Oh gosh @themountainsaysâ please donât be nervous to ask D: I promise for as much as I can babble endlessly about what I love about anything Prey, I can condense it just as well
Prey is a sci-fi, soft-horror video game that came out in 2017 developed by Arkane Studios, that I fell in love with IMMEDIATELY because of its amazing atmosphere, beautiful art style, and gripping story
The Summary is that Morgan Yu (the protagonist and player character, shown above as male but also playable as female) works alongside their brother Alex to test a device called a Neuromod that allows humans to gain nearly any ability instantly by copying the brain of someone who has that skill and creating a replicant of their neural pathways in the recipient of the Neuromod
Obviously thatâs kind of incredible! Want to visit a foreign country but donât know the language? Insert a Neuromod and now you do! Takes 30 seconds or less. Got an emergency situation where you need a welder with 40 years of experience in 5 minutes? Boom. Neuromod. Now youâve got 12
Alex asks Morgan to join him onboard Talos I, a space station from the Space Race Era that is now owned by their company, TranStar, but before coming up into space, they need to run a few basic tests to get started
Morgan does. Everything is fine :)
Until an alien transforms from a coffee mug and kills a scientist when he picks it up
And then Morgan wakes up and starts to repeat the same day
Turns out? Theyâve been doing that for a while. 3 years, actually. Theyâve just forgotten
Cuz hereâs the thing about Neuromods that not many people know about: if the skill given by the Neuromod is removed, so are all the memories the patient created past that point. That language you âlearnedâ 6 years ago? Gone, and all 2,190 days after that. Got a Masters Degree in that time? Dated around? Got married? Yeah, you donât remember, not a single second
The rest of the game is Morgan navigating Talos I, the space station (above) they didnât know they were on, constantly butting up against places and people they âdonât knowâ but know them, and attempting to avoid or eliminate the alien threat that has crippled the entire facility
These a$$holes: (note, if you have arachnophobia or find spider-like creatures distasteful, do not google âMimics + Preyâ. I will not be posting pictures of Mimics here, though they are the most common enemies in the game and arguably have the most relevance to the plot and au)
(none of these images are mine, most are official marketing images with the exception of the last, which is from reddit)
The aliens are called âTyphonâ, and theyâve been a government, and then TraStar, secret for almost 70 years. The first human encounter (via Russian cosmonaut) was a Mimic that was floating in space disguised as debris. It dispelled itâs form and attacked the cosmonaut, killing them violently. Mimics might be the weakest and smallest Typhon, but their ability to perfectly mimic objects in their environment is what captured TranStarâs interest in the first place. The spooky aspect of Prey (especially early game) is that in each new environment, you caNNOT trust your surroundings. Nearly anything in any room COULD be a mimic, and they are difficult to spot without practice. Is a chair ever really just a chair? Does that stack of toilet paper have one too many? You donât know, and neither does Morgan
But thatâs okay, right? Escape Talos I, make it back Earth-side with the Neuromod research and pick up where you left off, right? Itâs still life-changing technology, still worth preservingâŚ. right?
Except, remember what I said about how the Neuromod âreplicatesâ someone elseâs brain? And those MimicsâŚ. they can copy just about anything. And Morgan has been unknowingly testing these devices for 3 whole years andâŚ.. what exactly has Morgan had shoved into their skull everyday?
So letâs see weâve got:
- a ton of missing memories
- a space station full of self-replicating aliens (like a virus)
- aaaaaand a brain full of Typhon goop that, while handy, is probably super dangerous
The game allows the player to make plenty of decisions that propel the narrative forward. Everything from who to save, what to destroy, the destruction or preservation of Talos I as a whole, and, ultimately, whether the player/Morgan makes it out alive or not
And that just scratches the surface. Prey launches ethical questions at the player over and over again. They ask âWho are you?â - the person you were 3 years ago, 10 years ago, or 5 minutes ago? How many lives are worth sacrificing for progress? Is progress ever worth the suffering put into it? Whatâs fair? Whatâs just? Can someone who doesnât remember committing a crime be held responsible? Should they?
Prey is a playground of unique set pieces and fantastically tricky questions disguised as normal space-enthused, first person shooter and I absolutely adore it
So⌠maybe you can see why an au in a world this complex is so tantalizing^^
