The immersive sim has seen a revival in recent years. Not only from larger studios like Arkane, keeping the faith alive with their time loops and space stations, but also from a bunch of smaller developers bravely exploring a typically ambitious genre. RPS has always had an affinity for these systemically luxuriant simulations, historically lauding the likes of the original Deus Ex as the best game ever made. But given everything that has come since, is that still the case? Only one way to find out: make a big list.
]]>“I like the look of Prey but I haven’t picked it up yet,” sounds the lament of the perma-wastrel, content to watch life’s most precious resource tick away then dissolve into the ether, never to return. “Looks good but it’s still 25 quid on Steam” sounds the cry of the fool unaware that all their possessions are but substanceless adornments to a life hollow for not having played, arguably, the only good video game ever made. “I didn’t like Prey anyway,” blowfish-ly puffs the deeply incorrect naysayer, unaware that they will never be invited to any of my birthday parties. Well, no excuses now*. Fanatical are doing a thing where you can buy FPS imsim Prey and two others from a respectable selection for a fiver.
]]>This week’s freebies at the Epic Games Store are Arkane Studios’ interplanetary immersive sim Prey and Thunder Lotus Games' Viking ‘em up Jotun: Valhalla Edition. You’ll be able to nab them for zero currency later on today, but for now there’s still time to grab last week’s complimentary game, Terraforming Mars (which you can do here). Check the Epic Games Store at around 8am PST / 4pm BST for the changeover.
]]>Since Deathloop was first announced, I haven't been able to stop thinking about Prey: Mooncrash, the exceptional expansion to Arkane's Prey. It follows a similar sort of formula to what the studio have told us about Deathloop, with roguelite elements and permadeath that essentially mean you'll need to start all over again after each run. And now Deathloop has been delayed again, I reckon this is the perfect time to get back into Mooncrash - or give it a try if you missed it.
]]>Bethesda's games are beginning to arrive on Xbox Game Pass tomorrow. Microsoft made the announcement in a blog post, and there are 18 of them coming to Xbox Game Pass For PC.
]]>Nioh 2's Complete Edition is coming to PC on February 5th, and to celebrate the launch of Koei Tecmo's rock-hard Souls-like, Gamesplanet are throwing in free copies of Arkane's Prey when you use the voucher code NIOH2 at checkout. The same voucher will also slice 15% off its usual price, giving you a nice saving of £7.50 in the process.
]]>Update: Microsoft say they'll "keep the commitment" to bring Bethesda's Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo to PS5 as timed exclusives. More below.
Microsoft just announced they've bought ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda. The developers of games such as Skyrim, Fallout, Dishonored, Prey, Doom, Quake and all those classics are now technically Xbox Game Studios. Xbox boss Phil Spencer made a post welcoming the developers, in what he calls a "landmark step" for both Microsoft and Bethesda.
What a year.
]]>QuakeCon At Home is live this weekend on Twitch, though it really should be called BethFest when you look at the schedule. The event has moved wholly online thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the rescheduled celebration of id’s and Bethesda’s games has an intriguing schedule. Here are a few of the highlights.
]]>Break out the party poppers - Prey and Dishonored developers Arkane Studios turns 20 years old this year. Well, sort of. The studio may have been founded in '99, but who am I to ruin a party? To celebrate two decades of sneaking, stabbing, and all-round immersive sim'ing, Arkane are dusting off the oldest book on their shelf by giving away free copies of the studio's 2002 fantasy debut Arx Fatalis.
]]>Minigames are the coffee Revel of videogames. They are harmless, infrequent and unpleasant to think about. We accept their presence, yet no one has ever eaten a pack of Revels and wished for more coffee nuggets. Nobody completed Final Fantasy X and thought: “Needs more Blitzball”. That minigames exist as a mild distraction inside the glowing guts of other games is itself ridiculous. Imagine you were on a golf course, and hole 12 turned out to be its own 8-hole pitch ‘n’ putt. “This is stupid,” you’d think, and then you would play pitch ‘n’ putt for the rest of the day in a mindless stupor.
Here are the 7 most gratuitous minigames - but do they all deserve to be here?
]]>Here's a fascinating fact: Steam Charts has never won an award. I KNOW. If there's nothing else that demonstrates the corruption of the entire system, it's this. High quality, groundbreaking, Woodwardian journalism, are just some of the terms I use to describe this most esteemed of columns. And yet the silverware shelf gathers dust. It's a disgrace.
