Mullon

Imagine you have a friend who gets you your dream job. At your job while you are putting the finishing touches of your greatest project, the culmination of your interests and ability, you get a call from your friend saying they're about to killed and to drop everything and rush over and save them. You do so and go to their house and find the place empty. You go back to your job only to find your friend smashing your project to pieces. Then, to add insult to injury, they berate you for leaving your project unattended. That's what this game is. I like the doctor simulation aspect of this game. It's fun collecting herbs to make ingredients, rushing over to the patient's house, dodging the infected and gang members along the way, figuring out which medicine they need to increase their chances of survival, looting abandoned houses for money and supplies to upgrade your gear, and bartering with the townsfolk with the junk you loot for other junk you need, all while keeping your five survival meters filled. I wish that had been the entire game. What I don't like is when the game tells you to cross the entire map to complete some vague goal before a time limit is up, while doing everything it can to destroy your survival meters. Unfortunately that makes up most of the gameplay and is why I am in no rush to play this game again, while I would like to play the doctor stuff again, getting to it is a deal breaker. It's only intersting the first time when you don't know the story.

It's okay? It's a perfectly serviceable immersive sim with all the bits you like that work competently. If you can't play Deus Ex or System Shock or BioShock or Dishonored and need an immersive sim fix you should give Prey a shot. It has all the stuff you like, the email reading from Deus Ex, the stealth parkour from Dishonored, the history buff lore from BioShock, the space station crawling with alien monsters from System Shock, the weapon and ability upgrades from Deus Ex, the audio logs from System Shock, (the headcrabs from Half-Life), and the morality choices from Dishonored. Just don't play Prey if you want something novel, or a mystery that pays off, or an ending that's satisfying.

If you read a lot of reviews for this game you will see most reviewers say their favorite part is when you have to outrun the Cylinder before it smooshes your Trebhums. That is because it is the only part of the game that feels challenging and has a goal. In the other half of the game you wander around the enclosed areas looking for new things to eat and gain powers from, or you can look for more Trebhums, or the game's currency. But unless the game forces you to stay in the area to advance the plot there is no reason not to immediately go to the next outrun section. I didn't explore the areas until halfway through the game when you are given to permanently remember powers by combining items. That's actually interesting, that got me moving around in the hopes I will find the egg or bug needed so I can swim across water or float through the air whenever I want. I liked how the story was weird and didn't try to explain everything, I was worried it would turn into a metaphor or a dream sequence but it never did; the Cylinder is one of the more interesting video game villains in years for just how unrelenting it is.

This game falls into the same mistakes Telltale adventure games make and old Sierra adventure games make, creating a frustrating experience. One the one hand I did grow fond of King Eryk and most of his family and concerned about the kingdom he's trying to run. It was usually rewarding when a decision I made benefited the kingdom in some way and contributed to the war effort. But it still falls into the pitfall of your choices not really mattering and getting railroaded during important plot points. I played this game twice, the second time learning from my mistakes the first time, and despite handling my money better and negotiating with other lords better I still got the exact same outcome at the first major battle. This illusion of choice could have been tolerable if it weren't for the second, bigger problem. Both times I played I had to give up when I got stuck in a no-win scenario based on smaller choices I had made earlier. Treasury, supplies, and population happiness are the three plates you are suppose to keep spinning while building up your army for the inevitable conflict, one of those gets below zero and it's game over. The treasure and supplies are fairly easy to maintain, you solve the problems of the townsfolk and other lords by giving them supplies or money or scouts to assist them and they pay you back later. It's the happiness that is the most frustrating problem, in part because it's so random. Don't give a peasant some money and the happiness plummets, give them some money and the treasure plummets while the happiness doesn't improve. Or sometimes it does. It's random and impossible to plan out. At the time one mistake won't look damning, but it quickly snowballs into more problems and before you know it you are in too deep to fix your mistakes before you get a game over, if the game even gives you a way to fix your mistakes. Some might argue that this makes the game realistic, that real life doesn't have do overs and mistakes aren't always immediately apparent. But in real life you can do things like apologize for your behavior, explain your reasoning, or carefully explain to someone "Listen, I can't send a general over to deal with your stupid rabbit infestation because a madman with an army is arriving in a month to kill us all including you, so sorry." This is where the old Sierra adventure game problem rears its ugly head. I quit the second time when I realized I was in an unwinnable situation. The Switch version saves automatically once a week ingame, but looking at my old saves I realized the problem that doomed me started before those weeks. And I didn't restart the game because the thought of spending hours going through the exact same dialogue and choices until I reached my mistake again was just horrible. And that's not even getting into the technical problems. From stupid things like the game acting as if I sent my male general to investigate a house instead of my female witch, to beneficial like a peasant acting like I gave him supplies when I didn't, to embarrassing like programming language appearing in menus, to insulting like the game crashing when it tries to save. That is amateur hour. The only reason I didn't give this a lower score is because I did like the basic concept, settings, and characters, but that's not enough for a good game.