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S2 Ep89: Prey
74 Plays6 years ago
SPOILERS THROUGH MIDGAME: PREY
HAPPY 2020-02-02! This week we're covering one of Jake's favorite immersive sims of all time, and one Dave should've played a lot earlier...PREY!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
HAPPY 2020-02-02! This week we're covering one of Jake's favorite immersive sims of all time, and one Dave should've played a lot earlier...PREY!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
March 15th, 2032: Plans & Tests
00:00:01
Speaker
Good morning, Morgan. Today is Monday, March 15th, 2032. Hey, Morgan. Wake up. You're burning daylight. You sent the helicopter to pick you up. It's just a few tests. Don't forget to wear your suit. See you soon.
00:00:32
Speaker
Oh, listen, uh, what are you great? You decided to come on board. We're going to shake things up Morgan. Like old times.
Cheese Chat with Dave & Jake
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the soapstone podcast. My name is Dave joined as always by my co-host Jake. How's it going tonight? Jake. Uh, it's going all right.
00:00:51
Speaker
I had some cheese earlier. What type of cheese? I don't remember for the quiz. I forget about cheese names. Gueyere. Gueyere. It's Japanese for something. Gueyere. Gruyere. Gueyere. It is dark. You were likely to be killed by Gruyere. Yeah, no, it was pretty good. Had some crackers.
00:01:13
Speaker
I really like that buffalo cheese. It's very strong. It's like buffalo sauce and then they congealed it into cheese, air quotes. Right. It's interesting you mentioned that because I can already picture congealed like buffalo sauce. Like if I order wings or something and you get them like bathed in sauce, you have that as a default. It's not something I have to imagine.
00:01:37
Speaker
It's just weird if you like leave it on a plate not that I ever leaving some plates But like the hot stuff just kind of like dries up. Yeah and evaporates I'm like, where's it going? Is the air now spicy? This is what I have to look forward to god Yeah, but no cheese was good crackers were good it's nice to start to the evening
00:01:59
Speaker
And boy, how much more we have in store.
Is 'Prey' the 2017 Game of the Year?
00:02:03
Speaker
Thank you guys for listening. So today is an extra special episode for me because I almost, I was like on the cusp of going back to see what games actually came out in 2017. They could compete with us because this is before we had started recording episodes. We should say the name of the game. Yeah. It'll be five minutes before we get
00:02:24
Speaker
I was trying to circle around as much as possible, but I believe Shot in the dark that prey would have been my game of the year for 2017 Because it was real good This is my first time playing prey and Jake was Super dick hard on it in 2017. I think I bought it for you at some point didn't I you did It was a holiday sale. You're like, hey, you should play this game and I was like, okay
00:02:51
Speaker
And you treated it like I treat all the videos that you linked me. Jake, you really like this. I don't know if that's true. So I had enough interest to play it initially, but it didn't catch my interest to be like, oh, I'm going to sit down and continue to play through it. Now coming back, I am actually upset at Jake for not making me play it because I really enjoy the fuck out of it. It is a solid game.
00:03:18
Speaker
I'm probably going to do another play through at some point because there's so many options throughout the game that I did not explore. Yeah, it's pretty crazy adaptive, but for the type of game it is, it is an immersive sim, so you can feel- Bioshock. It's like Bioshock, yeah. Like Bioshock or Deus Ex a little bit more because you have like a bit more variation in how you can approach problems.
00:03:40
Speaker
But it is entirely that sci-fi fantasy first-person RPG with the upgrades And honestly just a really cool setting that they they establish really early and Because we just get right in so what were your thoughts on the opening for prey? I
00:04:03
Speaker
So I've, I've continued that one playthrough since 2017. So I do not have. Oh, you actually, you jumped straight back in. Okay. So it's not like I got super far. I probably put in two to three hours, but I was still in that first area. I didn't really explore too, too much.
00:04:19
Speaker
So when I picked back up, I'm like, all right, uh, shouldn't fight anything. Okay. Continue on. So I want to talk about the opening a little bit then, because pray has an awesome opening where, uh, you plays Morgan, you either male or female, you choose at the beginning of the game.
'Prey' Game Mechanics & World Overview
00:04:35
Speaker
Um, and that's the advantage of picking Morgan, you know, gender neutral name.
00:04:41
Speaker
And you go about your like your day which is like taking a helicopter ride to another building going through some tests where researchers give you really simple tasks like move all of the boxes out of a circle and then Like hide in this room with nothing to hide behind. That was uh, that was a fun one cause I was immediately like
00:05:06
Speaker
I don't know. I think I went for the corner or I just like stood there and waited for them to be like, okay, thank you. It's like an aside. There's, um, there's like a time you, you only have so long to hide and you progress regardless, right? It's not like an actual test, but depending on where you hide in the room, there's different dialogue. So if, uh, you just stand there perfectly stationary and don't attempt to hide at all, they're just like, uh,
00:05:33
Speaker
Well, we'll go to the next one. If you run up to the front of the room and try to hide like next to the window, the researcher window, he'll say, Morgan, we can still see you.
00:05:46
Speaker
And if you hide, you just duck behind the one chair that's in the room. The female researcher says, uh, he's, he's hiding behind the chair and it's just the only object in the room. It's just, it's just kind of hilarious. Um, but it's, it's all meant to kind of put you off a little bit. The final test is a, uh,
00:06:08
Speaker
Series of questions like oh you were killed. How do you feel about that? Like I feel vindictive for No one has the right to do that or I'm at peace, and then they give you like a bunch of trolley problems Yeah, it all seems kind of
00:06:24
Speaker
Noctis might not be the right word, but you don't understand the context for anything currently. Cause you're just like, what is this game? A series of puzzles and random questions from researchers as you go through. Yeah. And, um, the, uh, right after finishing that, like a graphic pops up.
00:06:44
Speaker
Um, that's kind of like an ink, ink blot design, um, on the screen. And then the head researcher like goes to take a sip of his coffee cup, but there's two here and he's like, Oh, it's already, already empty. Like what's, what's wrong with coffee? And, uh, it turns out it's a mimic and it attacks him and kills him.
00:07:04
Speaker
So a mimic is one of the most upsetting but cool things about this game. Because basically, there's an alien species called the Typhon, one of which is a mimic. And it is very, I guess like a headcrab might be a comparison. Yeah, yeah. Kind of like more tentacles. More wispy and wiry. But it can take on the form of other things. So in this case, it was a coffee cup.
00:07:30
Speaker
but there's literally no way to tell that it's a mimic. Yeah. Um, so the researcher gets killed, I believe. And then like gas fills the room, which knocks you out. And, uh, your brother, uh, Alex is like, Oh, is Morgan okay? And they're like, yeah, he or she's unconscious. He, in my case, uh, for my play through. And, um, they're like, he's like, okay, we'll handle it. I'm on my way. Um,
00:07:57
Speaker
And then you are fade to black, you're out of it. And you wake up to your alarm clock and the standard, um, your clock tells you the day and it's the same day as it was just previously. Um, but, uh, your brother doesn't call you this time.
00:08:15
Speaker
Because it take the helicopter ride to come over to exactly he doesn't he doesn't call you But otherwise everything else seems okay until you leave your apartment You grab your suit you put it on you leave your apartment just as you would in the previous day But the hallway outside of your apartment is darkened and where there was like a janitor lady Doing some repair work before now. She's dead and it looks like there's a there's a special like
00:08:42
Speaker
desiccated look for people who are victims of mimics because it like pales them makes them look like prunes kind of it kind of Husks husks them out a little bit. Yeah Like if you've seen in any movie where they kind of like suck up somebody's life force and it kind of ages them Makes their skin kind of pull in towards their bones. It's just they have nothing. They look malnourished Yeah, they they're having a bad time or they had a bad time. I
00:09:07
Speaker
But you can grab her wrench and then there's nowhere else you can go. You can go to the elevator you took to get to the roof before, but it doesn't go anywhere. It's like unpowered. And a voice calls you. It's a robotic voice and it self identifies as January.
00:09:27
Speaker
And it self-identifies, what a 2020 phrase right there. I self-identify as Jake. And it's like, hey, you know, but you got to get you out of your apartment.
Morgan's Test Chamber Revelation
00:09:37
Speaker
And you don't really know how to do that, but there's a door, there's like a glass door to your patio in your like high rise apartment. It's a sunny day outside and you're like, all right.
00:09:48
Speaker
The door's locked, but I have a wrench, right? Problem solver. And you can smash that glass. But as soon as you do, you realize that you're not smashing the glass to view outside. As soon as you smash the glass, you realize that you are in a like a test chamber, essentially.
00:10:12
Speaker
So basically you broke the the monitor that was like projecting. Hey, this is outside quotes quotes. Yeah It's like your chill in the beginning of portal pretty much. There's actually like It's worth noting the the glass the game uses it several times. It's called looking glass in the game itself But it's really cool technologically
00:10:36
Speaker
Because it respects position so you can see like objects outside as you walk left right forward and back and everything looks real until you break the glass and then Whatever part you broke out just now is not you can't see through that anymore. It's or you see out to reality It's hard to describe I guess
00:10:58
Speaker
Let me make an attempt. Yeah. Yeah, go for it So basically it's as if you were watching TV you have an image projected Mm-hmm, but it's also like you're physically there for whatever. It's showing this three. I'm looking straight into the TV I'm gonna see that front-facing view. Mm-hmm. If I take a couple steps to the left I could see what would be in that space of the TV in the back right
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, you know looking through yeah, it's like if you're looking at like the wind in somebody's house Don't do that by the way, but if you like go from left to right you can see different angles You're seeing into something exactly versus like being across the street with the binoculars and you just see She's watching TV family It's on a flat screen if you're like in a three there is depth to it based on angle positioning
00:11:52
Speaker
And the game uses it at several points, and it's just a really cool technology. And it's obvious they wanted to show it off, but it's fully paid off at the beginning of the game when you smash that glass for the first time and realize that you're in a test chamber.
00:12:08
Speaker
There's a cool part after that because the helicopter ride was fake. It's all just on a gyroscope. The other building is actually right next to your building. The elevator doesn't go anywhere. There's walls that come in and out to change the location. So the whole helicopter ride's fake.
00:12:31
Speaker
Uh, it's all just looking glass over like San Francisco. You're actually on Talos one, which is a space station. Um, in space in space. Yeah, that's fair. It's not like they were working on it on earth and they're like, look it up there one day. Right. No, this, this, this boy's up there. Yeah.
00:12:51
Speaker
But you quickly realize everything's gone to crap. The recording with your brother's voice is on a computer, a technician's computer right next to your room, quote unquote. And you can just hit a button to make his morning call play through your radio.
00:13:10
Speaker
So pretty much it's a full shatters reality type thing because it gives you an initial premise and then they quickly yank that away. But what you saw with the mimic was not fake because as you start to explore your surroundings, you don't really see people.
00:13:26
Speaker
But you start to see some mimics here and there and other instances of these Typhon. And you realize shit's real fucked because Typhon have infected the station and there aren't really living people as far as you know at this point, at least you're not coming across any. You find a lot of dead crew members throughout the game.
00:13:50
Speaker
Which I kind of like in the way that they actually, for each terminal you'll be at for a different area, you'll say like, hey, here are the people who work in this area or who are here. And they might be like missing or found based on whether you found them or not. Exactly. And usually each body will have some items or stuff for you to pick up. There's actually an achievement. It's like lost and found for finding almost everyone.
00:14:13
Speaker
there's there's some like mercy space where you don't have to find it's like 260 living and dead people and the whole the whole thing but you only need to find like 244 or something like that actually only get the achievement yeah
00:14:28
Speaker
It still takes forever. But at this point in the game, I really liked obviously them giving you a wrench, getting some of those Bioshock vibes. Also, it's a very, in the same way of Bioshock or other games, it's very desolate because you're on this big ass empty space station with dead bodies and aliens and coffee cups, which you're not sure are coffee cups or not.
00:14:54
Speaker
And that really adds to the excitement of the game because anything you encounter something you're fairly weak because you start out with a wrench. Yeah, and then you get a stun gun which is your Slightly more ranged way to deal with something and then haul ass. Yeah, they don't give you much at all but it's It feels cool because I would like crouch and go slowly to see if a mimic would
00:15:18
Speaker
Stopping a coffee cup and start to attack me. Yeah. Uh-huh or just to explore Because they actually do have a lot of detail throughout the game and I wish I played it even slower than I did because the art style is very detailed amazing. Yeah, and Like every computer where it's like hey, this is so-and-so's email it adds lore to the world and they're actually
00:15:45
Speaker
either well-written or funny. Yeah, they're not just corpses. Yeah. I don't think there's very few. Nothing is there just for the fuck of it. Exactly. And if you do go slowly, like the mimics, sometimes you can see them kind of like vibrate. They'll just shake a little bit like they're struggling to maintain their form. But one of the things I absolutely love about it is the intuitive nature of prey. So like if you, the mimics can disguise themselves as any nearby object.
00:16:15
Speaker
So, if you're looking through an office area and you see two chairs at a desk, if you're just playing the game going forward, whatever, that might not mean anything. But if you take a break and you're like, hey, wait, why would there be two chairs at this desk? People don't study together. Exactly. This isn't a paired programming experience.
00:16:36
Speaker
Like little little pieces of information like that and help you out or you see two two types that are very like the same object side by side a lot of times that's a mimic I Honestly have never noticed that so it goes to show you what type of player I am
00:16:51
Speaker
I'm very, uh, devil may care just off doing my own shit. Uh, pretty early though, you get, uh, you get neuro mods, which are like the game's persistent progression.
NeuroMods & Player Choices
00:17:02
Speaker
And did you grab mods that enabled you to pay attention to less, but go forward more, keep the tempo up or did you go more stealthy?