]]>Games Done Quick, the marathon that raises millions of dollars for charity twice per year, and speedrunning more generally, owes its existence to glitches. Though runners show off their skill and dedication, almost all of them rely on the game behaving in unintended ways, doing things that people playing casually would never experience.
Despite this, runners often make off-hand comments about the games being “broken,” or worse, the developers being “lazy.” The latter is obviously generally untrue and unfair. But spare a thought for the humble glitch itself, and how they make this whole wonderful endeavour possible.
]]>Speedrunning charity marathon Summer Games Done Quick is barrelling towards us at top speed, and it’ll be here in just a few hours. Raising money for Doctors Without Borders, players will be rushing through more than a hundred games for a non-stop week. If you’ve never seen a speedrun before, imagine how fast you could get through your favourite game. Now throw that idea away, because these people get weirder and glitchier than you could anticipate.
]]>Time to pencil in another week of sick days and sleepless nights, as the competitors and games for this year's Summer Games Done Quick have been announced, broadcasting from Bloomington, Minneapolis. The charity speedrunning marathon kicks off on 5pm BST on June 23rd, demolishing games at record pace around the clock until June 30th. As with their other summer events, they'll be raising fat sacks of money for Médecins Sans Frontières. While there's still time for last-minute changes, the show schedule is here, automatically adjusted to your local timezone.
]]>Prey: Mooncrash was already my pick for expansion of the year, and that was before today when Arkane Studios threw in two more games for free. Typhon Hunter is a multiplayer game inspired by Team Fortress 2 and Garry's Mod favourite Prop Hunt - a team of five shapeshifting alien shadow-spiders attempts to outfox a lone human. Transtar VR is an escape room-styled prologue to Prey for the fancy space-goggles crowd. Anyone who owns Mooncrash should check their Steam library for Prey: Typhon Hunter, which includes both and installs as a separate game. Prey (with its brillo expansion) is on sale, too.
]]>The deadliest multiplayer game of all - hide and seek - is coming to excellent Prey expansion Mooncrash next week, free. Typhon Hunter was announced when Mooncrash launched, and sounds a lot like Prop Hunt, a mode big with the Garrys Mod and Team Fortress 2 scenes. Six players, one as an increasingly paranoid human and the other five as shapeshifting Mimics waiting for a chance to pounce. It'll be a free update next Tuesday, December 11th for anyone with the Mooncrash expansion, along with a VR escape room mode. That's a trailer below, not a mimic - promise.
]]>Cyber Monday is, of course, a pure and honest celebration of all things cyber. We hack the planet as one, united against corporations, capitalism and the class divide. Then we all burn our 4K televisions and go off to have a massive rave-orgy in an abandoned sewer. Such is the way of the Cyber Monday Warrior.
But it's not all talking in C++ and overthrowing distant tyranny. Cyber Monday is also a time to remember the sacrifices made in the name of the hacking. None of these are quite so tragic as otherwise great games laid low by poorly-judged hacking minigames, forcibly inserted by executive pressure to pad out the running time. Today, let us honour the fallen.
]]>Arkane’s space-faring update for immersive sim Prey was a more roguelike spinoff called Mooncrash, and now they’ve added some homages to the indie games of the genre that inspired them. The free Rogue Moon update gives players the chance to add skins based on these games to their operator companions, as you can see in the trailer below:
]]>While none of their games have been the industry-shaking hits I would have loved them to be, Dishonored and Prey developers Arkane have put the immersive sim genre back on the map. At QuakeCon last week, agents for the ever-sneaky VG247 managed to pin down Ricardo Bare, lead designer at Arkane. Despite the studio being famously evasive ever since that whole Press Sneak Fuck incident, he did have a few things to say about the present and future of the studio and its games.
]]>Update: The show is live right now. Tune in for games being thrashed to within an inch of their lives.
The Summer Nerd Olympics are almost upon us. Every six months, the best and brightest in gaming assemble under the Games Done Quick banner to demolish games extra-fast and raise heaving sacks of cash for good causes. This Sunday, the speedster swarm will be descending on Bloomington, Minnesota to destroy games as you know it, all in the name of supporting Doctors Without Borders. As usual, the whole thing will be streamed live on Twitch (and archived on YouTube) and runs for an entire week, 24/7.
Below, find some of our must-watch picks from the full schedule.
]]>Goodness me, I'd forgotten how brilliant the opening of Prey is. Bluffs and misdirects, some delivered on immediately, others saving surprises up for later, it's an ever-backward-pulling camera as your complex situation begins to dawn upon you.
