Arkane's Prey built a world where I really cared about the choices I made
In plain sight.
It's lonely in the future. Trust me, I've been there. For the last few weeks, I've been replaying Arkane Austin's Prey, an immersive sim in which you explore a space station orbiting the moon. You're trying to find out what went wrong - and why the whole place is overrun by hostile aliens. It's an interesting tone, though. Despite the space station being hectic with nasty life, you spend a lot of time on your own - and yet that doesn't mean there's no sense of humanity to the game.
Sure, for the bulk of Prey's runtime, interacting with other living people is a relative rarity, especially in the opening hours when anyone with a pulse who you happen to run into generally doesn't remain that way for more than a few seconds. The advanced space station Talos I, once seen as a shining beacon of human brilliance and scientific advancement, now effectively serves as a floating prison for everyone trapped aboard, including main character and TranStar nepo-baby Morgan Yu. (TranStar is an unfettered ultra-capitalistic conglomerate on a quest to research alien creatures known as Typhon. Every sci-fi game needs a company like this.)
Because of this relative isolation, you learn more about the TranStar crew (largely consisting of scientists and engineers) by digging through their DMs like you're the nosy parent of a teenager. Not just DMs, but emails, logs, reports, other written ephemera. Granted, this was hardly a new concept when Prey came out in 2017. It's practically a staple in the immersive sim genre. What makes Prey special in this regard, though, is how its writing breathes rich life into characters before you have a chance to meet them.
The TranStar crew is more than just a collection of bodies used to exposit narrative points or serve as visceral environmental decor. They're people. For example, let's look at Abigail "Abby" Foy and Danielle Sho, the space station's lead sanitation engineer and technical systems administrator respectively. Abby and Danielle have to be in the top three on my list of romantic subplots in games, if not a firm number one. With everything that Prey likes to throw at you, from the evil of corporate greed to the endless arrogance of mankind, a romance between two coworkers always brought a smile to my face when I stumbled upon their communication devices, known as 'transcribes' in the parlance of the game. In one audio log, titled Dear Future Us, Abby even describes their joint messages as a form of "mental scrapbooking". Together, they "save the moments that matter".
Stuff like this emits a warm glow, even if we later learn that this relationship didn't stick. All it took was one relatively lighthearted joke from Abby for Danielle to end things with an oppressively distant, "Get out, we're done".
I should have expected this. Prey is a game where small positive moments shine brightly because they exist in contrast to the dark backdrop of space and its lonely horrors. And yet, always the optimist, between aliens jumpscaring me by mimicking every object they can and hiding in plain sight to the monstrous behemoths known only as Nightmares hunting me for sport, I hoped for a happy ending to Abby and Danielle's story. But as I ducked and skittered my way through the main campaign, that hope began to fade. Danielle's inevitably pleas for anyone to respond as to Abby's status practically echoed in the cold, empty halls of Talos I. Again: I should have expected this.
Not everyone's in love, anyway. Luka Golubkin, another member of Prey's cast, is the definition of a shady character. Facial scars that suggest he's all too familiar with knife fights paired with his thick-rimmed glasses and unfortunate hairline make him seem almost like a wicked math teacher from an 80s teenage comedy - one who was locked up for finally snapping. After just a few seconds of conversation, I knew I'd only be able to trust him about as far as I could throw him. His aggression towards his robot assistant, the awkward… pauses in his speech as he spoke about himself, the fact he was refusing to offer Morgan shelter in his barricaded kitchen until they get him what he wants? Clearly something was amiss. As someone who had been giddily combing through every transcribe and email I could find, his act as "the cook" wasn’t all that convincing.
Even without noticing that his tone of voice and mannerisms weren't the same as the transcribes of the ship's actual chef Will Mitchell, I've simply watched too many horror movies to believe that dealing with anyone like Luka would end without a knife in my back. But as he (expectedly) betrayed me and left me in a freezer to die, the only emotion I felt was pain. I realised that his previous victim was Abby. Sitting limp in a pool of her own frozen blood, she clutched onto a transcribe, one with a message from Danielle asking if she’s okay, asking to meet her in the fitness center.
But the real gut punch was meeting with Danielle face-to-face in the aftermath of all this and having her realize that my presence meant that Abby was gone. After all, it meant that I received her message instead. There was no coming back from what had been said, in other words - only a bitter hope that Abby could be avenged.
Real talk: at this point in the game, Danielle is floating on a spacewalk outside of Talos I doing her best to avoid the Typhon crisis. Slowly losing oxygen and with her cognitive senses beginning to wane, she sends me a final message while I'm out exploring, "Last thing. O2 almst gone. [...] Dont let him fget awy". Jeepers.
It's easy to forget that the entire arc involving Abby, Danielle and Luka Golubkin is optional. Your decisions here have no impact on the plot's ending - in fact, it's possible to miss this thread altogether and beat the game without resolving the story of a killer cook.
This is fascinating, because immersive sims are playgrounds of emergent gameplay and player choice. Prey shines brightest when it's building a world in which you care about the decisions you make and the outcomes they bring. You could give someone more choices than stars in the sky, but if you aren't invested in the lasting impact, then what's the point? I wanted to save the crew of Talos I, the plot gives you the option to, and Morgan doesn't appear to remember enough to care one way or the other. Even after getting what is considered the best ending, I couldn't help but lament the lives of those I couldn't save.
Despite it not being a great commercial success, I really hoped that Arkane would get another shot at making a sequel to Prey. I felt that the community sentiment was too strong and that its status as an underappreciated gem would one day lead to a continuation of this rich fiction, and that we'd get to learn more about the Yu family history, TranStar, and the ending had so many different branching possibilities. But with the unfortunate closing of Arkane Austin in 2024, the likelihood of that ever happening is sadly next to zero. Prey has an atmosphere and feeling that can't be replicated. It was something truly special and I won't forget it - not a word.