Here's the video version of this article, which is a tad different but has some funny bits:
The gaming community let out a little collective sigh when Bethesda announced a ‘reboot’ of the 2006 game Prey, which would have literally nothing to do with the previous franchise other than to fight aliens - raising eyebrows to whether this was a simple cash-grab on a vaguely recognizable game license. Fortunately the game has released and actually is really, very good. Although by no means perfect it is something interesting following in the footsteps of the System Shock and Bioshock series with some splatterings of Deus Ex with general nods to cyber punk as a genre.
The beginning of Prey creates a great sense of intrigue and presents us with the threat of Typhon; an alien race we’ve been injecting into our brains on this space station Talos 1 - granting us essentially magic powers - of course they’re not the friendliest bunch of shapeshifting aliens and promptly break out of their testing chambers reaping havoc across the oddly art deco Talos 1 (a nod to that we are playing in an alternate timeline where Kennedy survived assassination, Russians and Americans went into space hand in hand and bad taste stuck around forever). The Mimic Typhon can mimic anything hence providing the threat that they can hide in plain site, adding to the general spookiness and burning uneasiness that decorates Prey’s atmosphere.
As either a male or female Morgan Yu. You (gettit?) of course have amnesia, a trope now we are so used to in gaming that I think we don’t even process the idea of a playable character not having amnesia and left to wander the wreckage of Talos 1, attempting to save, or perhaps brutally murder, the remaining survivors and in the end destroy the pesky Typhon. Interesting this beginning has us break out of a simulation. Which is a nice little bit of foreshadowing.
So far, so good. So far, so videogames - it’s an enjoyable first person action adventure romp with a fully fleshed environment that’s a joy to investigate, mainly due to extensive world building; every single NPC dead or alive is named, you can find character sheets for this alternative world’s DnD group on the space station and one of the weapons is a kind of useful crossbow that fires foam darts created by a bored engineer all being examples of the lovely touches used to flesh out the setting. The combat is a little clunky as these games tend to be and there’s some nits to be picked depending on your nit-pickiness.
Also the soundtrack is awesome.
Of course, I’m guessing you’ve played through the game already if you’re reading this or perhaps simply love massive game ruining spoilers, but this is the crux of what I want to talk about - the ending of Prey is perhaps one of the most satisfying conclusions I’ve seen in recent videogame history. I don’t say that completely lightly, because it wasn’t my first impression, it ticked the right boxes for an ending sure but the more I thought about it the more I felt like it needs slightly more discussion.
Let’s talk about context - in terms of gameplay, setting and overall themes I could only find myself drawing direct comparisons to the now referred System Shock 2, in fact it made me want to fire up my old steam version and give it another blast - now as great as System Shock 2 is, the ending is one of the worst going for a classic title - it’s very oddly out of character for the survival horror aspects and ends on a bit more of a funny note. The evil AI shodan in a last ditch effort to persuade the player character to join with it rather than destroy it, becoming more powerful than ever before - a short silence is followed and he answers “Nah” then shoots SHODAN in the face.
It’s jarring, an ending that actually stuck with me because of it’s leftfield wackiness in what was otherwise a fairly serious game - suicidal robots aside. For a game that consisted of a lot of decisions being made by the player, such as choosing the career that built your stats before the beginning of the game, it suddenly and abruptly took away that decision making for essentially a quick and daft quip, with a Netflix horror-esque teaser afterwards.
This game is almost as old as me so I understand that I can’t expect the game to give me a sweet multiple choice ending, if done nowadays I could imagine the choice being made for us due to our actions throughout the playthrough such as the Witcher or Bioshock done. Essentially that’s the march of progress - Deus Ex made the mistake of having us just choose one of a couple hundred endings which all seemed as depressing as the next.
So upon playing Prey I had the sudden worry that ending was going to be bad, or at the very least pretty generic. Floating in my head I had:
-You choose to join the Typhon, because you’ve injected so much brain juice that you can’t handle it - leading them to destroying humanity.
-You choose to remain as human as possible and get the ‘best’ ending.
-You fight a big boss at the end and it really doesn’t matter.
-You fight the big boss and apply either of the first two points.
-You die in a selfless act to prevent humanity being attacked/wiped out by the Typhon.
-BONUS ROUND: Your fat brother Alex turns out to be a Typhon and the final boss.
So far, so videogames.