And thank goodness it is quite so good, because if you want to play Prey's New Game+, or it's Story Mode, you're going to have to go through it in its vanilla mode before you can see the differences. There's just some question about how much either adds. As for Survival Mode - well, it's great, but it's not a survival mode.
]]>Prey: Mooncrash is a game of refinement. It's a piece of DLC that uses an economy of space by asking you to replay the same sprawling collection of areas repeatedly, with varying characters, varying skillsets, and an ever-changing threat to combat. It's a game that will make you play Prey differently than you have before, and you'll be grateful of it.
]]>Not satisfied with bringing snow trolls and hellspawn to expensive cyber goggles, Bethesda are bringing two more of their games to VR – Prey and Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot and Prey: Typhon Hunter are set in their respective universes and, of the two, Typhon Hunter seems the most interesting. It’s a prop hunt-like bit of multiplayer hide and seek, in which five players are mimics pretending to be everyday objects, and one player is Morgan Yu, trying to find and kill them. "Typhon Hunter is a deadly game of cat and mouse," say Bethesda, "except in this instance the cat is sometimes a trashcan or a bottle of cleaning supplies and the mouse has a shotgun."
]]>At last night's Bethesda E3 conference, we got another of those 'here's a thing and it's out now' announcements. It's a Prey expansion, called Prey Mooncrash, which is pitched as "an infinitely replayable experience" in which the "enemies, hazards and loot" are different each time you play.
If spending money isn't your thing, Arkane had more Prey-flavoured stuff, too. A free update - also out now - brings new modes to the base game, including store mode, new game+, and a survival mode. Hop below for trailers and details of all of those - plus a scant mention of a multiplayer mode called Typhon Hunter that's coming later this summer.
]]>You better not shout, you better not cry, you better not expect the Elder Scrolls VI to be announced in front of an LA audience I’m tellin’ you why. E3 2018 is coming to town!
Yes, and with it, so come the takes. The RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, wants in on this. So here are some of our predictions, hopes and fears for this year’s dreaded multimedia assault on the nervous system.
]]>I love to start the weekend off right. And by that, I mean seeing some fun video game news that makes me shout at my screen uncontrollably. Look, there's no bigger fan of Prey than your boy Brock here. Heck, I'm a fan of all Preys. But now, it seems Michael Stipe is giving me a run for my money. While we already know that Prey is headed for a bit of a moonshot, the time for saying Good Morning, Morgan may be upon us sooner rather than later, because 150mb update just added 10 secret achievements, and maybe more?
]]>There are few things as momentous in the gaming calendar as Games Done Quick charity speedrun marathons, and the full broadcast schedule for this June's upcoming Summer Games Done Quick event has just been published. Many of the world's weirdest, most diverse and implausibly skilled players will congregate at the end of June to raise money for a good cause (in this case, the increasingly important Médecins Sans Frontières), and systematically tear dozens of games into tiny, glitchy shreds over the course of a week of non-stop speedrun showboating.
]]>Occasionally while surfing the interwebs, you'll stumble upon a Cool Thing from a few years back that you absolutely missed in the moment, but is both fascinating and painfully applicable now. I failed to notice that this post I love is from 2014, so while some of the examples are slightly dated, playing the associated game is still a frustrating experiment in awareness.
So let's play Male Protagonist Bingo.
]]>Huzzah for rhyming headlines! Yesterday, we reported on a series of increasingly overt teasers coming from Arkane Studios, not-so-subtly hinting that they're not quite done with System Shock-ish immersive sim Prey.
Today, they dropped almost all pretense. It's March 15th, the day that Prey's story begins on (at least according to the robo-voiced alarm clock that awakens protagonist Morgan Yu from rest). Celebrating the pseudo-anniversary, the studio got together to tweet out a mysteriously redacted team photo, only to release the uncut and probably release-date-containing one later in the day.
]]>Arkane's Prey was one of the best games of 2017, hands down. A proper revitalization of the System Shock formula from the team who had already updated Thief through the spectacular Dishonored series. So, it hit us rather hard at RPS Towers to hear rumblings that it hadn't sold so great, along with Dishonored 2 and its standalone expansion.
With the very future of the immersive sim in question, imagine our excitement and relief when the official Prey Twitter account sprung into life once more, doling out increasingly overt hints that Morgan Yu's spooky space adventures might yet continue, this time amidst the scenic rolling hills of a lunar research facility.
