Yu, it was most likely putting you to sleep. Terrible VO work for the male version, but female Morgan (and by extension December and January) are pretty memorable, imo.
was it ever really a twist with shodan? she's on the box and the game hints at it pretty heavily
The bad name was one of my theories too. The theory in which it's too perfect doesn't work because people love talking about the shitty name! Your final theory is definitely the best one. It's not memorable because it has nothing memorable about it. Being good, competent, even original, is not necessarily memorable. The closest the game has to a memorable moment was the glass breaking part. Everyone seems to remember that being a really cool moment.
In addition to the bland name, I think it just wasn't marketed well. I hadn't even heard of it until years after release, when I found it on an Xbox Live sale for dirt cheap. Gave it a try and I couldn't put it down for weeks. I wanted to talk to people about it but none of my friends or siblings had heard of it either.
There were a few memorable moments, notably one when you first use a neuromod, but overall, again, people seems not to remember them too much.
Genuinely there's FUCK loads of memorable moments but people barely played the game and then ditched it or just forgot it cuz they didn't engage with it
I think you hit the nail on the head with the "arrow to the knee" bit. As insufferable as that meme was, it was something external to the game that added weight to the fandom and discourse around the game. Prey didn't have any of that - it was purely good gameplay without any hooks, narrative or otherwise. Even now the only thing I can really attribute to Prey in discussion is that it was "the game that tricks you at the beginning into thinking its set somewhere else then becomes like system shock" which is not only not a good 'hook' (because the rest of the game is nothing like the beginning) but it's not distinguishable from the dozen other games that do the same thing.
@EL AUTENTICO that's memorable for the Wrong reason
That was a really good opening ngl
@VyzeeXTC And a picture of the green m&m is any less spergy? Get off your high horse.
No? The twist was also Alex's intentions too, not just that but the fake cook was a great story hook and MORE
Also the game had STELLAR atmosphere, world building, fantastic art design, great gameplay, a underated BANGER ost and MORE
I never played Prey, but a line from Yahtzee's review OF Prey always pops up in my mind, when he's talking about the mimic jumping at you, and "you feel like a gorilla in a phone booth with a wasp."
The visual in my mind it gave me made me laugh till it hurt.
People saying "I will not take this slander the game was great" he literally says a minute in that the problem with the game isn't that is bad but that it didn't left the impact it should have for such a good game
I mean, basically. The game is great, it does nothing that wrong, but it never excels in a way that's memorable.
UA-cam viewers not watching youtube moment
I love Prey to death but it's definitely not flawless. It lacks a bit for enemy variety and the last fourth of the game is mostly backtracking.
@@MrWhygodwhy what living human expects a human made product to be flawless? what does this qualifier add to the conversation?
@@xalener Yhatzee said the game was too perfect? Which the commenter was referencing? I'm dismantling that line of thinking. Why are you being aggressive anyway? Go bother someone else, I don't care for your shit.
“Style over substance” is an issue plaguing much of the gaming industry, but Prey achieved the much more impressive, yet equally problematic feat of “substance over style”.
🤔 Those are not equal problems in my book.
Which is a shame. In my opinion "substance over style" issue can be easily fixed compared to the "style over substance" counterpart. If we're taking the forgettable characters to be the issue, fixing the writing would be much easier than fixing core gameplay mechanics. Although, I suspect there's more to it than just characters and writing.
I think it's less "substance over style" and more "substance *without* style"
To me it had the same problem as all games that rest on large empty spaces, alone and trying to survive, etc. Its a cool concept when your in the game but afterwards it makes it hard to recall any impactful moments because of the lack of meaningful contact with other characters. Even Dark Souls has other characters that give points of life to an otherwise bleak world.
You're not wrong. It's a really great empty space, but it's still an empty space.
TBH the Dark Souls games are pretty forgettable apart from the characters and a small number of bosses.
I will never forget it. I am in a constant state of wanting to replay it every few months.
"And at some point... I forgot her name... HER. NAME." *Calvino's audiolog stops*
This was really interesting to listen to, and makes me want to give Prey another go coincidentally
same here. bought it but never played it. once elden ring looses its luster, i'll have to give it another go.
