Episode 126 - Coulda, Shoulda, Keycards - Prey

We spent years trying to put the podcast into you, we never tried to put you into the podcast. Welcome back! We’ve had a pretty good time so far on Fanbruary, the month where our listeners select the games we play, and we’re going to continue that good time with Prey, the 2017 Arcane immersive sim game. Prey is a first person shooter, but with a heavy focus on systems and a wide array of things the player can do, either by default or by spending some resources to unlock abilities. This is fairly standard for the immersive sim genre, but as the games that meet that criteria are pretty few and far between, it’s safe to say this is among the most accessible of them. The game is pretty not confusing, and the threats and objectives are always clear, so even a player with little to no experience in specializing toward a playstyle can jump in and get a handle on it. I mention this because it describes both of us prior to playing this game, and once we jumped in, we ended up taking two entirely different paths and found the game about as balanced and fluid despite our vastly different playstyles. This is the strength of Prey’s design: the game gives you tools and lets you decide how best to use them, and no matter your choice, you’ll find yourself uniquely capable of taking on its challenges without needing to bend your playstyle around them. We’re going to be talking about tried and true vs novel mechanic sets, world design across the whole title with special emphasis on the brilliant intro, and we talk about how the fat cats over at Big Arrow got their hands into our games again. Thank you for joining us again this week! This is the last full episode of “Fanbruary” (and, would ya look at the time, maybe the last episode in February at all), but we have one more listener-suggested pocket title to get to next week. We’re extremely pleased with how these turned out as far as quality and variety, so we’re going to count this as a successful theme and will probably revisit it next year. If you want to get in on it, let us know in the comments, or come join our Discord server where you can talk about this and all the other games, as well as make regular suggestions whenever you want. What did you think of Prey? Did you play it at launch, or is it one you came back to? Did you become hopelessly addicted to Neuromods like I did? Did you accidentally play the 2006 game because they share the same name? Let’s hope not. Next time, we’re going to be diving into Elden March, which is to say, we’re talking about Shovel Knight, a game that has very little to do with Elden Ring. But I hope it’s exciting nonetheless.