]]>Last year's Prey was a lovely thing. Arguably one of the best immersive sims ever made, and despite its title being lifted from Bethesda's back-catalogue, it had vastly more in common with System Shock than any other game. On top of being impressively designed, it looked quite nice thanks to consistently slick art direction, and ran excellently on just about any gaming-capable PC.
Some people with beefier machines felt a little let down, though, feeling that corners had been cut over the course of development to ensure smoother performance on lower-end hardware. Enter modder jmx777, and their rather clumsily named 'Real Lights Plus Ultra Graphics' mod, allowing you to squeeze an immediately noticeable chunk more graphical fidelity out of the game.
]]>Welcome to the freshly relaunched RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show! You might think this is episode 31, but actually it’s episode 1 again. We’re rebooting it, even though we just did that last year. We’ve started by making it more accessible. Instead of three of us chatting about videogames between snippets of jaunty music, there’s just a sad man saying “Sonic the Hedgehog” over and over. We’re confident you’ll like it.
]]>The Games Done Quick events are among my favourite parts of the gaming calendar. Showmanship, absurd levels of skill and a mountain of cash raised for good charitable causes for a week straight, twice a year. The winter event - Awesome Games Done Quick - starts this afternoon at 4:30 GMT and if you've never tuned in to watch one of these live on Twitch (or recorded on YouTube), then you're missing out
While traditionally console-centric, recent years have seen a far higher percentage of PC titles (especially smaller indie games) demolished live, and the schedule for this coming week's event looks to be continuing that trend.
]]>BAM. A sound captures your headphones and holds you hostage. It's the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. We've been lying in wait for the past three weeks, consolidating our strength and preparing to kidnap you by the ear canals. "Listen up, 2018!" we shout out from atop this metaphor. "We have a list of demands and we're not releasing this poor listener until you've delivered! Or until the one hour playtime is up, whichever comes first!"
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>The calendar's doors have been opened and the games inside have been eaten. But fear not, latecomer - we've reconstructed the list in this single post for easy re-consumption. Click on to discover the best games of 2017.
]]>As you may have spotted, Humble has been running an 'End of Summer Sale' over the past few days to ring in the Autumn and, well, discount a bunch of games. The sale only has a few days left to run and the final wave of titles has been added as of today. This batch is entirely from Bethesda and features some of the company's best stuff - from Doom to Wolfenstein to Call of Cthulu. Just me on that last one? (it did sneak into our list of best horror games! - ed).
You have a few days left to pick up this range or any number of discounts (like Hitman's entire first season) before the sale is gone for good.
]]>Other sites will bombard you with "facts" and "details" about the top-selling games on Steam, but not us. We won't patronise you with such things. We know you're better than that, taller, more attractive than the readers of those sites. We know you know we know you better, and as such reach for higher, smarter, more eloquent brilliance.
]]>You want to know which are the top ten selling games on Steam this week, but you also still don't know the capital city of Turkmenistan. What is a person to do? Well worry not, because here at Steam Charts HQ, we've got you covered! All the games that are in the top ten games in the Steam top ten games chart, and all the facts you need for that surprise government test!
Join us today as we laugh and learn.
]]>Oh, nice! After trying to highlight a few games that have PC demos recently (I do like a demo - it's far friendlier than a refund scheme and can actually be really interesting as a piece of curation or editing in and of itself, although obv it then requires more work and doesn't contain the possibility of someone forgetting to get a refund or straying outside the no-questions refund period) there's now one for the sci-fi adventure, Prey [official site].
]]>This is possibly premature, but I'm worried that Prey might have fallen through the cracks. I don't hear it talked about that much now. Don't wait for a sale. Don't dismiss it because it looks a little sterile in screenshots. Prey is exactly the game that long-time RPS readers have been praying for, for decades. (Pun possibly intended).
]]>Raphael Colantonio, president and founder of Arkane Studios, announced that he was leaving the company earlier this week. Colantonio started Arkane in 1999 and was most recently the creative director on Prey [official site]. Today, at Gamelab Barcelona, he reflected on his time at Arkane and what prompted his departure.
]]>Raphael Colantonio, the founder and president of Arkane Studios and creative director of recent fuzzy alien basher Prey, has stepped down from the studio after 18 years. “It is time for me to step out to spend some time with my son,” he wrote in a statement, “and reflect on what is important to me and my future.” Colantonio was also the co-creative director on Dishonored, and the man who once referred to us grubby journalists as “press sneak fucks”.
