In the Wake of Tragedy and the Unknown
Prey
A pandemic post-mortem on paranoia, on seeking fear to process fear
Early on in the pandemic, there was a heightened paranoia about surfaces. In public, and especially in the city: the virus could be anywhere, unseen and hidden in plain sight, masquerading in the normalcy of everyday life.
In the cacophonous panic of those early days, there was a constant tension and wariness in living, a lack of safety around every corner. The volume of pain and the general lack of understanding about our situation was impossible to comprehend.
So I escaped one hellhole for another.
Prey is Arkane Studio Austin’s simulation on being trapped in space aboard the civilian-commercial research station Talos I. Primarily for the development of brain remapping neuromods, the station conducts experiments upon the alien Typhon who have managed to breach containment. In the wake of their takeover of the station, they’ve infected every aspect of the inhabited environment, leaving the majority of the crew dead, disparate, or divided.
You wake from your own neuromod experiments as Chinese-German(!) researcher; doctor; vice-president; Dr. Morgan Yu. Faced with the enormity and tragedy of the situation at hand, there are opposing paths forward. On one hand, your brother; whether in folly or in failing his presidential duties; calls upon you to drive back the Typhon threat and save the station and its research. This is juxtaposed against January: claiming to be an artificial intelligence created by you in case of this very situation; who urges destruction of the station to prevent a spread to Earth.
Caught between these two; unsure of who to trust; conflicted on if you can even trust yourself; you cautiously try to piece together what’s occurring on Talos I and how you might fix it. And despite personal motivations and hidden directives, you hope what you can salvage and discover onboard will be enough to see things through.
The isolation conveyed by the station’s suspension in Earth’s orbit is inescapable. It echoes in the quiet halls of a place wracked by tragedy; in spaces left vacant, scrounging through the abandoned scraps where life once existed.
Walking through Manhattan early on mimicked this eerie quiet. You can see it in pictures of Times Square in the throes of pandemic. The opulence; the clean lines; devoid of the messiness of nature; built for consumption and yet left with no one to take it in.
Interspersed in these moments of quiet, the constant specter of danger looms.
Typhon Mimics: cat-sized, oil-colored, spider-shaped-shape-shifters capable of taking the form of everyday objects; hide in the clutter of lived spaces hastily abandoned. The paranoia is palpable. Every corner, every surface, every mug or ashtray or seemingly harmless object is scrutinized for the possibility of danger.
The paranoia of reality echoes here. In surfaces wiped clean and clean again, examined for foreign traces, the mundanity of all the things we touch in life radiating the potential of danger.
Yet there is an agency here that wasn’t present as the real world grappled with its understanding of the unknown. You’re far from a helpless actor in this environment aboard Talos I, though simply shooting your way through things is rarely the only solution.
Within the ecosystem of Typhon (the Mimics being one of which) are the Phantoms: seemingly symbiote/parasite infected humans. The game UI still has their human name. The station departmental directory shares it as well, alongside their role at the station, with life-support trackers still active. These crewmembers have relationships uncovered in correspondence and in environmental storytelling as we fill in the pieces of the lives they once lived.
And in the midst of staring down the barrel, we wonder: are these lives salvageable? Is any of this reversible? The uncertainty lingers and hesitates the pull of a trigger.
Repurposed research equipment proves useful here.
One of which: the GLOO Cannon; a fire-retarding, rapid-expanding, gel cannon that covers and slows the Typhon in their tracks; is a welcome alternative. Its here where you feel like you’re outmaneuvering and overcoming the aliens: slowing mimics and aliens to control confrontations; building paths of putty-like goo for sequence-breaking navigation and shortcuts.
Prey here can subvert the power fantasy with something enamoring in its own way: a cleverness and a scrappiness that your own fragility hinges on to survive. And as you scurry from sector to sector, wresting control from the alien’s grasp, this question of survival shifts to an ever expanding net of preservation.
Arkane iterates on its treading of questions posed before, reverberating the moral conundrums of the Kaldwin Dishonored games, yet stepping back from the wholesale removal in Death of the Outsider. Here, you push the net ever-outward, saving who you can, questioning how far it can be stretched before it snaps. Extricated from the systems motivating you to do so and teetering on the brink of collapse, Prey contains a different type of acceptance here: an understanding that regardless of whether we’re able to absolve ourselves from the weight of who lives or dies, it trusts that we’ll feel that weight once we’ve made our choice. Just because the necessity of the situation requires we continue to push ever forward in pursuit of the larger task at hand, doesn’t mean our decisions are made lightly.
Inch by inch, life by life, hope is dangled within arms-reach and possibility flashes before our eyes; perhaps this situation, this horror, this tragedy, is salvageable.
In many ways, the trials of Prey mimic the trials of COVID-19 since.
In this practice of empathy, when the people we impact are abstracted away, their lives unseen, their suffering compartmentalized to the darkness of space or drowned out in the overcrowded beeps and hum of an ICU: how do we act when no one else is watching; in those moments of quiet; in those empty spaces left behind?
Free of the feeling of observation and judgment of our shortcomings, we’re left to ask ourselves if we cared enough to try to make a difference.
And whether we can live with our own self-judgement when faced with the reality of our answer.
Thanks for reading!
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After the release of Deathloop, I felt I needed to first revisit my thoughts on Prey: a game well underappreciated, but also one that would probably satisfy many of the complaints leveraged against Deathloop for its different approach to structure (I for one also love what Deathloop brings to the table).Post-Dishonored, it’s interesting to see how sister studios under the same Arkane-name iterate on the legacy of the games before, and I’m super excited for what comes next.
Prey by Arkane Studios @ bethesda.net/en/game/prey
