After playing the first hour of Prey, I realized that it will be nearly impossible for me to avoid spoilers while telling you about it thanks to the big twist that unravels in the first 15 or so minutes. So before I throw out the spoiler warning, know that Prey appears to be on its way to upholding Arkane’s well-earned reputation as a purveyor of fine single-player campaign-first shooters. But where the gameplay trailers we’ve seen so far have suggested a BioShock influence, playing Prey reveals an inspiration that goes back to, it turns out, BioShock’s own forebear: System Shock 2. If that’s all you need or want to hear, by all means I understand. But if you want to suffer an early game spoiler and come down Prey’s fascinating rabbit hole with me, there’s much more to tell…
*SPOILER WARNING*
My Morgan Yu woke up in her posh apartment looking out over the bay (you can also play as a male Morgan). Another beautiful day in 2032, though she’d be spending it in her laboratory. But as Morgan, you’re first able to explore your apartment. Log into your PC, check your email, collect computer wires and parts for your inventory that might be useful later, hurl your game console remote at the TV, etc.
A trip to the roof and then a helicopter ride through the city to the roof of the lab building serve as a clever mask for an introductory credits sequence. Once you arrive, descend the elevator and go inside, you go through the full version of the testing procedure shown briefly in Prey’s gameplay trailers. You collect blocks, hide behind a chair, and answer Sophie’s Choice questions. But why? It’s clear you’re the guinea pig for some sort of experiment, but what? And did you volunteer, or is there something more nefarious going on?
Everything is going fine until one of the Mimics – small, smoky, spider-like alien creatures, gets loose and murders the doctor administering your test behind the glass. You’re gassed to sleep in a containment effort. When you wake up you find…
Playing Prey reveals an inspiration that pre-dates BioShock: System Shock 2.
You’re back in your bed. Your alarm clock goes off again. Same time, same day. The literal facade that is your life begins to reveal itself. Another check of your email this time reveals a handful of duplicate messages from someone named “January” that all say, “Get out now!” Donning your lab suit and stepping out into the hallway of your apartment building reveals the same maintenance worker from yester...today(?), except now he’s dead. And the body isn’t pretty; it looks like it’s had all of its essence sucked out.
The hallway’s configuration has changed and you can no longer get to the roof. And since the sliding glass door out to my apartment balcony was locked, I decided to smash my way through with the wrench I’d just found in the hallway. But rather than clear a path to the outdoors, breaking the glass revealed...that you’re still inside and that there’s clearly more to this “apartment building” than meets the eye. Something is clearly amiss. Signs mention a stage and script and actors, warning employees to not stray from their roles.
You soon discover that it’s all a set, designed to keep your Morgan in a Groundhog Day/Truman Show-like loop while they run different Neuromod experiments on you day after day, wiping your brain and resetting the mods after each day.
If you’ve followed Prey’s progress to date, you’ve probably figured out by now that, yes, you’ve been on the space station the whole time. The helicopter trip through the “city” was a glorified Star Tours-style ride, and the Mimics have broken loose on the station despite, of course, man’s best efforts to control and contain it. Now you’ve broken free, too, and it’s the newly opened-up Prey that starts to feel a lot like fellow bad-things-in-space first-person shooter/RPG, System Shock 2.
You have an inventory in which you collect weapons and items. Books and audio logs strewn about give clues to the backstory of the station and its mysteries. The pace – at least in the first hour I played (on PC, by the way) – feels more deliberate than even BioShock, adding to the tension and suspense. Skill trees reveal branches you can specialize in, such as hacking, strength (i.e. lifting and hurling tables and other heavy objects), and repairing. The first few Mimic encounters might make your skin crawl; the little buggers move fast and can disguise themselves as objects in the room, such as chairs or coffee mugs, and all you have to combat them is the brute force of your wrench. Before long you get your hands on the GLOO gun, which arcs foam blobs that freeze and encase the Mimics, giving you time to pummel them with your wrench. Alternatively, you can, as I did, use the hardened foam projectiles to create your own stepping stones, allowing you to platform up to areas that would otherwise be inaccessible.
The alien skills – yes, like being able to transform into a coffee mug – add even more emergent gameplay possibilities.
In fact, Prey’s first hour hints at the large, open Metroidvania-style spaces that will slowly become more accessible as you find passcodes, improve your hacking skill, and discover alternative routes to reach new places that you couldn’t before. I collected several Neuromods in my hands-on time, which I spent on hacking upgrades and strength (though, sadly, I ran out of time in the demo before getting a chance to murder a Mimic with a tossed chair). The System Shock 2 comparisons – which I make in the most enthusiastic way possible, by the way – really feel apt once you start diving into the skill trees. And that’s just the human skills. Prey lead designer Ricardo Bare said that the alien skills – yes, like being able to transform into a coffee mug – add even more emergent gameplay possibilities to Prey’s campaign, which he estimates will last between 16-20 hours with plenty of replay value thanks to multiple endings and alternative playstyles and skill choices. “This is very much an Arkane game,” Bare said, “so please feel free to experiment [and] try different powers out.”
Personally, it’s refreshing to see a top-shelf developer put all their energy into making a compelling single-player campaign – which Prey is on the right track for based on its first hour – without worrying about checking the multiplayer box on the Modern First-Person Shooter To-Do List. The fact that it gives me such strong System Shock 2 vibes only increases my enthusiasm to play the rest of it, since Irrational’s 1999 classic is one of my favorite games of all time. With less than three months to go until release, it’s important to note that there’s still plenty that could derail Prey: the build I played on a high-end PC didn’t run as well as I’d expect (though it hardly ran poorly), story turns could end up dragging it down, and we still haven’t seen the console versions in action. But if the rest of Prey lives up to the first hour, then we could be looking at a very memorable game.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Podcast Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire