T w e n t y S i d e d

Morgan (presumably) wants to blow up the Talos-1 space station. To do that, she needs Alex’s arming key. To get it, she needs to fly around outside the station and get mauled by six different breeds of alien tentacle monsters while she tries to scan bits of their neuron-like coral that now envelop the station.

The thing is, this scanning is part of a plan to obliterate the Typhon and leave the station intact. With the scan data, we can tune our contrivance generators to the right frequency and atomize the Typhon. Then, once the station is no longer in any danger whatsoever, Alex will hand you his arming key, which you will no longer have any use for.

You will actually get to choose which way you want to go at the end, to nuke or nullwave the station. I’ll come back to this choice when we get there.

The more immediate problem is that Player 3 has just entered the game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 16: Cartoon Bad Guy”

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.

It’s been a long road, but I think we’ve finally reached the part of the game where Morgan can finally begin having agency within the story. Up until now, Morgan has simply been opening doors so she could open the next so she could reach the next door. While this was going on, she was gradually learning the story of Talos-1. She knew all of this stuff at one point, but the neuromod stripping robbed her of the knowledge and context to make sense of things. Now that she’s opened up the station and Alex has promised to stop opposing her, she’s basically all caught up on current events and is now in a position where she can start making informed decisions about things beyond her immediate survival.

Actually, not quite. There’s one last piece to the puzzle.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 15: Building a Better Morgan”

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.

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.