Try Prey 2006
@@BluntsNBeatz except for the marketing it was of a higher budget with better tech behind, for "low budget", try a game called Chrome that came out around the same time
I never finished or remembered Prey because the enemy design was so incredibly bland. Other immersive sim enemies had memorable characterization or sympathetic goals. Deus Ex's guards were either freedom fighters or former coworkers and System Shock 2's zombie's had a great deal of personality. Prey had a series of featureless black smudges that were neither sympathetic or particularly menacing. I do hope another game adopts the shapeshifter enemy idea, because that design choice transformed the passive collectathon sections into tense moments of risk and reward. Now what if the suspicious extra office chair transformed into an enemy as iconic as ones from other immersive sims? That would be cool.
Prey had a really strong opening and then it got really repetitive towards the midgame. It could really have used some more enemy variety
Actually, that's a good observation. It had a strong opening, and a fairly involved endgame, but the mid-game was just so repetitive and boring, that's what most people remember. It also kills the replay value, because while the level design is ingenious and allows so many different ways to approach problems (there was a locked room where I counted something like seven different ways you could get it, including hitting a button with a NERF gun), the slow grind of the mid-game turns most player off. I know it did for me, as I only did a single playthrough, and I had to grind my teeth to force myself through a lot of the boring parts.
I got a counterpoint, i was fine with whole "I ripped out my psimods and need to get off the ship" but having to go through the simulation just killed my interest and almost made me turn it off like really? Going to hit me over the head.
Also could of used more weapons, upgrades that didnt need like 5 psienhancers to upgrade my shotgun and the game freaking out that i got alien powers... ironic considering you are a alien goo man and the game is like "We got a commie in the base!" Even if you did the good stuff and save the heads of the labs?
@@Subject_Keter what simulation are you talking about?
Exactly.
I love immersive sims, played it on the highest difficulty (which is quite doable) and enjoyed it a lot but the last third of the game was a drag.
I think that prey's memorial moments are more personal moments rather then an overarching boss like bioshock or system shock. turning on subtitles and finding out what phantoms say sent chills down my spine, the toilet seat in the character choice being up or down if you're male or female, the secretary outside morgan's office saying her boss is smoking hot if you pick male morgan, staff member playing with the nerf crossbow from a lift, among plenty others. small moments like those really stuck out to me and gave such character to talos itself, a melting pot of gifted, strict, and people just trying to have fun in the middle of a dark ocean
then there's those light bulb moments like using the crossbow to hit buttons, screens, or distractions for cystoids and mastering the combat systems like abusing the phantom ragdoll with the wrench to stun lock them. it rewarded the player with knowledge and how to create spectacles in those tense and fleeting combat encounters, rather then the game itself creating spectacles
One of the best games I've ever played with unforgettable art, music, atmosphere, great story, and fun gameplay scratching just the right itches.
My only complaint was dumb binary moral choices again. Why is giving a woman an audio recording of her father being tortured and killed the "good" choice? How about just deleting the audio log and saying to her "yeah, your father's name was in the logs, he died there, sorry"... Don't give her this nightmare fuel for the rest of her life lol
@@fleshworm I get what you're saying, but I guess part of the nuance to that choice was for the MC to not omit anything, i.e. their involvement in the death. I don't think the full recording was necessary, either, but the choice itself was more about whether you accept guilt for your actions or not.
@@fleshworm oh my god, that is a huge problem with both this game and dishonoured.
Like in the first dishonoured, the non-lethal option for targets are supposed to be this sort of “poetic justice”,but a few of them just end up either dead or in a situation where they’ll prolly die.
For the head overseer guy, you can get him excommunicated, and a few levels later you see him in slums, sick with the rat plauge.
For the twins, you have this gang leader guy, ship them off to their own mine, which has been known to work people to death!, and their tongues have been cut out so they can’t get help, and they’re heads have been shaved so no one will recognise them.
And then for lady Boyle, when you’re at the party, some creepy stalker dude asks you to render her unconscious and DELIVER HER to him at this little boat, where he goes away and says to the unconscious lady Boyle that “she will learn to love me in time”.
