Tag: Horror

Prey Review

Prey Review

The First 15

Right away I have to say that the start screen music is perfect.

First I have to choose my gender. I’m male so I choose male. It’s the year 2032.

I leave my apartment and get onto a helicopter. The city looks really good. I can see the mix of new buildings along with “old” 2017 buildings. I arrive at the company headquarters and am greeted by a science probe which informs me that my brother is waiting for me.

I go through a series of very basic tests. The scientists are making this out to be some kind of huge deal, but I can’t figure out why. After the third test the scientist gets attacked by some kind of alien creature.

I wake up the next morning and find that things aren’t quite right. For instance, the hallway doesn’t go where it normally did. I grab a wrench and use it break the glass windows of my apartment so that I can escape…

…and walk out onto a soundstage. What the hell is going on?

Story

Several decades ago astronauts encountered the Typhon. The Typhon are an alien species with an unknown origin. America and Russia team up in secret to build a space station where scientists began studying the Typhon. Eventually they develop a device called a neuromod. A neuromod can teach a person any skill in a matter of seconds by remapping a person’s brain as if they had actually learned the skill.

Of course, everything eventually goes horribly wrong. The Typhon break containment and begin killing the people on the station while simultaneously growing some kind of weave, purpose unknown.

The story for Prey is as shallow or deep as you want it to be. A lot of the story is about the Typhon running amuck and trying to decide how to handle it. This mostly involves a lot of shooting things until they die. But there’s a deeper undercurrent that talks about memory, identity, and what it means to be an individual. There are choices that have to be made and repercussions for each decision. Players can dive into this or choose to ignore it as they wish.

Interface and Controls

You can set weapons to left, right, and down on the D-Pad to quickly swap between them which is nice. Up is reserved for the flashlight, which you almost never use. I wish the game allowed you to set a weapon to up as well.

The inventory has a number of issues that should be simple to fix (which leaves one to wonder why they weren’t fixed before release). These issues mostly arise when the player’s inventory is nearly full. The first issue is that items which should stack, don’t always stack when they enter the inventory. A single push of a button sorts them into a single stack, but having to go into the inventory, sort it, and exit out every time the player collects another item which fills their inventory gets annoying. The other issue is that if the player tries to pick up a weapon which takes up more than one inventory slot, the game will claim the player’s inventory is full even if the player has enough room but doesn’t have enough open inventory blocks that are side by side. Again, going into the inventory, sorting, and exiting out will fix the problem, but it’s bad design that such a thing is even necessary. Simply put, the inventory needs to auto-stack items that enter the player’s inventory, and if necessary auto-sort to fit larger items such as weapons.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out where I needed to go for some of the objectives. A few times I would follow a quest marker only to realize that it was just leading me to another area of the ship entirely. Other quests simply didn’t have a quest marker and reading the quest text still didn’t tell me where to go. The quest indicator should be another color if it’s in a different area of the station, and another QC pass on the quest text would have been nice.

I ran into an issue during spacewalks where it was next to impossible to track points of interest. The green dots would appear, but the only way that I could get the labels for these dots was to turn off all primary and secondary objective markers. The developers need to make it so that the labels will appear around all markers in the direction you are looking rather than one at a time.

Gameplay

The best part about Prey is how the game rewards the player for exploring. There is the primary objective and several secondary objectives, but a lot of the best gameplay is when players try poking their heads in nearby rooms, exploring down unknown corridors, or sometimes even just visiting entirely different sections of the ship. Unlike a lot of games that only let players go a little ways off the beaten path, Prey lets players explore for hours if they so choose in whatever direction they want. Some areas can only be accessed by progressing the story of course, but by and large the station is one giant playground to explore.

One of the core concepts of the game is the neuromods. Neuromods allow the player to learn new skills to fight better, hack doors, repair broken systems on the station, and a myriad of other things. I was particularly impressed with how I found every potential upgrade worth taking. At the start I wanted them all. And that was before the game doubled the amount that I had available to me. Mostly the player has to find neuromods, but they can also be constructed, up to a point. Once the player tries to make too many, the game locks them out and requires the player to go on a sidequest to unlock them again. I enjoyed how completing that sidequest became the most important goal to me even over the primary objective.

Eventually the player finds a scanner with which to scan the Typhon. Doing so unlocks new Typhon abilities that the player can learn. These include every ability the Typhon know such as mimicing objects, hurling fireballs, mind controlling people, and more. The ability to mimic objects was particularly interested because it allows the player to enter areas that normally are inaccessible. It takes a big mental shift to consider that the way past a locked door is to transform into a coffee cup and roll in through the mail slot.

The concept of the Mimic enemy is very cool. Mimics will (as the name suggests) mimic another nearby object and lie in wait. When the player gets too close the creature will drop the disguise and attack. This creates a lot of tension and leads to some interesting gameplay moments. When players first explore an area, they have to keep an eye out for duplicate items (one of which could be a mimic). And if they ever go back through an area, they must be wary of anything that wasn’t there before.

