What are you playing right now?

Prey.

GOG recently added a ton of new games to their catalog (and at deep discounts) and this was one of them. Another one was System Shock 2, which I got for 97 cents. I replayed through SS2 in like three days and still really enjoyed it, so I wanted something similar. It was between Prey and Dead Space but I don't remember the latter having much exploration, so I went with Prey. I originally 'tried it' when it was first released in 2017, liked it, but lost interest midway through.

I'm only a couple of hours into it and already I'm starting to lose interest again. The lore of the game's world history plus the mystery of what TranStar is up to is interesting. The art direction is great, though even with its outdated graphics and lighting SS2 manages to be much more atmospheric, as everything in Prey is very sterile and brightly, overly lit. Exploration is fun because the areas feel well designed and logical, like they're actual places people would work at and live in, which is something I really like and that System Shock 2 shared, plus the game is designed so that most obstacles have more than one way around them.

Unfortunately, I'm finding most of the core gameplay to be underwhelming and unengaging. Combat feels very basic, with the guns in particular being disappointing and lacking any sort of kick to them. Typhon abilities aren't much better, with Mimic Matter being the only one that feels inspired. Enemies are also kinda bland and not very interesting. The whole 'mimic' thing also quickly loses its appeal and once the novelty is gone they become dumb jump scares or you quickly recognize them (oh, look, two of the exact same items side by side, gee I wonder where the mimic could be).

Lastly, looking at this as the closest we'll probably get to a System Shock 3 (I never really cared for BioShock) I miss tsundere SHODAN insulting me and giving me backhanded compliments as I completed objectives :(
 
Loved the System Shocks and felt the same about Prey and kinda just stopped playing in the middle of it. Something about it is just kinda meh and it just doesn't keep you captured. So System Shock 3 is dead? Eh, probably for the best.

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Loved the System Shocks and felt the same about Prey and kinda just stopped playing in the middle of it. Something about it is just kinda meh and it just doesn't keep you captured. So System Shock 3 is dead? Eh, probably for the best.

I don't actually know anything about System Shock 3, it's just that it's been flopping back and forth between life and death for the last 20 years, so I assumed we'll probably never gonna actually see it completed.

And, yeah, I can't really explain what exactly it is about Prey that makes me lose interest in it. SS2 had some of the same problems but managed to keep me enthralled. Maybe it really was just SHODAN calling me an insect that kept me going.
 
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Soul
Soulless
 
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