An attempt to jump to the Bioshock level, but with your feet towards the top. It’s hard not to respect the game at least for this, and if the game had been called that way, it expanded the universe of the game very well and many would have noted its fair merits. A more open and complex level design, pleasant shooter mechanics, moral choice, the ability to approach situations with creativity. Those who are unhappy with the name of the game can safely perceive it as a spinoff of Bioshock and it surprisingly fits into this definition. Prey is a gameplay-verified Bioshock. However, we should not forget which people made it and as a result we get Bioshock, where the gameplay significantly exceeds the quality of the narration and presentation of the background.
Here a stumbling block arises. The setting of the game, although it does not reach Levin’s fantasy, is good enough to tell interesting stories about the dead and surviving characters. He just does it outrageously rarely. One location. Only the location where all the crew members lived is literally saturated with interesting stories through messages, records, interior, everything! This is an ideal location to study, because the material to study from it is damn interesting! Outside its borders, computers will contain a damn dull summary, scientific journals and stories of no interest to anyone will be scattered. The latest Deus Ex also suffers in a similar way, where the entire text part given for study is either boring or incompetently woven in such a way that you don’t care about the author of the message on the computer. It is simply impossible to smile or become interested in the author. Yes, it is a plus for the background, but I don’t understand why it can’t be made interesting. Really interesting places - a minimum and some of them are found in the plot. But that’s exactly what the game is about! Studying locations while slowly making your way from deck to deck. Speaking of which!
I don't like metroidvania. Going somewhere far and then running back somewhere because something has changed or a new passage has opened is dreary. And the plot doesn’t even try to provide rich plot motivation for the player. So ask me, what happens in the middle of the plot? What is most of the game about? In Bioshock, I can say "We are looking for Andrew Ryan and we are being sent to him by the sane madmen of Rapture." Immediately, “the fucking robot is kicking us all over the station for something that will blow it up.” And if in the first case this describes only part of the game, in the second it is almost the entire game, except for the final hours! The plot was written as if for the finale and as a reason to show an interesting world. “It’s the same with bioshock,” you say? Partially, because even before the finale he offered interesting plot moves and colorful madmen. They immediately pushed everything towards the final hours... Although I’ll give credit to one, for all my dislike for metroidvania, here it was much less annoying unlike Bioshock, fortunately there are faster paths from one location to another, and the paths themselves between locations on repeated runs they seem much shorter and in fact the station feels smaller than it was when we first met.
Side moves are often very flat and you don’t even notice how you take them and how you perform them. Important tasks are placed in a separate category and you perceive them as a fork in the plot quest. It’s not to say that the secondary characters are perceived as particularly alive, but with the recordings that give them background, the finale disappointed with its sharpness and budget, which did not provide any interesting videos and literally ends the story with a snap of the fingers just when you want additional events about the consequences. There are 8 endings, they are really quite different, although one hell it all comes down to the afterword, where they will show you the main twist in any case and the subsequent fork gives absolutely nothing.
And this is how difficult it is to judge the game.
Good gameplay, but not enough to drag the game on yourself. The background is good, but only a quarter of all notes are at least somehow interesting against the backdrop of a piece of paper used to create the image of a live station. The plot is okay, but it is distributed in such a way that you study the station more than follow it. At first you start to love the game for the plot, gameplay and world, but after that you are frankly abandoned in it and you are stupidly bored with studying it. Gradually everything is getting better, but after completing the game I feel that I was never given individual events and meetings that would have perfectly developed the plot.
Like the heiress of Bioshock 4 out of 5
Like a simple game 3 out of 5
The game is good. Remembering individual elements even very much! But remembering my impressions after 5-10 hours, the inability of the plot to grab your attention and skillful leveling reduces everything to just a normal game, where the boring is balanced with the interesting. Gradually, boredom fades into the background, but this makes the game difficult to judge. 23 events are in this balance, and the last third still perfectly instills in this world and with great pleasure you study it and follow the events. Maybe I should have made the gaming sessions longer, but let the truth be somewhere in the words, not in the ratings. And even if there are in them, let there be two of them.