00:17:14
Speaker
So as you know, every time I, I went more stealthy, there were different trees, which will probably hit on more in a little bit. Yeah. Um, but I just went things that would be like, Hey, this will help you sustain more or a little more stealth, a little more, maybe you can pick up heavier objects to find different entrances to areas. Yeah. You can get strong.
00:17:37
Speaker
Another great thing about the game is you always have options to approach a thing. Oh, yeah. So a lot of times I would see like this Small pass away. I'm like, oh my god if I was too if I was strong enough to move that box. Yeah. Mm-hmm. They tempt you with it To go back Every time I do stealth and like I want to be a stealth god Yeah, and then shit hits the fan and then I pull out my shotgun and I go hog wild. Uh-huh. They're like, okay back to stuff
00:18:04
Speaker
And there's just like, everything's broken. Dead bodies are everywhere. And obviously I failed my stealth, but... This is why you're the best, boss. Boss, you killed a child. It's like you're sneaking up with a mission. The guy goes, hey, just a reminder. And you're like, shooting Rick. That's close.
00:18:24
Speaker
It's very accurate though. There's a lot of spooky things in Prey. And like by the end of it, you can be the spookiest thing, but that's the truth. It is definitely the truth. Another enemy is a Phantom, which are people that are essentially created from human corpses. They're Typhon, they run around, they kind of say human lines sometimes just to creep you out.
00:18:51
Speaker
Well, it's kind of like a Spectre from dota 2. Mm-hmm. Yeah type human lines like everything's kind of very Ethereal not fully formed. Mm-hmm, but they are humanoid shadowy creatures and they do dashes they do like reality dashes like little blinks Yeah, we're like shadows that shadow status shadow stuff. Yeah Or it's like hey
00:19:13
Speaker
I just detected you and then they take like a step forward and then jump 20 feet to you and then attack you and you're like, oh, okay. And they don't necessarily just hit you with their shadow mitts as much as they might send telekinetic blasts your way.
00:19:32
Speaker
And you don't start out with like a huge health pool. No. More weapons. So much. So you really kind of got a early, early game, early doors. Find that pacing for when you want to engage with something. And if you need to at all. Yeah. Especially considering your resources. Like you'll only have so many med packs. You only have so much food, which heals you slowly. And you'll only have so much ammo at the start of the game.
00:19:57
Speaker
But one thing the game does really well that I've grown to appreciate more and more is, is very much a game where, as you are going through and exploring things, you are kind of picking up everything. Yeah. If you touch a body, you're like, and pick up all that stuff, open a box and all that stuff. Yes. Everything. And eventually your inventory gets kind of clutter. You're like, what am I doing with these junk items? I can't do anything with. You got 52 banana peels on and about your person. Right. I'm like, this seems, what am I going to trip a typhoon, comedically?
00:20:27
Speaker
But you find these recycling machines where you can stuff all that extra shit into, press a boop button, and then it drops out these materials in like cute cubes. Yeah, cubes and spheres. So you pick up all the cubes, you're like, all right, my inventory is about the same amount, maybe a little bit more space. But then you can find a fabricator.
00:20:50
Speaker
where you can put in these raw resources to make things like, Oh, that would be nice to have a shotgun or shotgun ammo or goo gun ammo. Yeah. Oh yeah. Goo gun is a, it's an interesting kind of inclusion here. I got to say it is.
00:21:08
Speaker
I was already enticed in the game initially, but this added more to it. Yeah. I'll let you subscribe a little bit before I get too hyped. So, uh, I would ask you how many, how many ways do you think you can use the glue gun and pray if you could come up with a number? Cause I, and I'll tell you, I'll tell you how many I can think of. Should I think in my head quietly or should I like list them out? Just guess like a number.
00:21:38
Speaker
All right. Fill the air time. Well, I sure. Yeah. So I'll start listing what I know. Uh, so you can use the glue gun to glue walls. Uh, but the game explicitly says in a loading screen, uh, and they have the scientific word for it that I can't remember, but it doesn't attach to glass. There's an N universe description for why it can't attach to glass. It has to be other types of services.
00:22:00
Speaker
I'm gonna say four. Four. Okay. Interesting. So you can glue walls to either block off doorways. I would take a lot of glue. Or. Or. To make a ladder. Exactly.
00:22:14
Speaker
So since you can, it's kind of like you throw some goop on the wall and then it congeals and hardens, but if you do it at like a 45 degree angle up a wall, you've essentially have enough space to kind of walk up the side in between like some jumping. The game also has like some, some vaulting or, uh, what's the term? It's not gantry, but it begins with G anyways, uh, whenever you climb up something.
00:22:40
Speaker
If you're like near the top, you'll kind of use your upper body leverage to do the rest of it. Especially if you get like a couple physical upgrades, you can like for jump height, which is literally under human. Oh, I was so happy when I got that. It's so good. It was a late game though. You can just drop like a couple of gloop things on the wall and then just jump, grab one, jump, grab one, jump, grab one, and just vertically climb with them. It's so freaking good. But yeah, you can climb.
00:23:06
Speaker
You can goop enemies, which slows them down until they're fully gooped, at which point they're frozen for a bit. And you can do extra physical damage to them. Yeah, it's the one-two punch. Yeah, the one-two is like, goop, wrench. Yeah, give them the goop, give them the wrench. It amps all types of damage though, which is like really cool.
00:23:28
Speaker
So you can like use the full shotgun blast and it does a lot. That's kind of what I did. I didn't always necessarily wait to goop them though. It depends if I was found from my stealth or not. It's a nice, you get tons of goop ammo and it's pretty cheap to make in resources. So you can actually, if you're running low on other types of ammo, you can utilize that amped damage.
00:23:54
Speaker
More by slowing down all your opponents before you go for the the coup de gras You can also use it to shoot and disable electric arcing boxes I Say boxes, but electrical boxes. I'm gonna blanket say disable hazards Because a lot of times maybe like a fire has broken out in a space. She's like I'm gonna jizz all over and it kind of puts out the fire and
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's flame retardant. Um, it'll also, we don't, it'll also, uh, block. Um, if there's like a gas pipes that have fires in them, it'll seal those up. You can literally do, I, I was, I marked to you before the episode, you do more repairs than this than Isaac does in dead space by far. Like, yeah, I think it doesn't weld shit in that game. No, it's not actually that great of an engineer. Um,
00:24:49
Speaker
But yeah, I think that's most of it. Well, also just because it is a projectile slash weapon, it doesn't deal damage. But if you're unsure about a room and you want to conserve bullet ammo and not swing wildly with a wrench, you can throw out some goop stuff and you might catch a mimic. That's true. Or if you're not sure something is, you want to check it range.
00:25:13
Speaker
use a group. Yeah, it's way better than shooting wildly with like expensive ammo that's harder to replace. And you have stamina, so you can't run around with your Wrenching key swinging indefinitely. I think you get like four swings before you're just kind of like lightly poking them with Wrenching.
