Prey allows players to tackle problems in their own ways. By using their tools and the abilities they’ve unlocked. But more importantly, they do it by applying the logic of the game world as if it were a real-life place. (It also has the combat of a JRPG, so that’s cool too)
Pretty much every facet of Prey’s combat design takes the form of a puzzle.
Take the weapons for example. Each weapon has their own niche that players can use to fight the aliens that infest TALOS 1. Because of those niches, the weapons begin to take interesting forms.
When you think about it, heavy machine guns and light machine guns and snipers and shotguns are all varied weapons in their own right, both in real life and in First Person Shooters. However, in terms of puzzle-like combat design, there’s not really that many differences between them.
So, what do I mean by puzzles? In terms of combat, I’m referring to definitive weaknesses that enemies possess to certain weapons or abilities.
It’s fairly common in JRPGs, or just Action-RPGs in general, and informs a lot of character building in those games. For example, a water-type enemy would be weak to fire, or something like that.
When you apply that to firearms, its hard to make sense of a statement like, “The tall enemy is weak to the submachine gun”. Because like, why would it be? Is the caliber of submachine gun bullets just the perfect size to penetrate the tall alien? Does the rate of fire resonate perfectly with the surface of the tall alien’s skin to create a shockwave effect, blowing it to smithereens?
It’s hard to rationalize. Instead, in First Person Shooters, firearms have ‘soft’ strengths. For example, the tall alien might not be directly weak to a submachine gun, but it would be beneficial to use them because of their high recoil. You wouldn’t have to worry about compensating for kick since it would just ride up the tall alien’s body.
You can make up any situation like that. Shotguns are good against enemies that like to get up close because shotguns do the most damage at that range. Snipers are good for floating enemies that like to throw shit at you from far away. Pistols are good for weak enemies. The list goes on.
While that’s interesting, Prey doesn’t take this approach with its weapons. The aliens have weaknesses that are more ‘direct’. Meaning they would fall into the, “Tall enemy is weak to water”, type of category.
So, since more conventional weapons aren’t very well suited to direct weaknesses, Prey contains more unconventional weapons.
There is a pistol and a shotgun, which are good for just doing damage to enemies. But, for example, there’s also the disruptor gun. The disruptor gun fires an electric shock only a couple of feet in front of the user, so you have to get close. Where it gets interesting is how you can use that in combat.
There are corrupted engineering robots that attack you on sight with flame throwers that are pretty tough, but if you fire a shot off with the disruptor gun it knocks them out. I mean, it makes sense, right? They’re electronic machines, so firing a burst of electricity into them overloads their circuits, or something.
Some alien enemies, called the typhon, are also weak to the disruptor. Especially the Technopath, a typhon that uses psychic powers to control electronics, including turrets. Shocking that thing will wrest those turrets free from its control.
It’s kind of like a tool, if you employ it during the right moments, it can be incredibly useful. And it feels really good when you use that tool correctly. (Like finding the last piece to the puzzle, get it?)
That kind of puzzle-like design can pretty much be applied to all the weapons in the game, including grenades. The typhon lure, attracts typhons. The recycling grenade. . . recycles?
Okay, so the recycling grenade is interesting. It’s a device the engineers on TALOS 1 used to convert objects into raw materials. A metal table gets converted to metal material. Food gets converted to organic material, and typhon get converted to exotic material.
It essentially acts like a normal grenade would. You can throw it at aliens to convert them into raw materials (sounds fucked up but what can you do). You can throw it at your feet to convert yourself into organic material (but you probably shouldn’t do that).
Where it gets zany is that the recycling grenade isn’t just useful for combat. Like I said, you can throw it at objects, any object (that isn’t bolted to the floor), to turn it into nice neat little cubes. If you throw it at a pile of crates blocking a doorway that’s too heavy to lift, well, the crates go away and you can go through the door.
Immersive sims are known for their realism, that’s why their called immersive sims. Players interact with the world, and the games levels, by thinking of them as real-life places.
If there’s an electrical grid going haywire that’ll shock you if you get to close, you can’t get near it. If it’s near a doorway that you want to pass through, sorry, better luck next time.