Like, dude, this is the guy you here horror stories about in real life, are you sure that mercy killing isnt a thing here? Or at least make the other options not fucking insane.
3:11
On this topic yeah not only are you completely right about this but the original title was literally “Psycho-Shock”.
That made a lot more sense with the concept of the game AND made the System Shock/Bioshock spiritual succession even more clear, but it was changed to Prey because they had the IP and wanted to use it and this new game was also a weird spaceship alien shooter game that they had doubts about the profitability of.
I've heard "Neuro-Shock" being thrown around. Honestly, that's not bad at all.
@@BluntsNBeatz Oh that’s cause I made it up.
Probably one of the most memorable games I’ve never played
Me too, big flashy epic set pieces and overly verbose theatrical characters don't make a game memorable for me. Exiting an airlock for the first time to zero fanfare, and being left to discover the vast scale of your situation for yourself...that's memorable. It's like Alien or Blade Runner. Those who know, know, everyone else will realise how good it is 20 years from now when we are still talking about it.
Originally I stopped playing Prey at an early stage as travelling between areas spawned monsters and randomly damaged turrets I left for myself. It just bugged me that the enemies weren't actually damaging the turrets, instead they just got randomly damaged. Like I left half a dozen turret in a place, all turned towards the one entrance and and a minute later I come back after a loading screen and 4 were destroyed, no sign of combat. Like... if it was such a brutally strong enemy that it could frontally assault that many turrets and take out 4, yet not a bullet hole, no damage in the furniture and it only destroyed 4 turrets, the rest weren't even hit...
Not to mention hunting for materials became a direct loss since you had to spend materials to kill enemies and at the early stages you couldn't just sneak by that easily nor could you source so much materials. After all the materials didn't respawn while enemies did so it really riled up my tactical, hoarder mind.
Years later I restarted and knowing all that abandoned that playstyle and just went ham on the enemies. Game rapidly devolves into you hunting them instead of the other way around and from that point on I didn't need to worry about losing materials to fighting as the enemy became my materials. It was a bloody harvest.
Was fun but when a game acts like you need to sneak around but effectively punishes you if you do just that... yeah. I did enjoy it a lot but I don't see myself replaying it again. The moon dlc I outright hated as I loath anything with a time limit or with mandatory deaths/loss. It felt like "that cinematic where your character gets in trouble out of your control": The Game. Honestly I feel like that about a lot of roguelikes.
TBH I've personally had this struggle with all Arkane games. I can see the care and craft that goes into them all, but something about them leaves me cold.
the gameplay is the focus, the story shouldn't;'t be what ppl focus on but they always seem to :/ a shame
@@Sion67Productions i actually liked the dishonored series, but i gotta say that i think my experience was a little bit compromised by me being a console player, those games are totally meant to be played on mouse n keyboard.
Arkane's games have a depth of a sandbox game, limited by the linear structure of (barely any) plot.
I always feel like I have to go out of my way to use some of the mechanics (more so in Dark Messiah and Prey), but there is little incentive to do so, usually you can just follow the designated path and achieve largely the same.
> the gameplay is the focus
Then the gameplay better have some memorable qualities to it. Prey didn't do that, the mimic mechanic lost its gimmick almost immediately and was largely useless in the hands of the player, the GELL cannon was underutilized and the zero-g sections were a pain. Hell, even with the Nightmare mechanic you can just wait it out, never having to deal with it.
I personally think they’re good at creating gameplay concepts (the powers/weapons in Dishonored and Prey are cool and allow for many combinations) but they do a very poor job of presenting the worlds they’ve made as well as the characters. In the case of Dishonored, I never cared about the plot because I didn’t care about Corvo or any of his associates; there just wasn’t enough characterization there for me to want to revisit it. I didn’t play much of Prey, but it struck me as having the same issue; a world with a lot of good ideas there, but it just wasn’t presented in a way that made me care.
@@Garrus1995 i pretty much agree with you there, art design is what made me care with dishonored's world, the story was never impactful and characters are bland, but since i only played dishonored i still want to go through prey and deathloop because they all have at least one thing that can draw your attention.