00:25:29
Speaker
Please die. Yeah. And you feel like a geriatric at that point. You can get like some type, some Neuromod upgrades to increase your stamina, but I probably, in my ratings tier list, I would value those lower. Um, uh, the, there's a, there's a combat reflexes, like slow-mo time thing, which also gives you more, uh, stamina efficiency. And I think at highest rank for that, you're almost like stopped in time compared to the enemies you move full speed and you don't consume any stamina with your attacks.
00:26:00
Speaker
So you kind of just turned like a ninja with a wrench, I guess. I don't know. Wrenched. Yeah. No, that was bad. Doesn't quite work. I'll get back to you on that. Um, but yeah, I think that's most of it, like four or five. Usually like if it's a puzzle solving, uh, tool in a game like this, you might only have limited use for it, but the goop gun or the goo gun stays like useful through the whole thing. I use it less toward the end, but it's also always a viable option to mitigate incoming threat.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah. There's some enemies later on. And they're also smart to the game where you're in space. That's true, yeah. Surprise, surprise, Space Station. It's better in space. It is, because I can kind of just spray an area, and it's just gonna go indefinitely, but it's nice to kind of scatter blast certain things. There's these assistoid-type Typhon that, like, spawn from assist nests, basically.
00:26:54
Speaker
They they sense movement. So when you get close to them one you get some radiation, which is like its own sort of damage type in debuff But they'll explode if you get too close or an object gets too close is more accurate and they release these little tiny swarming bubbles, I guess I'd describe them as
00:27:14
Speaker
Yeah, they're kind of like weird, weird tribbles in a way. Yeah, actually. That's a good one, actually. That's a good one. But there's so the first time I played through way back in the day, I was like, I kind of struggled with them. They caused me pain. Sometimes I'd take suit suit damage and I'd like start losing oxygen and zero G, which is never a fun time.
00:27:40
Speaker
Because usually you have infinite oxygen and let until your your suit breaks But in this playthrough I found out they freaking track movement and they're like encyclopedia entry and the journal tells you that So if you like just pick up something throwing throwing like in space and you throw it near them the tribbles will chase it down and explode on it and
00:28:06
Speaker
Completely harmless. Yeah, there'll be times I would just find like a scrap of something or like a fire extinguisher Just like a you know, gas cancer that's better always laying about in games and I just kind of eat it out and then just Yeah, I didn't even consider it my first playthrough. I just wasted tons of ammo and I used goop goop is goop is much more efficient for that because they still die to it
00:28:29
Speaker
Yeah. I like how we derailed really hard off of, uh, the goo gun and also those narrow ones. Yeah. So some of the cool things you can do in the trees, uh, you can put points into, we obviously were talking about some strength, uh, if you want to move some objects out of the way to explore different paths.
Scanning Typhon & Player Abilities
00:28:47
Speaker
Also there's some stuff you can do to repair. Yeah. There's some turrets from the game. I never put points into that and I should have. Enter repair.
00:28:55
Speaker
Cause every time it's like, Hey, if you were two levels higher in repair, you could do something here. I'm like, damn it. Um, you can hack in this game, which out of the other types of games like this, this has been my favorite hacking. Yeah. You're kind of just moving a, a little ball through a grid and you'll have some square barricades. Yeah. But you have a little bit of, uh, inertia, so you'll bump off some things.
00:29:22
Speaker
But basically you have to go to the specific area and press the correct key, which will show up when you get there. But you might hit something that'll stun you along the way, et cetera, and then it's timed. Yeah. I don't think you get penalized if you fail the hack.
00:29:37
Speaker
You take a little bit of damage. You get shocked. I feel like that's the best way to punish hackers. Yeah, just shock them. Give them a light taste. A little light. Light. Stop it. Stop it, you. Electric chair. Please take a seat. Chris, no.
00:29:55
Speaker
I'm trying to think what else for humans. Scavenging, get better at that. Yeah, you can get some recycling efficiency in the human tree, which is really good if you recycle literally everything like I did. Don't need this gun.
00:30:12
Speaker
I mean, in some cases, yeah, if you got like another shotgun, um, they also get the ability to upgrade their weapons, which I'm sure you did if you were going with weapons. So initially for any weapon, as you get like upgrade packs, you can kind of just drop it in, which is pretty nice. Um, there are different things for like maybe accuracy, handling, range, damage. Reload speeds. You can only do one level and the rest are locked until you put points in that. It's like a taste, right? Yeah. It's like, Hey, wouldn't it be nice if your stuff was better?
00:30:42
Speaker
So yeah, you can actually max that out. And once I did, I put everything into the shotgun because that was my damage golden choice. It's beautiful. It's pretty good. A maxed out shotgun in Prey is fairly absurd. And you reload so fast. Yeah. And you can also get like sneaky crits. So if you hit an enemy who has not detected you, you will do essentially backstab damage.
00:31:10
Speaker
it is great yeah i think the human trees they're made up of like the scientist branch and the security branch i think those are the two yeah now jake i noticed twice that you said human tree which is not something you can grow or buy normally in the states but
00:31:28
Speaker
So the genome branch there, um, something I like about the game is they hide the other options, uh, entirely. They tell you first, I think, um, you get an item called the psychoscope, which is just like, uh, do you remember like the camera from Bioshock, how you could use it to take pictures?
00:31:46
Speaker
Yeah, you got like research by doing that and you could get some upgrades. This is somewhat similar to that It's nicer than bio shot. It is watch like you had to switch to the camera. Is that right? Yeah, it was like a weapon slot Yeah with the psychoscope you can just have that as a HUD overlay on top of everything else It kind of narrows your field of view a little bit. It's like a monocle like a giant monocle and the middle of your head That's what it looks like
00:32:12
Speaker
Cyclops. Cyclops, yes. But the first thing you get with the psychoscope is the ability to detect mimics. Yeah. And it's a specific chipset you can put in there and you can swap out for other chipsets later. But I'll say like, hey, that chair, it's not a chair. Fake chair. So it gives you a bit of a heads up and you can check before you go into a room.
00:32:35
Speaker
A lot of times I would forget I had that option and be like, oh shit, goddamn it. Right. Yeah. Cause you get comfortable to a point and then you get reminded why you should not be. Right. But also as you are seeing something that is Typhon, you'll kind of scan it. And if you get enough scan progress, it'll say like, Hey, here's some cool stuff. And it starts to unlock pieces of this Typhon tree for skill sets with neural mods where you can essentially get Typhon powers.
00:33:05
Speaker
And I did not really go into any of this outside of like one trial thing, because I'm a human. I represent humans. But Jake, you said you had a really fun play through going full Typhon. Yeah, so pretty much. What are some things you can do with Typhon mods? So there's a couple of things I love about it. I also wanted to mention one thing about the psychoscope. Yeah. Similar to detective vision and like Batman, but where detective vision, you always had it on in Batman, so you didn't like lose awareness of anything.
00:33:33
Speaker
and pray your sound is dampened when you have the psychoscope on. It's harder to hear things. I miss that sound thing. So it's a little bit harder to track all of your surroundings if you're relying on 100%, which I love. There's a trade-off. But it makes you immune to fear while you're wearing it as well, which is good. I could use one of those sometimes.