But, if you can repair it, you’re in luck. Prey, like a lot of immersive sims, and RPGs in general if we’re being real, allow you to upgrade your characters using points. In this case, they’re called Neuromods, devices used to implant your brain with the knowhow to do complex tasks in an instant. . . like repairing electrical junctions.
If you use some of those Neuromods to upgrade your brain to be able to repair complex machinery, you can get past that electrical grid blocking your path.
What’s interesting is that you never really get just one thing when you gain a skill. Not only can you repair electrical junctions spewing electricity everywhere with the Repair skill, but also elevators (well, they’re actually gravity shafts, but let’s not get into that right now), operator drone dispensers, and a bunch of other stuff.
Now, if we apply that to the recycling grenade scenario, things get subverted a little bit.
Normally, one might use Neuromods to gain the Leverage skill, letting them lift abnormally heavy objects. When those objects block a doorway, you can simply lift them out of the way and get on with your life.
But, if you have the sense to try and throw a recycling grenade at it, you can get the same result! Except you didn’t have to waste Neuromods to do it!
This is a situation that happens a lot in the game, because well, it’s an immersive sim. If you apply the logic of the game world (that hopefully resembles our real-life world, at least a little bit), you can come up with some seriously ingenious solutions to the problems the game presents to you.
Going back to the ‘pile of crates’ scenario, if you’re feeling really poverty and you don’t have any recycling grenades, you can do something else. Find yourself a fuel canister, drag it over, and nestle it in a spot inside the pile of crates, then shoot it.
If you’re lucky, those one-ton crates might get displaced enough from the ensuing explosion for you to slip past an opening. That’s even more efficient (and creative!) than using a recycling grenade.
There are other solutions to this conundrum as well, but I don’t want to spoil everything the game has to offer (if anyone simultaneously, somehow finds and reads this article and hasn’t played Prey).
The fact of the matter is, is that you apply the logic of the game world to solve problems, interesting things happen. In a way, that line of thinking can be applied to the combat. Take the enemies for example.
On top of the disruptor gun, EMP grenades are also good against machine enemies (including turrets in some cases, but we’ll get to that in a bit), and the Technopath. Because, of course it would! They both disperse an electric current, it’s just that one is a ‘grenade’ and the other is a ‘gun’: two options for the same solution. Or is it two solutions for the same enemy type?
Because enemies don’t always have one ‘direct’ weakness. They’re assigned to enemies based on what makes the most sense for them to have.
Take the Technopath (I know, again, but it’s probably better if I mention as few enemies as possible). Yes, electricity overloads it, but it uses psychic powers to actually control machines electrically. So. if you use an ability called Psychcoshock, you can stun it completely!
That’s like, three different weaknesses you can exploit on the same enemy. And most people would gladly take that, because they’re no goombas, I promise.
In some respects, that’s a way to incentivize players to actually search for weaknesses in the first place, because other methods are pretty hard to pull off, even more so on harder difficulties (especially nightmare, holy moly).
While it might sound a bit dull that you’re pressured into using weaknesses, there are always multiple ways to exploit those weaknesses. That leaves a lot of room for player expression in terms of progression. And that’s always nice.
Speaking of progression, Psychcoshock isn’t just some ability you can use Neuromods to install willy nilly. Well, you can but there’s a catch. It’s actually a typhon Neuromod, meaning it mimics the alien abilities and lets you use them. If you put points into too many alien abilities, turrets will start to shoot you on sight, and those boys hurt.
A lot of alien abilities let you exploit typhon weaknesses, much like weapons and grenades. It’s another option for players to use. For example, instead of using an electric shock to stun operator drones, you can just make them fight for you with Machine Mind!
That was something I did a lot on my most recent playthrough. It’s another example of the many ways that Prey allows for player expression while still having that puzzle-like combat.
Taking that line of thinking with player expression further, I have to mention that psychic abilities aren’t good for just combat.
Bringing it back to the ‘pile of crates’ scenario again, there are even ways to bypass this hurdle with psychic abilities! And why wouldn’t we be able to, it would only make sense!
For example, you can fire a kinetic blast from your hands to move those crates. Or more interestingly, morph yourself into a small object with the Mimic ability, like a coffee cup, and roll in there!
There are practically an infinite number (okay, not really) of situations like this. If it’s feasible in the game world (that’s hopefully mimics reality) you can probably do it. Its such a rewarding feeling, being able to assess a situation and come up with your own solution. Like you’re cheating or something.