Turrets add another interesting element to the game. When I found my first turret I felt like I’d found my savior. I would carry it around with me while I explored the lobby and let it do the shooting since I had a very hard time hitting the fast moving mimics with my pistol (and the turret has unlimited ammo). Each time I walked in front of it, the turret would scan me and declare me free of Typhon material. It wasn’t until later that I realized why this was so important. If you choose to install Typhon neuromods, the turrets will start to attack you on sight. In this way they go from being a savior, to being another enemy. I found it to be a very interesting role reversal.

I especially liked the way the game handles spacewalks. I sometimes got turned around, and upside down, but it felt like a “natural” part of floating in space. The controls felt intuitive despite the lack of up and down.

The GLOO Cannon is Prey’s equivalent to Half-Life’s gravity gun. The GLOO Cannon does serve a purpose in combat, but its real use is for climbing walls and putting out fires. It gives the player a freedom of movement that takes a while to fully comprehend. Areas that at first appear flat hide a verticality that takes some getting used to. The game does a good job of showcasing what you can do with the weapon to get players started.

Another interesting weapon is the Q-Beam. The Q-Beam does reverse damage. This means that rather than lower the enemy’s health like most weapons, it begins to fill the enemy’s health bar from left to right. Once it fills the enemy’s health bar completely, the enemy disintegrates into its base elements that the player can collect. Since the beam only has to reach the enemy’s current health, players can combo other weapons with the Q-Beam if needed. My only complaint about this weapon is that the energy buildup decays very quickly. This makes it hard to use any other weapon after building up any kind of charge in an enemy. I would like to see the energy from the Q-Beam never decay once it applies to an enemy.

Grenades in this game are the worst weapon to try and use. Throwing a grenade is often times a study in futility. Without some kind of trajectory indicator it’s hard to tell where the grenade will go. Sometimes it doesn’t go far enough or it goes too far and misses the intended targets. Other times it bounces off something that the player might not even realize is in the way. This actually killed me when a grenade I threw bounced off a box and landed right underneath me before going off (though I did get an achievement for it). I would like to see the developers add in a system that shows the player the trajectory of the grenade before it gets thrown.

Then there’s the shotgun. The shotgun is by far the strongest weapon in the game and pretty much renders the others obsolete. The problem is that even with such a powerful weapon I still found myself crafting tons of ammo for it so it was actually fairly well balanced. But it highlights that the other weapons just aren’t good enough to keep up with the enemies of the game. I would like to see the designers boost the strength of the other weapons a bit rather than nerf the one gun that seems to really work. Also, it would be nice if players could upgrade the wrench to make it a more viable option rather than that thing players have to use when they run out of ammo.

The game allows players to equip chip mods which give various passive effects. I like the chip system, but one chip specifically I do not like. One of the chips allows players to detect Mimics while they are hiding as other objects. I feel like this removes a major element of the game and cheapens the experience. On the plus side, the chip does not work on Greater Mimics, but I still feel that it should be removed from the game.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy a game that rewards exploration and has more than a few jump scares.

You will not like this game if you want a more linear experience or if you strongly dislike jump scares. The game has some sense of horror to it, but after a while you get used to the Typhon.

I enjoyed this game mostly for the freedom it gave me in exploring the station. The combat is interesting and I felt challenged even on Normal difficulty. The Typhon abilities are also a nice touch with mimic being the most unique.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

The First 15

The story starts with two videos from my character’s girlfriend. The first one is happy and carefree. The second one is decidedly creepy and frantic.

The gameplay opens up with me talking to a friend on the phone about why I’m here. Good to know that I’m smart enough to at least let someone know where I am.

I spend a few minutes walking through the forest. This game really loves its invisible walls. Fortunately it’s daytime. There are a few creepy objects lying about, but nothing too scary yet.

Eventually I come upon a rundown house. I open the side door and peer into what looks like a gaping maw of pure blackness. I am being told that I have to leave the safety of the daylight and enter the blackness if I want to search for my missing girlfriend. Against my better judgement, I step on through.

Inside is complete darkness. Fortunately I brought along a flashlight. I wish I had brought along a brighter flashlight, but I’ll take what I can get. I very slowly start to explore the house. It’s seen better days. The food is all rotting. The boards creak as I walk over them.

Wait, was that a person I just saw?

Story

The main story manages to remain creepy from start to finish. Even as you learn more about what’s going on the knowledge never really makes things any less scary, it just transforms them into a different kind of horror. That they can maintain such an atmosphere for the entire duration of the game is quite impressive.

Occasionally you find VHS tapes. Watching these tapes puts you in the shoes of another character for a short time. I found these to be a very clever way to expand the story while maintaining the sense of immersion.

Interface and Controls

Many times throughout the game I found myself wondering where I was supposed to go next. The map lists objectives, but doesn’t tell you where to go to complete those objectives. A line of dialogue sometimes points you in the right direction. But if you quit playing and continue again later, you may have forgotten where you were told to go. Of course other times the game just never says. Having such unclear objectives often times lowered the tension since I spent so much time just wandering around areas I’d already cleared trying to figure out what to do next.