00:33:55
Speaker
But the mods you get with it, they're entirely based off of what you scan. So if you scan a Mimic, Mimicry is the skill you get. If you scan a Phantom, you get the ability to fire kinetic blasts. It's like if Ash scanned the Pokémon instead of catching them, and then he casts Thunderbolt. That's what Prey is like.
00:34:19
Speaker
I would have gone to Kirby, but I see what you're saying. So, but like as mimicry, can you actually mimic something? Yeah. So like you can mimic anything a basic mimic could, could mimic. And the, the first time I played the game, I didn't take advantage of it whatsoever. I was like, this takes two psi energy, which is just like your mana sort of psionic potential energy. Um, you can refill with Eve Hypo's, I guess.
00:34:47
Speaker
They're Psi Hypos, but they're the same thing. It's your man. It's your you. We know what it is. I barely used it in my first playthrough. And then this one, I realized that there's a lot of security booths or things like that where there'll be a little security slot at a bank or something like that. Like a television station where it's like, here's your security glass. Yes. Because you can slide envelopes, pretty much. So I had a moment in this playthrough where I was like, huh.
00:35:15
Speaker
And then I went and I like grabbed a book, uh, like there was the nearby vicinity, not immediately there, but nearby. I just set it up there on the edge, jumped up on the edge and crouched down like a crazy person and then mimicked the book on the ledge and just slid my way through the, through the little gap, uh, reverted to human form and unlocked the door from the inside. And I'm like, I'm freaking genius.
00:35:40
Speaker
Hello, this is your local library. I want to say you have some overdue jakes. You could please swing by. Your earliest convenience. It's kind of funny. It's awesome that you can just be another object in the game though. And they all like, you move by like rolling or doing little hops as the object. You can just like do a little hop. It's like your, not like Katamari, but a game of life or something like that. One of those. It's like you are bread. Yeah, exactly. Exactly like that.
00:36:08
Speaker
Um, but love mimicry, uh, good problem solving one. You also get remote manipulation, which I barely use till the end of the game. Is that it's like telekinesis?
00:36:19
Speaker
Yeah, but it'll let you interact with things at like crazy distances once it's upgraded and it's any interactable. So anything that you'd usually have to hit your interact key to do you can do with telekinesis. Whether that's hack a turret or upgrade a turret by reinforcing it with the repair skill or... Okay, so that actually has good use where you could be like further away from enemies who are patrolling and you're just like
00:36:44
Speaker
And mind powers turn on the computer. Exactly, yeah. They hear like the Windows 95 startup like, what is this?
00:36:52
Speaker
It's really cool. And you have your presence is next to the object while you're interacting with it. So your body is like vulnerable cause you're astral projecting basically over there. Oh, it's a projection thing. Okay. Yeah, it's, it's pretty neat. And then there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of attack stuff. So kinetic blast, we mentioned a flame geyser sort of thing, which you can get from a flame variant of phantoms.
00:37:17
Speaker
There's a shock phantom as well. Yep, really good against robots. It stuns them and yeah, there's some really cool stuff in there. You get resistance to all their things as well as you continue to learn them.
00:37:33
Speaker
And there's a shield which is similar to like Quinn From the Witcher and that it blocks a certain instance of damage by default just like one But it builds up to like three Do you remember the Weaver enemies? Oh, yeah, I think they
00:37:55
Speaker
They kind of look like an amoeba and they had like an overshield. Yeah. So that's where you learn it. You learn their overshield, but they have a special effect where if you don't have the psychoscope down and you damage them, their shield breaks, but it afflicts you with fear. So you're like, your cursor starts to be like, and you see like some halo on the side of your screen. It's not the game, but like halo effect.
00:38:23
Speaker
But the backlash skill, what you learned from them, eventually has that effect. So you can fear Typhon when they attack you because you're a god and how dare they. It's just, it's great. Eventually you can corrupt the water supply, essentially on the station to make it psionically charged. So every time you take a sip of water, it's like refilling your, your mana essentially.
00:38:47
Speaker
Will say by default if you take a sip of water from like a water fountain it it recovers one health one hit point I think it is you can do it indefinitely you can there's a cool down There's a cool down of like 15 seconds. Mm-hmm. So it's not your most efficient. Yeah Yeah, so if you're like and if you're in like a bathroom, it behooves you to take a sip from every
00:39:09
Speaker
I've now I've searched the toilet might as well Another thing that's a really cool because you do have fairly limited resources as we keep saying. Mm-hmm, but there are these Robots who work on the station. Yeah, and there are different types operators operators. Yeah But there are ones would be like, oh I'm a medical operator. Mm-hmm. So if you go and talk to be like
00:39:33
Speaker
All right, here you go. And it just heals you. Yeah. It's a full. Greetings, Dr. Yu. Yeah. But depending on how hurt you are, it might just be like, oh, you just have a couple of scratches. Or, oh, god. And then there's also one for engineering, which does your suit, which is your armor. Yeah. Which I always forget that I have. And there's also one. Science operator. Science operator would give you your, quote unquote, mana. Yeah. It's just like your mental resources are below peak. That's a top and go. You're dumb.
00:40:03
Speaker
But for a while, I was always grinding out things, trying to get resources to recycle and then fabricate into what I needed. But there were times I just stopped making health kits because I'd be like, I'll just find a station. I'll 3D print a robot and just let it, just talk to it.
00:40:25
Speaker
The game has like a limit on it. Most of the stations can only like create three of the given type. But you really have to be like abusing these operators to run through three of them. Like the enemies normally don't target them unless they're techno paths.
TechnoPaths: A Player's Challenge
00:40:40
Speaker
Okay sidebar about techno paths because every time like you see a new enemy in the game, you're like, all right, the fuck is this shit?
00:40:47
Speaker
It's always something mean and nasty. It starts off with mimics. So you get a little bit of the world around you. You find phantoms, which are your humanoid and you see them in a distance. You're like, I will path around them. And then you get fucking techno paths. Oh my gosh. Yeah. What is a techno path?
00:41:03
Speaker
It is a giant black ghost with a cyclops eye and it essentially controls robots nearby and can also kind of spawn electrical pulses wherever the fuck you are at. It doesn't need to see you, just like fuck that guy. And it is really brutal to deal with.
00:41:29
Speaker
So you can't always necessarily go in shotguns a blazing. This is like one of the things. Yeah. I switched to the other shotgun in my inventory. But you can like goop them to kind of disable them and then get some hits in. You can use some psionic abilities. There's one with those. There's one that's really amazing. One I haven't mentioned. My top, my top.
00:41:55
Speaker
Scishock which the other path can use against you a telepath but scishock Disables psionic abilities and when it's used against you and when it's used against them and techno paths will like take over turrets by literally like flying into them and then making it hover near its body and corrupt it with yep
00:42:22
Speaker
And so they can be a problem. Literally I'm flying turrets around them. There's one later in the game where it just has like two turrets and it's just flying around like, bro, come on. It just has pet turrets. But you hit that with scishock and it loses the ability to telekinetically suspend the turrets.