Bioshock had this problem, in all that it nailed character and setting the ending was lackluster: an out of place boss fight and 2 endings that equalled world domination or becoming a nice dad. Bioshock Infinite seemed to take this criticism and decided to go ballsdeep into the ending, trying it’s hardest to create something wholly special in the final moments, while forgetting to actually put as much effort into the rest of the game leading up to that point.
Here I’m not completely dissing Bioshock Infinite, it’s a good game, it just felt like the ending came first and they wanted to work their way to it. A fear I had playing Prey was that it began really well, it was absorbing, compelling and stylish - would the rest of the game compare? Or would it be a game that started interesting then petered out? An inversion of Infinite.
So after choosing to destroy the Typhon against the wishes of an AI construct, destroying them but preserving human life on the base I was greeted with a short cinematic explosion and fade to title sequence, credits going by while people wandered about a lobby on the Talos one.
I thought they’d fucked it. Had the game been rushed? Do you have to replay it to get the proper ending? The disappointment of previous games crept back and worse, I was left wishing for a snarky one liner. Some little closure no matter how dumb.
I’ve seen enough Marvel movies now that I know to should stick around after the credits and here was were Prey delivered and offered me reprieve from my previous misgivings.
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| IT WAS ALL A DREAM |
Turns out it was all a dream, or at least was an artificial simulation designed to see if by meshing together human and aliens could create a Typhon that felt empathy, understanding preserving human life and not being a big indiscriminate murderer. There’s hints to this through the game, some emails have researchers believing they lack empathy due to a lack of mirror neurons or something.
So each major quest giving NPC you met on your travels was actually a robot sentinel and you were a Typhon reliving the memories of the real Morgan Yu - presuming you didn’t play the game as a complete bastard the robots will praise you according to your performance on their quests, then big Alex will show you that Earth has been invaded by the Typhon - and you are one of their last ditch efforts to save humanity.
You can choose to kill them all there and then or shake Alex’s hand - presumably in agreement that you will help humanity from Typhon assimilation/destruction. I think the kill them all option is there for a little bit of flavour, and for my own ease of mind I’m treating the shake hand option as cannon.
Now back in primary school I was taught that to end your story with ‘and it was all a dream’ is one of the most heinous crimes one can commit in storytelling, luckily it’s a crime not oft seen perpetrated (yes, I’m looking at you Twilight Breaking Dawn). So it’s tempting to lambash Prey for doing almost exactly that, except it wasn’t exactly that - in fact it was a clever reconsidering of the trope; instead of making all the previous experience meaningless it gave it greater profundity. All of it was a test of nature, of personal mettle, directly reflecting on the person playing the game as well as the character of Morgan Yu. It also has darker connotations, the idea of how manipulative the humans in Prey are and their willingness to push experimental boundaries with little care for collateral, expanding on one of the previous parts of the game dealing with human experimentation and the apparent callousness that came with it. It’s fitting that the Typhon are fundamental in their actions whilst humans are portrayed as a mix of grey - it was the humans lack of humanity in chasing to become essentially gods that got them into this dire situation to begin with.
Building further on this concept the Mimics can become anything: a cup, staplegun, trashcan, while not able to truly understand another being beyond it’s own, only able to achieve imitation - playing with the concept of empathy but inverting it.
If this was all an experiment for the sake of empathy then it succeeded; as humans on Talos 1 lost their humanity, our character - an alien - gained it.
Grand chin scratching themes aside it works as sequel fodder, the risk of Typhon invading Earth has already happened, the struggle to remove or pacify them has to begin. It didn’t end with a monster popping it’s head at the screen, we are shown a city skyline filled with Typhon matter, thanks to the events of the game we know that this is a bad situation for humanity but not one that could mean the end - presumably we will become humanity’s ace in dealing with the alien threat.
For all it’s comparisons to System Shock and Deus Ex this reminded me of the Half-Life franchise, particularly the later games - Gordon Freeman has something special about him beyond simple survival, a great role to play in a interdimensional war - although we’re never explicitly told what it is (yet). Prey has us exactly know what our ability is, with a huge number of possibilities for gameplay and storytelling that could go in any direction. I wonder if Prey might become a beloved, expansive franchise in it’s own right. Doing what Half-Life done what now feels so long ago.
Prey has achieved something quite special, pretty unexpected and frankly I’ve never wanted a sequel to a game quite so badly.
I hope that the ending of Prey isn’t just the ending, but also the beginning.
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