]]>I'm only a little way into Prey [official site] at the moment but one of the most interesting aspects for me is the monster design. I love pausing the trailers to peer more closely at their glitchy, weird forms without worrying about being killed. The monsters in question are these hostile lifeforms which all come under the bracket of "Typhon" but there are different species of Typhon within that.
The differing shapes, sizes and movements make it easy to distinguish one species from another. There are the scuttling spidery, crabby Mimics, the tentacled, floating Telepaths, the humanoid Phantoms... But there's a common visual thread - all of them are these glitchy, threatening oilslicks whose forms never quite settle. Even when dead their surfaces ripple and shimmer. Emmanuel Petit (lead visual designer) and Jason Timmons (lead visual effects artist) offered their expertise so we could unpack the design of these writhing oddities. Read on to find out why the idea of colour palettes makes the team laugh and how they repurposed foliage tools for monster silhouettes!
]]>According to Steam, it took me 22 hours to finish Prey [official site]. I wasn’t rushing, but I wasn’t dawdling either. John spent 30 hours on Talos I for his review. Compared to speedrunner Seeker TV, who finished in a blisteringly fast seven minutes, we’re a pair of doddering geriatrics. Check out the run below, though beware of spoilers.
]]>The Steam summer sale is in full blaze. For a while it even blazed so hot that the servers went on fire and all the price stickers peeled off the games. Either that or the store just got swamped with cheapskates looking for the best bargains. Cheapskates like you! Well, don’t worry. We’ve rounded up some recommendations - both general tips and some newly added staff choices.
Here are the things you should consider owning in your endless consumeristic lust for a happiness which always seems beyond reach. You're welcome.
]]>Update: The year is finished, which means you can now read the final list of our favourite games of 2017.
2017 has already been an extraordinary year for PC games, from both big-name AAA successes to no-name surprise indie smashes. Keeping up with so much that's worth playing is a tough job, but we've got your back. Here is a collection of the games that have rocked the RPS Treehouse so far this year.
We've all picked our favourites, and present them here in alphabetical order so as not to start any fights. You're bound to have a game you'd have wanted to see on the list, so please do add it to the comments below.
]]>Hark! It's the sound of our sweet voices taking up an hour of your precious time. The RPS podcast of old, the Electronic Wireless Show, has returned in a fresh new body. We've got news, interviews and silly features, as well as some of the traditional idle chat.
This week, Pip, Adam and I are chatting about Far Cry 5's "Last Supper" image, the recent layoffs at Hitman developer IO Interactive, and enjoying a jaunt through melancholy puzzler Old Man's Journey. There's also some Quickfire Questions with the developers of survival puzzler Rain World, news from Paradox Con and lots more.
]]>'Terrible' only in the sense of their gaming capability. Honestly, I'm sure your laptop is lovely to look at and it was definitely a extremely sensible idea to spend all that money on it instead of buying a holiday or helping to save the pandas. Truth is, though, that playing recently-released games on the vast majority of laptops is about as effective as starting an online petition to uncancel your favourite television show.
A little discretion goes a long way, however. Sure, you may be denied the glossiest of exploding viscera, but it is entirely possible to keep up with the Joneses even on a Terrible Laptop that has no dedicated graphics card. Here are but twelve contemporary games - either recently released or still-evolving going concerns - that will indeed run on your glammed-up toaster. Additional suggestions below are entirely welcome.
]]>The Mac Dad will make you jump jump, for, as always, these are the ten games with the most accumulated sales on Steam over the past week. It's an odd old chart this week: the mainstays continue to stay, but random discounts remix things quite a bit.
]]>We are living in a golden age of big-budget PC games that offer us choice and freedom. Be they descendants of the System Shock model - finding a route around a meticulously-crafted, locked-down and hostile place, most recently seen in Prey [official site] - or the roleplaying games based around choice and consequence rather than action alone, they are legion. There are so many, even, that I'm not sure we can fully appreciate how good we've got it.
]]>Prey [official site] isn't the game I thought it would be. Clearly, Prey isn't the game that anyone thought a game called 'Prey' would be until relatively recently, given its years in development hell and eventual total departure from both the first game to bear that name and the axed second one that was supposed to. But even when I played it twice over the past couple of months, doing so within time constraints, with my eye only on making progress, I formed an inaccurate impression of Prey. I thought I knew exactly what it was, and I knew I'd like it, but I wasn't sure I'd love it. I certainly didn't think it'd turn out to be the game I've enjoyed the most so far this year.
]]>In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion checks to see which ten games sold best on Steam over the past week. He just can't sleep until he knows whether Prey made it to number one or not.
