T w e n t y S i d e d

After Morgan deals with the mess in Cargo Bay, she moves on to Life Support. Here she bumps into ex-girlfriend Mikhaila Ilyushin.

Mikhaila is currently slumped on the floor, paralyzed in her extremities. She has a rare neurological condition called Paraplexis. She’s fine as long as she gets regular medication, but with the station in disarray she’s missed her dose and is thus helpless.

People with this condition are excluded from orbital duty, but Mikhaila faked some paperwork to get around that. She began dating Morgan at one point, and eventually Morgan found out.

Morgan broke off the relationship because she was about to enter the testing program where she would be memory-wiped over and over, and you can’t really maintain a relationship while that sort of nonsense is going on. At the same time, she never gave Mikhaila a reason for the break-up, so Mikhaila sort of assumed she was being dumped because of her condition. So the entire situation was mostly awkwardness all around.

We need Mikhaila’s help right now because Alex has locked down the entire station. She has a plan to shut down the entire reactor and start it up again to clear the lockdown. I don’t know if we should be using Windows 95 troubleshooting techniques on a nuclear reactor, but Mikhaila is the expert and she seems to think it’ll work.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 14: The Ex-Girlfriend”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Last time, Morgan had just launched herself into space and then snuck back on board Talos-1 through the cargo bay. Here we meet a cluster of well-armed survivors who have been gathering supplies and holding the Typhon back. This small group is really all that’s left of the command structure of the station. There are a few isolated survivors elsewhere,Like Danielle Sho, Alex, and the various people possessed by Telepaths. but the cargo bay is the only place where people are still relatively safe and organized.

These survivors aren’t stuck on the other side of a window. We don’t have a locked door between us. We meet face-to-face with these NPCs. And I hate it.

The Uncanniest Valley

Designers of story-driven AAA games have a problem. Stories require characters. Characters generally require some degree of back-and-forth dialog. Dialog requires the ability to listen and understand. And in a practical sense, computers are terrible at that last bit.

Maybe the designer has a scene where Jimmy Sidekick tells us about the time Dr. Crazo destroyed his hometown with an army of murder-bots. When the story is over, then the player is probably having some sort of emotional reaction.Assuming the scene was written well. There are a lot of ways someone might respond to something like this. There are countless different ways you might take a conversation in response to someone revealing their trauma…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 13: Face Time”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Like I said in the last entry, Alex locked Morgan in Deep Storage for her own good. But as I’ve made clear in the past couple of entries, Alex’s help is often a huge liability. The situation here in Deep Storage is classic Alex: He’s trying to keep us safe, but he’s accidentally locked us in a relatively limited space with the dreaded…

Technopath

This guy is a bastard. The technopath can control machines, manipulate computers, and disable weapons. He’s not the highest on the alien org chart, and I don’t think the designers intended him to be the biggest threat, but this guy killed me more than the rest of the creeps combined.

Note also how this is yet another point in the story where our silent protagonist works against the story being told. Alex supposedly locked us in here to “keep us safe”, but he’s locked us in a small-ish space with a high-level threat. Morgan ought to be able to call Alex and tell him that he’s being a butthead.I’m really curious what Alex would do if Morgan was able to explain the situation. Would he unlock the door and let you loose again, or would he just send you a bunch of supplies and tell you to take care of the problem yourself?

This game has turrets. You can find them, repair them, and reinforce them. They even carry their own (unlimited) ammunition. At the same time, they’re fragile and get broken or knocked over easily. They actually remind me a lot of the Combine turrets in Half-Life 2. 

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 12: Meet the Technopath”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.