Prey Vs Bioshock and System Shock 2: The true successor?
Hi everyone! My name is Sneaky Sam and today I wanted to talk about a game that I love and adore, and that’s Prey. Since its release, I feel it has gone heavily under the radar. While critics have rated it as one of the best games of 2017, sales of the game are middling at best. Developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda, this game left a lot of fans of the original 2006 game also titled Prey in confusion about the direction the series was taking. The memory of Prey from 2006 had all but been erased from this new title except for the name and what was left was, in my opinion, a perfect homage to one of my favourite video games. The story, the first-person perspective, the weapon wheel, the strange powers you’re given, even a (dang old) wrench as your starting weapon; it all reminded me of Bioshock. Most people would be quick to say that this game and Bioshock are both based on System Shock 2. Is this game really simply based on System Shock 2, or on 2007’s Bioshock? I want to answer this question because there are communities for both games that disagree with the game’s lineage. I think it’s worth it to go point by point why this game in my opinion is a spiritual successor to Bioshock rather than just calling it another System Shock 2.
Probably the easiest and clearest place to start is with the worlds that you inhabit. Rapture and Talos 1. In Bioshock, Rapture is a utopian turned dystopian underwater city. Prey’s Talos 1 is a space station floating in orbit around the Earth. It’s true to say that System Shock 2 and Prey are both set in space, though I feel the connection between the settings in these games is stronger between Bioshock and Prey. The reason for this is whereas System Shock 2 takes place on a starship thousands of lightyears away in the year 2114, Bioshock and Prey are set on or near the Earth in the 60’s. Though it’s not explicitly stated, the fact that these stories both have roots in the 1960s makes them feel like they live in a shared universe, whereas System Shock 2s story set in the 2100s makes it feel a little more isolated by comparison. In Bioshock it’s true that the city began construction in 1945 but the downfall of its society happened between 1958 and 1960. Prey is set in an alternate reality where the soviets launched the Vorona 1 satellite in 1958. The soviets eventually encountered the Typhon aboard the satellite. In 1963 John F. Kennedy, after surviving his assassination attempt, helped forge a joint space initiative between the U.S and the USSR called the Kletka program to study the Typhon. Almost 70 years in the future from that point, the events of Prey take place on Talos 1, the space station built around the Vorona 1 satellite.
The connection becomes stronger when you start to talk about Neuromods and Plasmids, the sources for special powers in Prey and Bioshock. There is a very strong connection between these upgrades and the settings in both games. In Bioshock it is discovered at the bottom of the ocean that there are slugs which carry the resource ADAM, which the genetic engineers of Rapture repurpose into Plasmids and sell to the public as a miracle drug. Without the creation of the city they would never have discovered Adam and created Plasmids. In Prey it’s a little bit different; due to the discovery of the Typhon in the late 50s, Talos 1 as a setting came to be because of this fact, whereas in Bioshock the city is built first then the discovery of ADAM is after that. System Shock 2 features a set of upgrades that are unrelated to the plot. They are there to progress the rpg mechanics and are a serviceable means of making the player stronger, and there is nothing wrong with that, though I feel from a thematic and story perspective Prey and Bioshock share a stronger connection and contrast one another more easily than System Shock 2.
When it comes to the characters who you interact with the most in the stories, there is another strong connection here between Prey and Bioshock. In these games you have voice assistants that help you named Atlas and January with the objective of finding two different antagonists, Andrew Ryan and Alex Yu. Throughout Bioshock’s campaign, Atlas acts as your guide through Rapture so that you can hunt down Andrew Ryan, who won’t let anyone leave the underwater city and to get revenge for the murder of Atlas’ family. In Prey, January helps you escape an endless series of neuromod trials at the hands of Alex Yu. These trials erased your memory. You learn early on that January is not human, but a robotic “Operator” given the voice and personality of Morgan Yu, the character you play.
These games share an antagonist and radio ally character dynamic that is difficult to ignore. System Shock 2 toys with this idea at the beginning of the game, but its quickly discovered that this is SHODAN posing as someone else to lure you towards it. The character SHODAN in SS2 seeks to terrorize the player rather than help them. Bioshock and Prey use these character protagonist relationships to advance the plot while guiding the player. Bioshock’s story reveals that Atlas was just an alias for a character named Frank Fontaine who was a business competitor for Andrew Ryan and instigated a civil war for control of Rapture. In Prey, January also goes out of his way to deceive you, but Arkane Studios changes things up in a meaningful way. January is bent on destroying Talos 1 and will stop at nothing to achieve this goal. It will try to convince you that destroying the station is the best way to stop the Typhon, and you can choose to agree with that or try to save the station while eliminating the hostile aliens. If you go down this route January will attempt to kill Alex Yu, who had been trying to help you the entire time.
The betrayals that are experienced at the end of these games are very similar to one another. Prey takes great inspiration from Bioshock in its plot and allows direct parallels to be made in the final product, not embarrassed to show its roots. The same attention to detail is shared in the gameplay, with Prey feeling like an improved version of Bioshock with upgraded game mechanics. There are many differences in player progression from Prey to Bioshock. Bioshock payed homage to System Shock 2 by riffing on the core game mechanics of leveling yourself up while playing with guns, using psychic powers, looting corpses and crates, and hacking terminals. Prey in turn pays homage to Bioshock. Just as Bioshock builds on the controls and game feel of System Shock 2, Prey re-introduces those mechanics to the player then adds more to them.
