Prey: 5 Reasons Why The Story Ultimately Fails
It's good, not great.
Releasing to rather positive reviews, Prey is garnering comparisons to Half-Life and Bioshock. These are really big shoes to fill, and amazingly, the gameplay seems to validate such comparisons.
The same cannot be said about the plot however, which, although ambitious, ultimately fails to deliver on its promise.
Spoilers follow.
In the year 2032, siblings Alex and Morgan Yu are aboard space station Talos I, investigating an alien life-form named the Typhon, which has invaded Earth. As the Typhon don't use any language, their objective is to implement aliens with empathy, so that they can understand humans and hopefully leave our planet in peace.
The problem is that the Typhon are not willing to cooperate, and the player has to kill a lot of their kind in order to reach his goal, which is either save or kill everybody on the station.
The game tackles some interesting topics like enhancement or consciousness, but doesn't do it too convincingly. Granted, the ending explains some of these events, but it does not make up for rather disappointing script.
That is, if we want to put the game in the same category as the aforementioned first-person shooters that conveyed a deeper message.
If not, Prey is still a really good game, although not as deep as it intends to be...
5. Operator?
Your guide through this memory hole-created maze is January, an Operator, who serves as a backup to Morgan's memory, which she/he (dependent on the sex you chose for your character) created during his three years at Talos I space base.
This already creates the first issue - since the Operator is a backup, why doesn't it inform Morgan about everything immediately, but instead makes him walk around the base looking for clues?
Obviously because the game would be much shorter, and not as mysterious.
January is one Operator that you can listen to, the other is December, a presumably older backup, who shows you the way to Alex's escape pod. The third "voice in your head" is your older brother himself, who provides a different narration of the events than January.
The objective, as we learn at the end, is to teach you empathy, but how is the opposition between January and Alex supposed to do that? It's not a choice between good and evil, saving lives or saving the planet from containment, but rather between trusting yourself or trusting your brother.
This is more about reality and memory, than empathy.