]]>Prey [official site] is, I’m so pleased to report, a truly fantastic game. It is also a game for which, delightfully, you’re going to have to shake off a lot of habits and assumptions. Here's wot I think:
]]>I thought the monsters and mimicry would be the stars of Prey [official site], but I was wrong. The real star is the Talos-I space station, which manages to be a convincing functional space and a delightful collection of hidden routes and challenges. In my first couple of hours with the game, I thought the setting was a too-predictable mixture of offices and industrial machinery, but six hours in, I'm finding it hard to hard to tear myself away.
Despite all of its powers and tricks, Prey is a game where I'm not so much interested in what I'm doing as I am in where I'm doing it. The combat irritates me more often than it excites me, the creatures pestering rather than petrifying, and the upgrade system hasn't convinced me yet – but if Talos-I continues to be such a warren of possibilities, I'll gladly spend another thirty hours or more there.
]]>The new Prey [official site] is out and I am not here to tell you how it is. No, both Adam and John are currently Preying away, giggling while they roll around a space station as a mug. Me, I'm here with a few little tech tweaks that might make it merrier for you. Such as: a field of view setting isn't officially in the options menu just yet but you can tweak it yourself if you don't mind plunging your hands into config files. Also: yes, you can make it skip all those the many screens of logos and notices at launch. Those two spacemen have also sent me some brief impressions of how it runs for them.
]]>Usually when I hear developers talking about Steam's refund system, it's all Wilhelm screams and gnashing of teeth because it's a) backlash for a game shipped in a rickety state b) the brutal bursting of an impossible hype bubble or c) calculating scrooges have worked out that they can blast through something short and still be eligible to get their cash back. Rare is the day when I hear a dev actively encouraging use of the system if a player's not enjoying their game.
That's the line taken by Prey [official site] lead dev (and nemesis of press sneaks the world over) Raphael Colantonio. Unlike the console versions of Bethesda and Arkane's System Shock'em-up, there's no demo available for PC. There's no need, argues Colantonio, cos you can just holler at Steam's refund elves instead. Hmm.
]]>Prey for the Gods [official site], the crowdfunded surive-o-action game heavily inspired by Shadow of the Colossus, is now named Praey for the Gods. It's a rubbish name but it is a trademarkable one. Developers No Matter Studios have made this change because Zenimax, the owners of Bethesda, thought Prey for the Gods was too close to their trademark for Prey. Rather than spend their limited funds on battling Zenimax's lawyers, No Matter agreed to change the name. The Suits didn't object to Praey for the Gods, a title close to one No Matter had originally considered anyway, so here we are. Here ends the threat of people mistakenly thinking Prey for the Gods is, I don't know, an ultra-exclusive limited edition of Prey reserved for religious leaders.
]]>Prey [official site] is not out until Friday but its launch trailer is already here. That might seem a silly mistake from publishers Bethesda but hey, they haven't even realised that Prey was already the name of a seemingly unrelated first-person shooter from 2006 - a game which Bethesda themselves own the rights to! Still, it's fine as the chunks of Prey we've played make Arkane Studios' Prey seem a fine sci-fi shooter in a similar vein to their splendid Dishonored. You could watch the launch trailer now or save it for Friday to watch while wearing a paper hat and pretending you're at the launch party.
]]>If you've been cooing and making kissy faces through the window at the upcoming new Prey [official site], Arkane's sci-fi remix of Dishonored, you might have heard a demo is out today. It's not for us. No, the demo with the first hour-or-so of the game is only for consoles. Given how many big games launch with performance problems, it's a shame we won't get to have a crack on our own PCs. Publishers Bethesda have at least confirmed system requirements, which give... a vague indication of how it might potentially run? Check your spec:
]]>A few weeks ago, I played through the first section of Bethesda and Arkane's upcoming first-person-shooterbut Prey [official site] (no relation, other than in name, to the original Prey or its aborted sequel). I like it well enough, particularly the Total Recallish sense of intrigue it raised about what was really going on and whether the player-character was the person they believed themselves to be. At the same time, I'm not sure how much I truly had to say about it, outside of description.
It was there, polished and pacey, absolutely the kind of thing I traditionally enjoy in an action game - but it was guns and monsters and doorcodes. Where was the thing that made Prey unique? I've been back and played a later section of the game, amongst other things I've transformed myself into a stack of towels and now I have a much clearer sense of what this new Prey really is. I can show as well as tell you why.
