andysheets1975: Prey. Just the base game. I want to finish Mooncrash but I think I'll save it for another time since I'm all Preyed out at the moment. This was pretty good, definitely one of Arkane's better efforts overall. You're running around a very large space station, trying to figure out why it's been taken over by a bunch of weird, shape-shifting aliens. Along the way, you gather up weapons and level up various skills and even gain access to alien powers yourself. Except I didn't bother with the superpowers because I didn't want any of that alien filth inside my body. You'd think I'd possibly handicapped myself but by the end I was sufficiently powerful with just my weapons and stealth abilities that I was able to cruise to the ending relatively easily. So it allows for different playstyles and multiple solutions to problems. And the game does track how you've approached it and will give you a slightly different ending based on your actions.
The graphics are quite good, although the people look a bit funnier (and uglier) than the aliens, architecture, and furniture. Unlike most immersive sims, you actually aren't alone on the station and not in that way where there's some sort of contrivance that keeps you from ever getting face to face with the others. The game breaks from immersive sim game design principles in several other ways, such as giving you quest markers, or even giving you actual quests at all. They likely did that as much because the station is so huge that it just saves time to let you know where you need to go as much as current game industry priorities, although there was a point midway through where I was just going through my sidequests and "checking them off" as quickly as I could, not feeling much urgency on anything I was doing.
As good as the game is, it's probably a bit too long and open. I was more than ready for it to be over a few hours before I actually finished it. I played it on default, so maybe it flows better with adjustments to the difficulty. There are also some ideas that seem good in principle but don't really work in the game. One in particular is that the game occasionally sends this huge Nemesis-like creature called the Nightmare after you. It sounds like a cool idea, this monster that pursues you and you have to either kill it (depleting valuable resources) or run away and hide until it goes away, but it misfires because whenever I entered a new level, I would immediately know the Nightmare was there because it's the only creature that always knows you've entered a level and it charges you immediately, so the solution to its appearances was to simply turn around and click on the door I just entered, go into the previous level, because it can't follow you across loading screens, and then just sit and wait (i.e., play with my phone) for a couple of minutes until the "ESCAPE THE NIGHTMARE!!!!" time limit expired. Then just go back to what I'd planned to do to begin with. I never bothered even trying to fight the thing. I guess it cost me an achievement. Ah well.
I also didn't get much out of the story. Part of it is that the aliens are so inscrutable that it costs the game a tad in personality, and despite all the audio logs and e-mails I collected, I never found any of the sub-stories involving the crew very interesting. I would come across hundreds of individually identified bodies and they never really became more than names that would be checked off on the security terminals. And you're controlling a character with a name and a past and relationships with people with whom you're interacting on the station (well, you click on them and they say a few lines before repeating themselves), but the game also wants you to be a blank slate you're recreating yourself.
Although I prefer the classics in this style, I do appreciate that Arkane has been the only major studio that has really been trying to work in that tradition and creating games that are better than can be reasonably expected in the current industry.
I too am playing through Prey 2017. While I really enjoy the game, it came get a little overbearing at times. Love the atmopshere, music, and story. But, really hate the escape from nightmare. And it has that same trope of several different abilities, which is pretty much cookie cutter at this point.
Another game I can't play more than just spurts is Ghosts of tsushima. Beautiful game, really good characters, and love the story. But has alot of modern tropes i hate. For one, bullet time type style for some of the kill scenes. Bullet time was cool, like 10-20 years ago. Not so much now. Also, alot of abilities that are pretty useless IMO. And so many cut scenes.