Prey 2017 was my GOTY and one my favorite experiences in gaming. To me it was a better Bioshock.
Main story beyond some killer twists (if you had no spoilers going in) was admittedly kind of weak, compared to the world building you get from all the notes and computers (that stuff was grade A amazing), gunplay was satisfying as hell (but suffered from lack of enemy variety), breaking down materials from random stuff around the station and using a futuristic 3D printer to turn it into useful things without much restriction was genius.
Ending certainly had more to be desired but all-in-all, it is in my mind one of the MOST memorable gaming experiences I've ever had. God I loved that game.
ill never forget that damn jumpscare. that one got me good
I loved Prey to bits and I can remember basically all the plot beats, but it really wasn't a mainstream game. The combat requires a bit more effort than many people are prepared to put in, and you can handicap yourself badly if you don't think your build through. The enemies are varied but all basically one flavour, there are no stomping bots or apologetic kamikaze protocol droids.
It's breathtaking art deco but it's sterile and hostile - and if you don't like feeling constantly threatened it can be frustrating. It's a bit of a weird spot.
I got halfway through Prey and, while it’s a perfectly good game on a mechanic level, I just kind of didn’t feel like finishing it….. no idea why
It's one of those games where you know you're going off the deep end more and more as you progress - and eventually find yourself at a tipping point where you can't decide if you're interested or care about the rest of the wild ride when it loses any and all meaning entirely.
Me too! There was nothing "wrong" with it. I just didn't care enough to find out what happened next. I do remember thinking "I'll get back to it later" but it is still sitting on my shelf not gotten back to later.
I got the "bad" ending (leaving on the escape pod early) half way thru the game and stopped playing there. The bad ending spoils the real ending, which as the video explains kinda takes the wind out of the sails of the experience, and it was also around one of the tedious backtracking/collection parts of the game. I was happy enough with the ending I got. Maybe ill try it again one day.
See I consider Prey as one of my favourite single player games of all time, and for me the mimics create some excellent gameplay and story moments that stick with me. The rest of the characters and story were...good if not spectacular; and I do wish the Typhon varients had more distinct designs
Can you describe a favorite moment from the game that stuck with you?
@@LemurMaster I think the first time you go outside is striking, you feel so vulnerable out there looking out at infinity. Plus the Arboretum is pretty cool.
@@LemurMaster there's two I was thinking of in particular when I wrote it, the first is really early on; after you leave the simulation and you've passed through the tests again and see the mimics for the first time. The dread I felt while stepping into an office knowing anything item could murder me was incredible.
The other one was where you first meet a weaver, and you discover how the mimics were made. The choice the game presents you with initially feels really easy; but if you're like me then your curiosity will be whispering to you to do something awful; much like the scientists must have felt...
It's a great game with lots of fun and deep moments; though I do feel there was room for improvement I still replay it regularly
I think it should been named Psychoshock. I bet 2k doesn't own a trademark to the word "shock".
@@LemurMaster For me it upgrading my skills far enough (didn't go for any alien talents), so that I could just take my trusty shotty, jump over a staircase railing right down into the face of a phantom and just blasting it point blank.
Amazing game and the best job showing how unsettling and disorienting space really is. I remember the genuine ass clenching terror I felt the first time I had to go outside the station to fix something in the vacuum of space, I remember gasping when I missed a airlock and watched the station fly away from me until I could regain my bearings, and that the first time I saw a mimic in space it actually calmed me down a bit because fighting monsters is something most of us can do by instinct now.
I love "Extra Punctuation." I could happily listen to Yahtzee's analysis for hours on end.
Thank you for revisiting Prey! One of the best games I’ve ever played.
I couldn't even finish prey because it was just so dull. But the moon crash DLC went on to be my game of the year. It's what every roguelike should model itself after. Perfect level of randomization and programmed progress that utilizes the time you invest to actually push the game forward and evolve itself.