]]>Here's the second and final part of my hour-long narrated playthrough of Bethesda and Arkane's upcoming shooter-me-do, Prey [official site]. N.B. Contains spoilers for the opening hour of the game, but nothing beyond that.
]]>Earlier in the week we ran both words and video discussing and demonstrating the first hour of Arkane's upcoming shoot-o-explorey game Prey [official site], but today we're doing both. Here's the first of two videos in which I commentate as I play through said opening hour, pointing out some of the details you or I might have missed and generally chatting about how it all works.
]]>I've written down my thoughts on what it was like to play the first hour of Arkane's upcoming first-person-shooterbut Prey [official site] right over here, but if you prefer to watch than read, here's a recording of the entire session for you. Warning: contains spoilers for the first hour of the game (but nothing beyond that point), which do include a couple of twists. Don't watch if you want to go in blind.
]]>The game I was most reminded of when playing the opening hour of Arkane's upcoming sci-fi shooter Prey [official site] was Deus Ex: Invisible War. No, don't panic.
]]>Prey [official site] will blast off on May 5, publishers Bethesda announced today. The new Prey. The sci-fi immersive sim made by Dishonored developers Arkane. The one which seems to have little to do with Human Head's 2006 FPS yet is confusingly named exactly the same. The one which which looks pretty good fun in its own right. That one. The one where you can be a cup. Bethesda celebrate the announcement with a new trailer which has shocking implications for our Graham.
]]>2006's original Prey came a full eleven years after 3D Realms began its production. Eventually completed by Human Head Studios, although using some of the original concepts (primarily the portal tech), it was released to rave reviews. Which is odd, because it's a colossal pile of shit.
]]>As Old Father Time grabs his sickle and prepares to take ailing 2016 around the back of the barn for a big sleep, we're looking to the future. The mewling pup that goes by the name 2017 will come into the world soon and we must prepare ourselves for its arrival. Here at RPS, our preparations come in the form of this enormous preview feature, which contains details on more than a hundred of the exciting games that are coming our way over the next twelve months. 2016 was a good one - in the world of games at least - but, ever the optimists, we're hoping next year will be even better.
]]>I spend a lot of my time wandering around space stations and off-world colonies. They're usually deserted, save for some infected former-people or an AI with some disturbing ideas about just what it should do with that sentience it found between the sofa cushions of its code. This year, I particularly enjoyed Event[0]'s unusual take on that familiar scenario, but next year we might be returning to some frights and fights immersive sim-like normality. I already have my eye on Prey and P.A.M.E.L.A., and now I'm adding HEVN [official site] to the list.
]]>Prey [official site] is the game where you can turn into a mug. It's a sign of developer Arkane's reputation as Makers of Interesting Games that it isn't simply known as "That Game Where You Turn Into A Mug". Eight minutes of footage, some of which you may have seen before, shows other reasons to be excited about this sci-fi thriller. There's the shadowy creatures, the gloopy gun-gadget, some handsome environmental design, and the kind of combo-chaining of abilities that Dishonored 2 does so well.
And, yes, a mug trundling around a space station.
]]>We don't know a great deal about Prey [official site], severed as it seems to be from the previous game called Prey and the half-formed sequel that died on the vine. The player character can be a man or a woman, there are shadowy, goopy aliens, you can turn into a mug, and it's being made by Arkane, the studio behind Dishonored. Prepare to learn a whole lot more.
A new video, using rather fetching animation, tells us the backstory of the space station Talos I (the game's setting), the corporation that owns it, and the creatures that live there. To get to the future though, we need to go back to the mid-twentieth century and an alternative cold war.
]]>I'm certainly up for transforming into a mug in the new Prey [official site], Arkane's upcoming 'reimagining' of Human Head's 2006 sci-fi FPS, but I was less sold on my default form being our own Graham Smith. It's not right, that. I don't agree that games are (or should be) escapism but playing my own boss - the man who chases me around the virtual office with a virtual broom every day - just isn't what I want.
Good news: if we'd like, we'll also be able to play Prey as a lady. Her name is Morgan Yu too. And she doesn't look like anyone I work with. Hear her in a new/old trailer.
]]>I don’t mean that as a totally unprovoked British insult. I mean you really will become a mug when you play Arkane Studios’ revamp of Prey [official site]. A gameplay trailer shown at Gamescom has given us a glimpse of the powers available to protagonist Morgan, and one of them is to turn yourself into inanimate objects – say, a coffee mug – and then wobble around like the dancing toaster in Ghostbusters II, enough to launch yourself through small gaps. Come see it in action.