What I think a lot of people miss in Prey’s combat is the fact that you can create many different combos by swapping between your weapons with the weapon wheel. Because of the general reception of Prey as another game that is cut from the same cloth as System Shock 2, a PC game, I would expect the mouse and keyboard to work best. When you’re playing, inexplicably the only way to bring up your weapon wheel is with the mouse wheel. This is a terrible spot to put something so important. It’s advertised as a first-person shooter, and it can be awkward to use the mouse wheel in the middle of using guns or abilities. What people end up doing as a result is unloading all their shotgun ammo or psi powers into the enemies instead of using more intricate combo sequences. The cost is that it’s a far more inefficient way of playing and there is no way to change it on pc. That’s a shame because you can fight much more effectively and stack extra resources if you make thoughtful use of your weapon wheel right in the middle of combat.
It’s only when I played with a controller that your weapon wheel is in the more serviceable Y or triangle button. Playing this way makes Preys combat feel more nuanced; stopping time when you use your weapon wheel gives you time to think about what powers or weapons you want to use from moment to moment. The problem is that a lot of people who played Prey on PC wouldn’t understand to play this game with a controller. I think it’s interesting that a lot of people including myself played Bioshock originally on PS3 or Xbox 360, so it’s nice that Prey lets you play something like that again with some improvements. There are other annoyances; the only way to sprint with mouse and keyboard is by holding the shift key, and it forces you to hold down the button for continued sprinting. Why couldn’t something like this be toggled on or off? On controller, you can simply press in the left stick once to toggle sprint. For me this is the most comfortable way to play, with all your weapons and powers at your disposal conveniently while easily navigating the environment. It’s concerning that these problems still haven’t been patched and it means that a lot of people who would never think to play with a controller might have had a dis-satisfactory experience with Preys controls. It might even be a reason why this game is so heavily underrated.
Bioshock worked off a linear structure that kept the pacing of the game under control. You go from one world to the next through several bathyspheres, through which you can go back and visit any of the previous levels at any time. Along the way you fight Splicers and Big Daddies, find ammo, health, upgrade your weapons and abilities, and hack machinery to clear each area one after another. In Prey it’s similar, but the level progression works a little bit differently. Right out of the gate there is a very large portion of Talos 1 available to explore and it’s generally up to you to either follow a path laid out in front of you or find other ways around your environment. Certain areas are locked off with either an object that is too heavy to lift, enemies that are too difficult to face, or a door that requires a keycard or hacking skills out your paygrade. Some of these you can’t get past at the outset but generally it depends on your willingness to upgrade your neuromods to explore certain locations or if you wish to instead use neuromods to improve your fighting capacity. It’s a give and take; certain enemies don’t respawn and the number of neuromods at your disposal can be limited at times.
Beyond the level progression being much more open ended in this game, there are gameplay elements that make the sense of discovery while you explore Talos 1 a lot of fun. As well as upgrading your hacking and leverage abilities or discovering the shapeshifting neuromod, that there are also weapons that give you more options to explore your environment. The GOO cannon is a wonderful device reminiscent of the gravity gun from Half Life 3 or Portal Gun from Portal that lets you create a series of platforms to help you climb over your environment or freeze enemies. There is a lot of vertical space in Prey and sometimes looking up and seeing if there is any secret entrances to rooms or other hiding spots can prove extremely useful. Some rooms don’t have ceilings and inoperable elevators are vertical access ways are ripe for exploitation. Another is the huntress boltcaster, a toy gun that fires nerf darts that can be used in creative ways, such as drawing an enemies attention and activating switches. You can pick up the darts and experiment with ways it can help you.
The game is not only self-aware of these tools at your disposal but it’s here where it inserts not only amazing or surprising loot for you to get such as neuromods or even early access to powerful weapons, but also interesting character progression. This includes emails, secret hangouts, food stashes, items and audio logs that offer insight into the life and minds of the crew aboard Talos 1 with lots to discover. The audio logs and lore you can find is a draw to these series, though I think Prey has the strongest character development out of all of them. You learn a lot about these characters including what they do in their free time, gossip around Talos 1, who they are dating and office politics. You also experience their dread with the reality of an alien force taking over the station. I found an audio log early on that mentioned that certain fire alarms have neuromods hidden away in them. Since that point it made me pay special attention to my environment seeing if there are any fire alarms with glowing lights above them. It really takes the design of some areas in Bioshock of “enemies are standing in water, shoot electro bolt here” or simply finding the code to a safe in an audio diary to a different dimension.
There are really so many reasons why I fell in love with Prey right away that I couldn’t contain my enthusiasm when I tried to talk to people about it. The problem is that most people had never heard of the game. The few who knew about it were reluctant to make the comparison to Bioshock and instead made comparisons to System Shock 2 or the original Prey which I didn’t agree with. When I search for gameplay or theories there isn’t a huge a community for the game. Most let’s plays I found consisted of people spamming the shotgun into every enemy they found, calling the game unoriginal or mediocre and moving on. Part of the reason why I started this channel was so that I could share my opinions on games such as Prey so that they were out there in the world and I could point to them at any time. Prey is full of so many cool ideas that were originally conceived in System Shock 2 but Arkane chose to build off a formula established in Bioshock. The studio also worked on Bioshock 2 and I think their experience in this series has paid off for them in creating an amazing spiritual successor to another spiritual successor that was loved by many.