Prey was another one of those games that really solidified my mindset of "A game must be played on the hardest difficulty setting to fully engage with the dire circumstances portrayed". It played like a horror game, because anything, even the little mimics, could off me if I wasn't careful. It was that tension, the checking chairs and mugs and things, that stuck with me from the game, alongside the fake helicopter ride sequences and things.
There were some elements of the combat which felt odd, though-- The way enemy projectiles worked (and could sometimes go through certain obstacles) and things of that nature made certain sections more tedious than tense (I'm looking at you, giant enemy in the biosphere area)
I think a big reason why Prey never got the love it deserved is that its quite slow to start gameplay-wise - the story is very on the go from the start but when I first played it I only put in a couple hours before leaving it for a while, because the emergent gameplay hadn't, well, emerged. Its slow and not terribly interesting to play until you learn, combine and abuse all the mechanics that are there. I'm sure there are plenty of people who weren't grabbed by it and never got past the initial slog to the incredible game it is.
Where does that happen? I was bored with the game and dropped it after a few hours. I got to the place where I can recruit a droid to follow me around but then I go outside the ship for the first time.
It's a strange feeling for sure. I felt the same way about The Forgotten City. I enjoyed the hell out of it and thought about it a lot after finishing it, but I have given it ZERO thoughts shortly afterwards.
It makes me feel kind of bad, it's a good game, but
Heh, at least Forgotten City lived up to its...
...wait, what were we talking about again :-)
I think what is missing in your argument is that there is nothing that stands out in Prey, it is good, everything is good, BUT, nothing is EXCELENT.
You need something to standout, you don't need "flaws to be able to see the goods", but something do need to standout or you will forever be remembered as "just good".
I personally found the whole game to be excellent. That being said, I'm not one for horror games in general so the horror-ish elements of this one were enough for me
@@Fernando-ek8jp I believe I would feel the same if the game was about 40% shorter, it got to a point for me that I did not enjoy anymore of the content and just wished it to end already
@@FMagno Yeah, it was probably a matter of personal preference and experience.
The main thing I remember from Prey was that neat looking glass effect, namely in the opening sequence and when you break the cycle and see the cool "behind-the-scenes" area like how the helicopter ride was fabricated. Outside of that, yeah, it's pretty much the award winner for Best Game I Don't Really Remember.
My initial reaction when I saw the title was "It wasn't forgettable!" But then I realized that I rarely think about it anymore. Prey is one of those fun-in-the-moment games and in fact it seems like it might convince our brain that it's better than it actually was. I do remember pieces of the game: the intro, the poor ending, the mimics, the Gloo Gun, the "Cook" NPC, and floating in space. But the rest (so like 90% of the game) is sort of a blur of generic-but-nice-looking spaceship exploration and whatever other combat happened. And unless I see its name somewhere, I don't passively think about it the same way that I do with Bloodborne, Fallout, etc.
Did you kill the cook NPC? I had taken 30 mins looking for clue until I went to the deep storage PC, there was an Email from the Daniel Sho NPC marked in red. Turns out I had to go all the way back to the starting area and get the tracker, after which I was able to Track him down. Expected a Boss Fight, but he just tried to kill himself and me with a recycler charge. I dodged the Recycler Bomb and survived.
@@pranaav2027 If you mean kill him early, then no. I got to the same situation. If I remember correctly he gets injured by a monster or something, which is why he ends up doing that. But it was anticlimactic.
Yes, he was injured..it was very anticlimatic. Also it turns out he was an "Imposter Cook", he was actually a Test Subject.
Also I fundamentally disagree with the idea that people like games because of their faults. Portal isn't a masterpiece because of it's flaws, it's a masterpiece because it doesn't have any.
Maybe Yhatzee was just in a bad mindset when he was playing it. Going through a open world rut or something. Prey had plenty of memorable parts.
Turning yourself into any object that wasn't bolted to the floor, using the gloo gun to make your own paths to the objective, the jetpack-in-space part, that creepy soundtrack by Mick Gordon
Except it wasn't just the faults. He mentioned this too WITH Portal (and Undertale) because they're masterpieces with memorable moments and effective writing. Plus, he does like Prey but memorable and good aren't equivalent. You can think the game was great and memorable, and some people can think it was a great and totally forget about it later.