Flip that Mimic ability over to the other side of the coin, to combat. If you’re really big brained, you might realize that you can mimic into a small object to actually hide from the typhon!
I sound like a broken record at this point, but figuring that out how an ability works and implementing it in your own way feels good. Experimentation with the same ability can have such wildly different results that one person can use a tool for combat, while another uses it for exploration.
The Mimic ability and the recycling grenade aren’t the only instances of this duality. The GLOO Gun is the most famous example with pretty much anyone who’s heard of Prey. But again, I don’t want to spoil everything, right?
Combat is puzzle-like, exploration is, sort of puzzle-like? We apply the logic of these puzzles by thinking of the game world like a place, as long as that place has any basis in reality.
I’ve been saying, “as long as it’s like a real place” for a while, but what does that mean? Especially with telepathic aliens and murder drones running around the place and mimic abilities. What part of this space station takes place in reality?
Well, despite those things being fictional creations, they still have some basis in reality. Again, no matter how sentient a walking A.I. is, it’s always (hopefully) going to be susceptible to electric shock.
Boiling that down to even more simple, every day things. The fact that you can stack boxes on top of each other to reach a high up place. Or using a maintenance shaft to get to a locked off room. Or just simple things like gravity and fall damage (or dropping heavy objects on some alien heads).
A lot of the things that apply to our world here on Earth apply to the space station TALOS 1. And that makes exploration a lot of fun. It’s up to players to come up with their own solutions to move forward.
The mere act of exploration is extremely engaging, but what lies behind closed doors is just as interesting to get our hands on. It’s like a carrot on a stick.
Most important of these things are Neuromods themselves. You need to collect enough of them to be able to unlock new abilities. There are often Neuromods cordoned off in areas you can only get to with certain abilities, or creative solutions. It’s sort of a reward for players willing to traverse hard to get to areas.
Aside from just upgrade materials, there’s just loot in general. Like in a Battle Royale, you’ll find yourself scrounging for every piece of scrap metal and banana peel you can find (okay, you don’t look for those in BRs, but you do look for ammo, and trust me, there’s a lot of that in Prey too).
So, what do you do with all of these half-eaten apples, and spare bolts, and whatever else you can find? Well, you recycle them! And depending on what you need, you can fabricate some pretty useful items.
For example, to fabricate a shotgun, you need synthetic materials (the plastic and rubber bits), and mineral material (the metal). You can find those materials by just going out into the station and scrounging.
You’re not really thinking about what you’re picking up when you’re picking up all that trash, but you know its going to be useful. The test comes from what tools you’ll actually fabricate from your pool of material resources.
In a way, and I swear I’m not reaching here, it’s like a puzzle. If, in one run back to the fabricator machine, you have a particular mix of the four material types, you’ll only be able to make a couple things.
Going back to the shotgun example, if you run out of mineral and synthetic material, you might not have enough material to make the ammo for the shotgun (if your uniquely unlucky), since it requires the same materials.
It’s another form of really broad player expression. There’s a lot of things you can fabricate in the game. But you can only craft so many things at any given time. However, some of those things will be very useful to you depending on your build path. Take psi hypo for instance. It’s a consumable item that replenishes the resource needed to use psionic powers. For players that have a lot of those alien abilities, it’s a must. . . ‘make’.
Granted, to make literally anything, you need the fabrication plan for it. Think of it as kind of a blueprint. They might be hidden in security safes or in desk drawers. Players will just have to explore the space station and discover those locations for themselves.
Prey is littered with goodies like this. Whenever you find a fabrication plan, it feels amazing, since it’s essentially a permanent upgrade. The game plays this up with a nice little Zelda-esque techno tune every time you pick one up.
It’s further incentive to explore. Not that players need one anyway since the act of exploring is so fun on its own. But it’s always nice having the thought, “there’s probably something dope here”, whenever you’re trying to get to a particularly hard-to-get-to area.
All of these ‘puzzle-like’ systems wriggle and writhe and intertwine with each other in so many interesting ways.
The thing is that they all allow players to tackle problems in their own ways. By using their own tools and abilities they’ve unlocked. And most importantly, they do it by applying the logic of the game world as if it was a real-life place. And that’s really cool.
Slickaria! 