00:42:42
Speaker
and they'll fall to the ground, take full fall damage, possibly break, and then it can't cast Lightning at you. When it's affected by the debuff from Scishock, which lasts up to like 20 seconds at max level, it has no attacks.
00:42:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's really good. It's really good. I really wish I went more into the psionic abilities route or maybe just did like a mix. But there's so many times I'm like, oh, I can possibly boost my max health or upgrade my guns. I think it's better for her in the playthrough.
00:43:19
Speaker
Because if you if you do really neglect all the human stuff, you're pretty glass cannon. Yeah And if you are casting abilities a bunch and you didn't do the psionic water Like upgrade or whatever. I can't I consider it an upgrade for the station Then you can run out of PSI hypos pretty quickly, too
00:43:39
Speaker
Yeah, there's definitely a point in the game where I ran out of pretty much all resources. And I think I chased down a telepath, which as you can imagine, just controls people instead of robots, just with a wrench. I had no other options.
00:43:56
Speaker
They fired homing projectiles at you. Yeah, it was not a good time because I would like go into my inventory eat a med kit or like try and salvage a rotten banana into health and then just go back to like swimming in the ranch.
00:44:12
Speaker
Yeah. But, man, exploring the station is really cool because they actually have different departments. Yeah. Like, I wish my fucking company had. It does. It was cool to see that. It's a weird wish, kind of, right? You're like, I hate this monolithic department structure at my work. We all work for the company, but what do I do? You work for the company.
00:44:37
Speaker
But it's cool to see like, hey, here's where people live. Yeah, crew quarters. Crew quarters. Or here's specifically science lab. Here is water treatment. Psychotronics. Here is pump station. Psychotronics for experimenting with the typhon. Did you see the red posters they had for psychotronics that was just like a head-on profile with the psychoscope in the middle?
00:45:02
Speaker
It looks like some crazy evil like cyber war war two propaganda nonsense. I don't know. It's great. That's part of like the aesthetic of the game is like, I don't want to say like 1930s esque. It does have some of that propaganda vibe. Everything also is very modern and futuristic, but not overly futuristic. It's not like future sci-fi. It's like theoretically in 30, 40 years.
00:45:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's like a couple degrees of separation from reality. It does have that overwhelming sort of corporations rule the world thing that is becoming reality faster than it should. But one of the things with neuromods is the consumer application is when you use a neuromod, it can have a skill set that they basically scanned from a highly qualified individual.
00:45:52
Speaker
So like, here's a scientist, and they know how biology works. So we scanned their brain, now we can make a neuromod. So you stab your eye with this needle thing, and now you know how biology works. Immediately, you just have it as a skill.
00:46:08
Speaker
The downside is if they ever do the process to reverse that, to remove the biology thing, your brain goes back to the moment you first used the neuromod. You forget all of your memories in that time, that whole time, which is what was happening at the beginning of the game.
00:46:24
Speaker
but it is very corporate kind of corporate corporate overlord ish because they were doing it to all the employees essentially on the station like Consistently, they're like, okay. We're done with this phase of the project. Everybody gets white Yeah, it's a really wild storyline as far as that's concerned but it's a really fucking cool because again, you're piecing this together from the few side quests of
00:46:55
Speaker
Oh, hey, somebody left their password for the secret cache of stuff. Yeah. For something that they were trying to do was like a side hustle. You can go find that. Mm-hmm. Or maybe there are a couple of people alive on the ship. Spoilers there are. Yeah. Not many. Not many. There's not a lot. But they might say like, hey, I'm gonna help you do this, but you gotta help me do something here.
00:47:14
Speaker
Again, shit's pretty bad. Yeah. And it's just none of them feel grindy. There's very few that are like out of the way and exploratory.
00:47:27
Speaker
But some of the achievements feel a little grindy, but the moment by moment achievements are. Yeah. There's one that's Transtar gourmet, which is eat one of every type of food and drink and the whole, the whole station. I followed a guide for it. I followed a guide for it. I was like, I'm going to do this. I had a spreadsheet on the side too. It was a little easier.
00:47:47
Speaker
But yeah, no, it's definitely fun to explore. And how you interact with people actually has some impact on how the game develops. So you mentioned there was a couple of survivors. If you helped them out, then they'll use the fabricator in your office and generate you some supplies or neuromods. In one case, you get a free chipset. They're randomly, like, there's some randomness in the game.
00:48:13
Speaker
Oh, so whenever you picked up a chip set, uh, that's randomized. I think the first one I think is always detect mimics and then every single one beyond that is random. Um, so you might get the one that makes it. So you slowly regenerate a sigh over time. That's a pretty good one. All I got was a faster scanning. Uh-huh. Uh, there's like a pistol crit bonus.
00:48:38
Speaker
Yeah. There's a shotgun, fucking equip that. Yeah. Uh, I forget some of the others though, but a lot of those are more so for overall, I mean, it's, I guess it passes in the same way that your skill trees are, but you can hotswap those out. Whereas if you've invested in a skill.
00:48:59
Speaker
It's done. It's there. You have it permanently. There's like a, there's a greater scanning one you can use that actually detects greater mimics, which show up later in the game, which are kind of just spiky mimics with more health. Yeah. And they can mimic like advanced things. Usually larger objects. Yeah. Versus not just like a, a cup or a chair or something. Yeah. Basic mimics stuff, really.
00:49:22
Speaker
One of the in-world or in-game things that I love is obviously like stuff's going on with the Typhon. There's stuff going on with Mimics all the time. Yeah. And you hear from these voice logs and other things, people are like, the fuck. So you come into this room and there's a lot of sticky notes on things. And the sticky note says, this is not a Mimic.
00:49:43
Speaker
Because these people actually went through and systematically were like is this a mimic because It could talk and attack you and kill you and people didn't know and they didn't really have a system. So They were essentially attack each item and they'd be like sticky note. This one's good hit it with a wrench first The sticky notes
00:50:04
Speaker
All mimics. Yeah, there's actually there's a voice log for that in the game when the upbringing outbreak happens and like chief Elazar who's a character doesn't really matter talking to somebody else and She's like hit everything with a wrench to make sure and then like get back here. I
00:50:21
Speaker
And then someone in the background is just like, but first check the ranch. Yes. I love that line so much. Yeah. It was also because Jake obviously is invested in this game. He's played through it more than once. And with that scene specifically, I was tempted to get a whole collection of like a dollar's worth of sticky notes, right? This is not a mimic and just put it on like a random shit in the recording room. Oh man.
00:50:46
Speaker
It's pretty freaking great. There's actually one kind of creepy scene where there's a mimic testing chamber where you can like Reveal certain objects. There's like tubes. Yeah, I think one's like an apple And then there was something else. Did you did you do microscope was one? Yeah microscope. I Think there's I think it's a greater mimic in there Did you do each test like reveal each item in turn?