@@proYEEThean Then his statement on portal contradicts his statement on flawes in games
aw dang! prey was one of the first games I played on my let's-play channel. I love that game. I thought it was great, and such a wonderfully creepy concept where anything in the room could be a threat. after I beat it in my let's-play I immediately started over off-screen and played through the whole thing again. even years later I still consider it one of my faves. I'm surprised it's not considered more memorable or talked about much in the gaming scene
I loved Prey so much it was my first platinum. Your feeling of not being able to remember anything about it after playing is very similar to the Man in the Tan Jacket from Night Vale.
Sometimes great games just fly under the radar. Same thing happened with Metal Arms.
For me the biggest problem with Prey is not that the ending is a letdown. It's that the ending had me hyped up for playing THAT game, the one where you're a freshly minted human/mimic hybrid ready to kick ass and take back the world. But that game didn't get made.
The thought that came to mind for me was that the whole game was just one big personality test. It starts off asking you what you think you know about yourself, then it sticks you in a scenario that puts those assumptions to the test. You have to figure that, at the end of something like that, people might not like what they saw in themselves.
Like the shuttle that left the station at around the same time the outbreak happened, and you gotta look at a remote destruct button and go “do I risk blowing up a shuttle of innocent people if there’s a possibility of the typhon infecting all of earth?”
I love the shuttle sidequest so much because it’s higher stakes than everything else in the game besides the main plot, and it’s entirely missable, and it’s just one button and some text. And it wrecked me.
The game's theme showcased the issue with trying to rationalise morale and emotional dilemmas quite well. Especially the trolley problem and the issue with applying logic to empathy.
The trolley problem's main flaw in judging how we actually would react in such a situation is demonstrated well in how there were situations where the player's empathy was being targeted by having characters literally beg for their lives eventhough sparing them likely would cause bigger issues for more people. See allowing the escape capsule to be released as a good example: I wonder how many players did that but destroyed the shuttle on its way to Earth because its passengers couldn't beg for their lives.
Would most people sacrifice the one person to the trolley if they knew them or they were able to cry and beg, while the others were strangers or unable to communicate or even be seen??
According to many social experiments the answer is that more often than not we would indeed prefer to save people we can relate to (being visible and audible) rather than someone who isn't, regardless of what would be the more rational choice.
This is also why I liked the ending as a whole: when you realize the entire game was meant to trigger the implanted mirror neurons in a Typhon, who is the actual representation of the player and not Morgan (it also explains Morgan's silence; the Typhon cannot talk), to make it develop empathy, the different events and how they were setup in the story make a lot of sense.
Gotta admit, I did not foresee Driver: San Francisco coming up in this.
Nah, I remember every detail of this game. It was so rich and full of differing paths, ways to play, and multiple endings, which all but renders the idea of it being “forgettable” just untrue
i bought this game for $10 a few months after release, haven't started it yet
If it feels daunting, try Mooncrash DLC. It's the Prey experience, but streamlined and condensed into a very compelling rogue-like that only takes 20-45 minutes to play (but maybe 10 hours to fully complete).
Forgettable ? One of the best game ever.
The thing I remember best about Prey was ironically me hiding out in the central hub elevator because the hub had been overtaken by this giant monster.
standout bit of Prey is playing that bands song, semi sacred geometry, in the lounge bar and killing the ensuing monsters
Prey is my absolute favorite single player game and I have finished it 5 times (one time with a "super hard mode" mod) I hope enough people talk about so we'll get a slim chance of "prey 2017: 2"
P.s loved the dlc also.
There's always one thing I remember from Prey (2017). It pops into my head now and again, unbidden.
"What does it look like? The shape in the glass."
Excellent series. Keep up the good work!
flaws, lack of flaws, whatever it is, Prey (2017) is still one of my favourite games of all time.
And one of very few games I regularly check the category for on Twitch to tune in to streamers i don't already know just to see their experience of it. I think that says something
I genuinely enjoyed this game. It was like a cozy warm bath of expected but welcome tension, fp metroid vania, and brutal power-augmenting eye-trauma I slowly got addicted too.