As you approach an item a small indicator appears above the item. When you get close enough it displays the button for you to press to interact with that item. Out of all of the systems in Resident Evil VII, I found this to be the most distracting. The pop-up icons look so out of place that frankly they caused me to lose my sense of immersion every time I went to pick up an item. And as with all horror games, there are items everywhere if you take the time to look for them. This only gets worse when you use a supplement. The supplement allows you to see the pop-up icon for items from much further away and through walls. So while the supplement lasts, you constantly see a bunch of tiny icons floating all around you.

Personally, I would like the pop-up icon be replaced by a white outline of the item once the player is close enough to ‘notice’ the item. The item itself would then gain a grainy white filter over top of it once the player was close enough to pick up the item. As for the supplement, I would rather the supplement cause some sort of synesthesia reaction. This would cause items to create sound that players could follow to locate the item. The supplement would need to last longer than it does currently to allow players time to track down the item making noise, but I feel like this would be far less damaging to the game’s sense of immersion than the current system.

Inventory space is limited which is supposed to create decisions about what to keep and what to toss. Unfortunately what actually happens is you waste a bunch of time going back and forth to your chest where you can store all of your unneeded items. This is mostly due to the need to actually store quest items.

Quest items also take up inventory space, though I honestly can’t figure out why. Each time you acquire a quest item you typically use it a time or two right away, then never need it ever again. And so all they seem to do is limit your inventory space until you manage to dump them into your chest. There’s also the issue of having to pick up items during a fight. The game doesn’t warn you that you’re going to need the extra space before the fight starts, so you end up having to spend time clearing your inventory in the middle of a fight which usually gets you killed. Of course once you die you then have plenty of time to clear enough inventory space before retrying the fight, but it just feels awkward. Instead they should give you less overall inventory space, but remove the need to store quest items in that space. It also might be worth exploring the idea of removing the chest as well.

Gameplay

This game utilizes a system of checkpoints for if you die. Unfortunately the designers have a tendency to be somewhat sparing with where they place these checkpoints. I imagine they did this to create a sense of fear over dying. Unfortunately, it had the complete opposite effect. When you die and reset, everything is in exactly the same place as it was the last time you went through. Enemies appear in the same locations, items are in the same hiding places, everything is exactly the same. What the designers failed to anticipate is that when you walk through the exact same hallway knowing nothing is going to jump out at you, fight the exact same creature knowing exactly what it is and where it’ll come from, and find the exact same items knowing that picking them up isn’t going to trigger anything (or even if you know one of them will trigger something), the game stops being scary. There was a particularly egregious section in the basement. I only died 4 times, but the entire area is a series fights and dying on any one of them forces you to redo all of them. As a result of this repetitive section, it absolutely killed any sense of terror I had about the game since I knew where everything was and how it would come at me. This loss of fear stayed with me for a while after I made it through this section of the game and had a negative impact on the remainder of my gameplay. I’m not saying that bad checkpoints ruined the game, I enjoyed Resident Evil VII. But the predictability of the environment gave me a chance to concentrate on the enemies long enough to learn all of their tricks so that they too became predictable. The game could benefit immensely from some randomization. Having enemies appear in different locations and shifting items/traps around would go a long way towards keeping players on their toes even when they are repeating a section of the game due to a death.

One other complaint about the gameplay was the lack of indication about a boss’ health. There’s often no indication that you’re actually damaging a boss rather than just making it angry and wasting ammo. One of the bosses would flee whenever I damaged it, making me think that all I could do was scare it off. As a result, I wasted a lot of time wandering around trying to find a way to actually kill the boss when all I had to do was chase it down and unload more bullets into it. It would have been nice if periodically the boss would indicate it was actually being damaged such as having pieces of it break off. I don’t need an HP bar on the screen, but I do need some indication that I’m actually doing damage.

Something very odd was going on with the health and/or damage I dealt to enemies. One enemy would go down with 4 shots from the pistol, and the next identical enemy would take an entire clip plus a shotgun blast to take down even though I shot it in the exact same spot as the first. I’m not sure if this was due to enemies having different amounts of health, weapons doing variable amounts of damage, or some other mechanic which I wasn’t aware of, but whatever the case, it made dealing with enemies odd since some went down easy while others required an obscene amount of hot lead before they died. This might have been intentional to make enemies feel more unpredictable, or it could simply be a bug. In the end though it seemed to simply lead to a lot of cheap deaths when an enemy hit me despite the clip of ammo unloaded into its head.

I should point out that despite the negative aspects of the gameplay listed above, I did very much enjoy my playthrough. The game certainly has its flaws, but it succeeds at creating a compelling horror experience despite them. Remember this site is largely about dissecting a game and trying to find ways to improve upon it.

Conclusion

You will enjoy this game if you like a well crafted story which will scare and creep you out on a consistent basis. The type of horror you experience shifts many times but never goes away.

You will not enjoy this game if you frighten easily. This game is designed to scare you and it certainly will do that at some point (even if you don’t frighten easily).

Resident Evil VII: Biohazard is a well crafted game with a more personal story than your usual Resident Evil title. Despite that, or maybe because of it, the story manages to maintain a constant sense of horror. The gameplay suffers a bit from some aspects becoming predictable if you die often enough in the same area (often enough being 3 or more times). All in all though, I enjoyed my time playing this game.