Like I said last time, Walther Dahl showed up for some mustache-twirling villainy just as the main story was getting good. So then the plot of the game slams on the brakes and we spend the next hour or so fighting the same boring enemy robot over and over.
There are a couple of different ways that Morgan can deal with Walther Dahl. She can give him a good old-fashioned murdering, or she can knock him out. And knocking him out isn’t just for bleeding-heart hippies doing “no kill” novelty runs like in some games. Here, sparing Dahl’s life serves an immediate practical benefit: It gives us a way off the station.
Here is one of the escape pod bays. One of the pods has a mimic in it, another is stuck in the launch tube, and none of them actually work.
Technically, we shouldn’t need additional transportation off the station. On Talos-1 there are three escape pod bays. Each bay holds six pods, and each pod holds 8 people. So what we have here is a Titanic-type situation where we only have a lifeboat capacity of 144 for our 260 personnel. If we want to be charitable,I don’t want to be charitable. we could assume that the original crew size was supposed to be less than 144, but the station has grown in the last few years and nobody’s gotten around to adding more escape pod bays.
Either that or everyone on the station is bad at math.
It doesn’t matter, since none of the pods work anyway. I found an audiolog where Alex Yu specifically directed a member of the maintenance staff to not repair or maintain the escape pods. But I never found a rationale behind the order, and the wiki doesn’t seem to have anything to say about it either.
The unfavorable explanation is that Alex is a much more cartoonish villain than I’ve been giving him credit for. He discontinued the maintenance because he wanted to save money, or because he thought nothing could possibly go wrong. If this is the reason, then Alex is actually kinda dumb.
The more favorable explanation is that Alex realized that the escape pods represented a huge threat to Earth. In the event of an emergency, the Typhon would most likely break containment. If they did, then having 18 different escape pods leave the station would represent 18 different ways for the Typhon to reach Earth. The odds are that at least one pod would end up with a mimic inside, and from there the Typhon can jump to Earth and it’s game over for humanity. So perhaps Alex effectively sabotaged the pods in order to protect the Earth.
It should be noted that Alex has his own private pod at the top of the Arboretum, and that one works just fine. Make of that what you will.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 17: Dealing With Dahl”
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.
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