]]>Bethesda are at Quake Con, showing off their new toys to people who love to shoot guns and bunny hop. One of their most intriguing toys is Prey [official site] (a re-imagining of the original) which is being made by Arkane Studios, the folks behind the Dishonored games. They announced it at E3 a couple of months ago but now they have finally given us a glimpse of what it would be like to shoot all the things. Come have a gander.
]]>Too long have I been playing games about people who almost look like me. No longer, now that Prey has been announced.
]]>When Raphaël Colantonio took to the stage at Bethesda's E3 showcase, I figured he'd be talking about Dishonored 2. He's one of the creative directors of the studio, alongside Harvey Smith, and we knew we were going to see more of their stealthy sequel.
Instead, Colantonio said he'd be working on something else, with a second team within the studio. A game in the same tradition as Dishonored - an immersive sim - but with an extra pinch of horror. It's Prey.
]]>It's terribly sad that all we seem to hear of Human Head's ambitious, semi-free form, Blade Runner-inspired shooter Prey 2 is the occasional murky rumour and contradiction about its troubled status. Not so long ago word abounded that it had been taken down the bottom of the garden and shot by Bethesda, which after slightly too long a wait was then officially disputed. We've just heard the exact same song and dance again, which I shall report purely because we don't know owt else about Prey 2's state of play.
]]>With official confirmation still lacking as to whether Prey 2 is currently bleeding out by the bins out the back of Bethesda HQ or if the great hunt will yet continue, one of the many additional questions is what might become of developer Human Head. Sounds like they're pondering a resurrection of their first game, viking-based brawler Rune. The 2000 Unreal-powered stabbing'n'jumping title is, apparently, a "cult hit classic", and its official Facebook page has raised the possibility of it getting the sequel treatment.
]]>Yes, it's that oldest of all the jokes. But I'm afraid a screenshot of Tommy's actual back is all we're getting from Human Head today. Given exactly thirty-two in every five hundred and twenty-eight people on the internet were vocally distressed to discover that Prey 2 would be ditching the first game's Native American protagonist Tommy in favour of a white soldierdude named Killian Samuels, you'd have thought the first unveiling of Tommy's NPC appearance in Prey 2 would have a little more hullabaloo. But no, just his back. And a bit of his nose, admittedly. Will he be purely a talky character, or will you fight alongside him somehow? I don't know these things. I'm sorry. Look, I've got this picture of his back, and that's all. Stop looking at me like that. What do you want from me?
]]>So we already know the broader picture of Prey 2 - a sandbox 'alien noir' world, with you as a bounty hunter taking on contracts - and how it's a far cry from the first game, but what about the details? Let's ask Prey 2 developer Human Head's project lead Chris Rinehart and chief creative officer Jim Sumwalt for a closer look at just how the missions, the morality and the money-making works - as well as why they decided to leave the first game's play style behind, why the themes are similar even if the lead character is not, whether it's all urban or if things get wilder, and why the hell he's called 'Killian Samuels...'
]]>I'm very surprised. Good surprised, not bad surprised. Prey is not a game I feel anything about, to be completely honest. I know it has its fans, but for me it remains part of that mass of id Tech 4-based stodgy shooters which went heavy on bio-mechanical corridor-pounding gloss at the expense of play I found truly engaging, despite early-game experiments with big ideas. Prey 2? More corridors, more textbook murderous aliens, more blamblamblam, no thank you ma'am.
Except it's not. I was not expecting a game where you spend a significant time without a gun taking up half your screen. I was not expecting an open-world game, inspired more by the likes of Red Dead Redemption and STALKER than by Quake and Call of Duty. I was not expecting a game where your interaction with funny-headed aliens is as much about making moral judgements as it is shooting them. I'm surprised.
]]>I admit, I never got around to playing any more of Human Head's shooter than the demo. However, I return from London Town to see that if I had any spare time, now would be a good chance to change that. For this weekend - and this weekend only! - it's on sale on Steam, for a mere $4.95. And for Europeans, that means it's at least seven ultracheaps. It divided critical opinion upon release - I know Jim was a big fan of the physics-warping levels, but it was critiqued even more than Bioshock for its repawning system. Those who've played it: Worth five dollars? Seriously, how could it not be.
]]>Comrade Mike sent us this 'Tube link to a 1998 live demo of the second iteration of the Prey project, a game which had originally been announced by 3D Realms back in 1995. It was (probably) the first game to demonstrate working portal technology, as you'll see three minutes into this clip.
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