A better comparison would be _Portal_ ; they are both atmosphereic games with minimalistic design philosophies, but _Portal_ had GLaDOS and her pitch-black humor, it had the turrets who apologize for shooting at you, "the cake is a lie," etc, etc. It had personality. Even _System Shock_ had Shodan, _Bioshock_ had the Big Daddies, "Would you kindly," "A man chooses, a slave obeys."
_2017's Prey_ had all the polish of a best-seller, but that's usually why these games had characters chirping in you ear the whole time--it gives personality so the main character can be the black stand-in for the audience.
Failing that _Soma_ and _Far Cry 3_ demonstrated that POV characters can have personities and not detract from the story.
I really enjoyed the original Prey, it had that campyness that Prey(2017) never had and although I really enjoyed the Bioshock series and System Shock 2 I could never really get into Prey(2017) no matter how many times I tried, I knew it was good and had a lot of things I liked but I just found I didn't really have fun playing it or feel the drive to continue after a certain point and always just moved on to other games instead of finishing it.
I think it may partially be that I remember what Prey 2 was supposed to be before it became the less enjoyable System Shock 2 clone it eventually did and that may have somehow soured the experience.
What would you rather have? A Space exploration bounty hunting game essentially being your own Boba Fett as Prey 2 would have been or exploring an empty space ship full of goo monsters with elements pulled from older and more unique games but done in a serviceable manner as Prey(2017) did.
I remember trying this game back when it was released and the goo monsters just turned me off. Like, I thought that it was the most boring enemy design I've ever seen. The thought of having to fight these guys for the rest of the game made me stop playing.
Then during COVID, I see all these videos praising the game so I gave it a try. Could see the quality of it, but still didn't grab me. Decided to re-play Dead Space instead.
Maybe I just need to be in a certain mood to really enjoy it.
Like you, so many people said it was great, I made it half way through and thought, "gee, I wish there was a Deadspace 4, this is boring" and quit.
Yep this was my first play through.
I just got bored because nothing about the setting, characters or enemies drew me in. I think i was only interested in pressing on because of the story which was executed very well at the beginning but isn't enough to keep you going through all the audio logs, backtracking through bland environments and basic missions. The sandbox environment was pretty cool but when your rewards are mostly audio logs it's difficult to care.
This thread right here perfectly sums up why Prey was forgettable 👍🏻. Not much more needs to be said.
But Im gonna add on to it anyway. It felt so generic. Maybe I just cant get into immersive sims, but yeah Dead Space is a great baseline to compare. Monsters were more memorable, the pacing/boss fights kept things fresh, and a big thing Yahtzee forgot to add:
'Show don't tell'
Audio logs as your main source of story telling leads to apathy. Sure you're alone in space, so conceptually it makes perfect sense to do audio logs and from a critic perspective, well done. However, unlike Dead Space there wasnt enough 'show don't tell' moments.
Prey was a game I tried, for free, and never went back to. I never beat it, mostly because I never felt driven to. There was nothing that drove me to progress. The mimics were cool, and gave a sense of horror... then you got that upgrade to detected them. It had some interesting moral choices, like with that forgotten prisoner. It even had good gameplay systems. The only motivator through the story was the Yu bots... ohhh, which one to trust, is this the goal, or is this... it was all just too wishy-washy. Then you had the goal of finding all the dead staff, and I thought, fk this. I don't care about Yu, the station, or anything. Close game, and didn't look back. In a year with SO MANY good games (2017 being the best year in that decade), it's no wonder it fell by the wayside.
Same here. It was good, but I couldn't get invested with it.
For all of its *shock patina, Prey was perfectly refined to a well-oiled game that was neither great enough to tell people about and not bad enough to complain about
Thank you yahtzee for the MacDougal The Builder reference in the end.
It wasn’t forgettable, it was a great and memorable game.
maybe try watching the video before you comment.
@@plastic4872 it wasn’t forgettable, it was a great and memorable game
@@plastic4872 it wasn’t forgettable, it was a great and memorable game
@@Delightfully_Bitchy It was
@@plastic4872 no