00:51:12
Speaker
I think so. Okay. I'm not remembering what you're. Okay. All right. So you might not have got the final thing. If you have it go through each item, there's the mimic inside will copy each one. Um, and then once you're done, it'll like turn towards you and then it mimics a picture of the you family.
00:51:33
Speaker
Like with Alex and Morgan and the parents and it just sits there on the ground. I'm like, what the crap? I was like, is this like an Easter egg? Is it, are they breaking the rules of the universe? Cause there's not something nearby.
00:51:49
Speaker
Not only is it creepy, but if you investigate it and you look at a table nearby right next to the, um, the mimic chamber that picture is there, but it's face down. So not only do they creep you out and they don't show you the picture initially, but they stay consistent to their, to the universe by actually have the picture, having the picture also be there for the mimic to copy.
00:52:11
Speaker
which is great. Oh, that's super good. Seriously, it mimicked you as like, what? Yeah. So you mentioned that there's a bug. You can find videos of it on YouTube where if you go into the chamber at like a specific time, it will mimic you. But in a T-pose, I am Morgan. You can see my arms out in a T-pose, but, uh, yeah, imagine me being crucified. And there you go. Oof. Oof. Statistically unlikely.
00:52:42
Speaker
I would hope so. But yeah, no games, uh, really freaking good. Um, I just, I've played through it many times. There's achievements for going maximum empathy, saving people as much as possible. Um, one of the last achievements I got was my, uh, I and it play through, which is way harder than saving people. It's kill everyone.
00:53:08
Speaker
achievement. Okay. Which requires some people only arrive later if you saved someone like earlier. Always you have to like save somebody to kill somebody else then go back and kill the original person.
00:53:24
Speaker
But the thing that really screws you over is we talked about the crew quarters for a second. There's two telepaths in there, and they mind control human pawns, basically. And if they see you, run at you, and they'll be like, ah, get away from me or whatever. I'm not trying to do this, you know, being mind controlled. And they will explode. They explode. They're human bombs. But if they explode like that,
00:53:52
Speaker
or if they wandered into fire or something else stupid. It doesn't count. It doesn't count because you didn't kill them.
Moral Dilemmas in 'Prey'
00:53:58
Speaker
So you specifically have to like, your life is in my hands, these NPCs, parts of the game until you can safely kill everybody and get I in it. Damn. Yeah. And there's also one for awkward ride home, which is without getting into it. I know which one this is. Fly home with the one remaining survivor.
00:54:22
Speaker
It's pretty freaking great. Yeah, so the whole... What were we at time was? Probably about 50. Okay. So like the overall plot of the game is you figuring out what's going on in the space station and then... 53. Trying to get off the space station or resolve things with the space station. Yeah. Because basically, you know how crazy infectious the Typhon are and how they can just spread with just like a mimic or two. If a mimic kills someone, they use that corpse to spawn four mimics.
00:54:54
Speaker
Damn, I know that actually. So yeah, it's kind of nuts. So basically part of your decision throughout the game is, am I going to blow up the whole fucking space station? Or can we maybe work with the Typhon and use their crazy space alien technology to enhance the human race? Like the ability to have, again, going back to Bioshock for these plasmids,
00:55:23
Speaker
They could be such good amounts of utility, but the same way weaponized horribly, depending which way it goes. You could evolve the human race. Exactly. So you kind of get to make the call as you go on for what you want to do. And the game is really good at giving you options throughout the game for if you are going more of a empathetic route or a murder hobo. There's one specific thing. I think it's in Psychotronics.
00:55:52
Speaker
where there's a prisoner in a room. And basically, you have the option to essentially run a test where you can bring a mimic into the room. And then as the mimic is killing him, essentially nuke that whole area and get a specific resource that only would come from the mimic during that time. Tons of exotics. You get tons for doing it.
00:56:19
Speaker
Yeah, or you can let the guy live and he promises to give you I think the key code to like a nearby Weapons closet. Yeah
00:56:31
Speaker
But you also have the options like read the guy's file and you see that he's a convict who's done some pretty heinous shit. Yeah. So you're kind of taking what you have at face value and the guy's also talking to you like, Hey man, like I'm not trying to do whatever. Yeah. So I actually started to, I started part of the test where the mimic comes in from the outside into like the tube in between. Yeah.
00:56:56
Speaker
He's like freaking out. Yeah, cuz you would be so I felt bad and I was like, I'll take your password to the thing instead of Trying to find it or hack it You know like it is it is evil, right? Like it feels bad if you do open the inner gate and you let them in it like kill the guy sources that being said
00:57:18
Speaker
For the I and it playthrough, as you need to kill everyone, you have to let the guy out first and then kill them. Buy my hands alone. Buy my hands alone. There's a lot of stuff in that armory though, so it's a pretty fair trade to get all like there's shotguns and weapon upgrade kits and a bunch of nonsense in there. I think like maybe even a chipset there's a lot.
00:57:45
Speaker
yeah so the game just feels super solid as far as going through exploration moments among gameplay uh progression has always been a huge thing for me yeah because like i said you start off being a guy who's crouching with a wrench uh but later on you can become a psychic force of nature or just a rooty tooty shooty boy
00:58:07
Speaker
And as soon as you get like upgrades to like movement speed and jump height and other things. At the end of the game, I was just trying to like rush through stuff to be like, Hey, here's your three big monsters trying to kill you. I would just zoom by, be like, Nope. Next door. Next area. Yep. Just trying to get through my objectives.
00:58:27
Speaker
It's actually really crazy. Do you remember the guts, the zero G tunnels inside this station and play through too. So my first play through in preparation for this episode was like 36 hours, something like that, maybe 32.
00:58:43
Speaker
I did a lot. I played through again to get some other achievements, but also beat the game in eight hours. And that was much faster. And that included actually Transtar Gourmet. That was eating all the items in the station. But what I realized in the guts is there's the assists that run at you and explode. You can fly past all of them.
00:59:07
Speaker
and take no damage. You can just speed run the thing and just full speed burst yourself through those tunnels if you know where you're going because you're just sonic speeds basically.
00:59:23
Speaker
The other thing, the zero G portions of the game are a little bit weird because sometimes you have to go outside of the station, but it's really fucking cool as far as, Hey, this is psychotronics or this is the filtering station. Yeah. But you can actually just go, I mean, you need to set up the airlocks for different things to have outside access. Yeah. You unlock it from the inside first. Yeah. But you can go through the station on the inside where you can go through on the outside. That's really cool. But also how the zero G handles as far as.
00:59:54
Speaker
your thrust and then zing. And then being able to turn and reposition is really cool. And also, because it is space, it feels very desolate. Again, we use that word. But also there's shit outside the station. Yes. Which I did not realize the first time I was exploring. This is quiet and bleak, but kind of peaceful.
01:00:14
Speaker
And then I found my first techno path and shit myself. Yep. They do a, they do kind of, uh, some of the, there is no sound in space, like simulation where you can actually hear sounds, but they're the reverberations of like impacts and things like that on your suit. Like you hear what you're reading. You hear some of the thrust noise.
01:00:35
Speaker
Yeah. If something like impacts against you, you'll like hear, feel it. Can you hear the sound? Yeah, that's true. But you can get ambushed real easy. There's actually a guy that has a suitcase, a briefcase out in space, and you can track him by using the personnel tracker on the ship that are at a lot of the security terminals.
01:00:57
Speaker
And he's got a nice chipset upgrade that allows you to get like a mini jetpack thrust. And then you can hover afterwards, you just like jetpack up and go. That plus like super jump. And you're a god by the end of it. You're just marathon man in the middle of a station.
01:01:14
Speaker
I think I remarked that you hide from and run from so many enemies toward the beginning of the game. But by the end, if you're trying to collect their parts to make more neuromods at the fabricator, they are the prey. And you're the predator. You're just going through areas chasing them down.
01:01:36
Speaker
I have really no complaints about this game as far as it being an immersive sim. I will say this live on air. I might like it more than Bioshock.
01:01:47
Speaker
This means a lot. Listen, I'm not going to get a prey tattoo, but it just offers so much in the way of options throughout the game and progression. And for providing a lot of different options to have a solution to a problem. Dave sex does a great job of this as well. You can talk to somebody or you can sneak in through an air vent and say, fuck you, I'm not paying you 100 G. The air vents give you. Because like sometimes you see the air vent afterwards, right? Well, yeah, that's the fucking kick in the pants. You're like,
01:02:17
Speaker
Just wasted 50. I just wasted some money or like wasted some side quest thing and I could have just you know Moved a box gone in the vents. It uses really intelligent storytelling and sometimes problem-solving I'm gonna stop like I know I gotta stop talking about all the things a little about prey but again, it's like basically my gaming year 2017 and
01:02:39
Speaker
Did you see in the Looking Glass, Morgan's message to himself, did you figure out the key code for the safe? Which safe? It's a safe in the room that has the chair near the beginning of the game.
01:02:59
Speaker
Because they're probably not it's not super easy to tell but there's a whiteboard near a safe at the beginning of the game and It has like you can tell that there was the code for the safe on it at some point, but it's been erased Later in the game you get a video message from from yourself and it's on the whiteboard
01:03:20
Speaker
And only since it's the looking glass and when you move to the left and right you're changing your perspective Looking into the room you can walk to the right and look at the whiteboard ignoring Morgan over there trying to tell you from important plot stuff and Look at the code on the whiteboard come back run to the area and open the safe So good Yeah, they just do a really good job and like Kind of just dropping little things in there. Yeah, I Gotta stop though. It's it's it's a it's a good game
01:03:50
Speaker
Yeah. I think a lot of the fun from the game comes from figuring out like, Hey, I want to play this way. And you're like, Oh shit. I didn't know that was the thing. And just like the discovery of the gameplay or areas themselves. Yeah. There's things I like play styles I completely didn't think would be viable or skills I thought would be a complete waste of time. And I picked them up and I'm like, Oh, this is actually amazing. And I completely underestimated this, um, which was largely largely pre.
01:04:20
Speaker
It's that kind of game. Yeah. It also has a DLC. True.
Exploring 'Prey' DLC: Mooncrash
01:04:26
Speaker
Called Mooncrash where you're trying to do like a speedrun escape from a station and I think you have to play through as different people. Yeah. There's like something like six people altogether. You unlock them as you complete it with different individuals.
01:04:41
Speaker
There's some meta progression, but the trick is basically the enemies I think spawn a new but in different locations for each person as the Typhon continue to infest the moon.
01:04:56
Speaker
Moon's haunted. It's pretty accurate. But the resources you use to fight the Typhon and escape are persistent. So if you pick up all the guns with your first guy through, like the janitor comes through as your second guy and he's like, why are there no guns here?
01:05:18
Speaker
Um, so It's uh, it's kind of like a resource management thing across a semi-roguelike experience different paths will be open different playthroughs will be different hazards and things It's a cool idea I don't like i'm not as much a fan of it as the base game But I give them points for trying something That I would not have expected the dlc to be at all Yeah, I wouldn't think of that for like
01:05:42
Speaker
anything. Right, let alone this. Like imagine another immersive sim like Davisex or Bioshock being like, all right, here's your roguelike version. Go. Yeah. Because they weren't meant to be like fast paced games. Prey can obviously get away with a little bit more of that. And it also has more verticality to it. Yeah. Because of God jumping. We went over athletics. Like sometimes you do need to like climb and go up an area.
01:06:07
Speaker
Yeah, there'll be vents above you or catwalks. Sometimes you can just escape enemies by being like, what if I was on top of the cubicle wall in this room? Because they don't look up. They do sometimes if they're looking for you, but it can't be too easy. Not too easy.
01:06:28
Speaker
Yeah, not too easy is the name of the show. It's not actually, it's soapstone.
Join the Discussion: Feedback & Social Media
01:06:38
Speaker
If you want it to keep being soapstone, you can listen to us in the future, maybe about topics that you bring up.
01:06:45
Speaker
at Gmail, email address, soapstonepodcastatgmail.com, or join the discussion on Facebook at Facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. I think that might have been the smoothest outro ever.
01:07:00
Speaker
Man, I really somehow stole your thunder by doing the intro once. I've forgotten how the outro goes. I try to find like, what is the maximum amount of roundaboutness and then also pauses in the roundabout. I can inject.
01:07:16
Speaker
There are plenty of pauses in a given episode just for my speaking pattern, because things misfire my brain. I'm like, wait, OK, words, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, that's fine. I have a couple of very articulate sentences. And then I'm like, what's the word? Oh, the. I was going to say, I was about to say, it's because you're just making sure that you're focusing on high quality thoughts, you're thinking through what you're saying, and then you're like, no, the.
01:07:46
Speaker
I remember like early episodes, I actually cut out a lot of the pauses between us talking. Oh my god, that was brutal early. That's before we had any type of conversation going. Yeah. We were much worse about it then, but also I grew much more confident in our natural cadence, I think. So it's like, it's weird if you cut out the pauses at this point, because why is everybody talking so fast?
01:08:11
Speaker
So yeah, um, please get engaged and just interact in any way, shape or form. Uh, I will talk about it for like a week afterwards. Thank you for sending me a potato. Um, whoever you are, whoever. Uh, but also maybe at some point in the future, we could challenge people to maybe make their own content, soap, some related.
01:08:34
Speaker
my god and somebody would like take a voice sample modulate it make a dumb thing because otherwise i'm gonna be forced to continue to make dumb videos here and there
01:08:45
Speaker
to entertain myself mainly and to torture Jake. The next video will be one of those like, um, like, uh, donate $5 to help animals like around the world thing, but it's just Dave like making videos. It's like make content for us. So we don't have to picture of Dave in black and white. Um, yeah, that's fun. Well, just like pray. It is. It is very fun until next time. We'll see you in the next one.