TLDR: Fuck this game. I am NOT coming back.

If you're like me and picked up this game expecting a fun space alien shooter with cool powers and spooky enemy designs, do NOT get this.

Prey is my first time with the genre “immersive sims” which I’ve seen defined as: “games that allow the player multiple options to engage with combat and puzzles, and multiple paths to progress past a roadblock.”

When I found out that Prey wasn’t some sort of “Doom clone” I was a little bummed. But I wanted to give it a fair shot before I went to write off the game altogether. And after watching a Youtube video or two about Prey and immersive sims, I decided to go in as blind as possible.

Before I get too negative, there are a few things I liked about Prey. I really liked how the first hour of the game tries to emulate a sort of "Truman-Show" vibe. Leading you to find out everything you know is fake, and slowly uncovering your place in the grander story was pretty sick. There's also a few horror sequences that get executed pretty well, and music's good too.

But on a surface level, the game wasn't very interesting to me. You don’t get any cool powers early on, and most of the combat isn’t very engaging. If anything you just walk back and forth between dull rooms in silence.

While there are a few good things that Prey has going for it, they’re completely murdered by the game's LACK OF COMMUNICATION and GLACIAL PACING.

Strike one for me was one of the game’s “gloo gun puzzles”. So early on, the game tells you two things.

One, that puzzles and routes to rooms have multiple solutions, (with multiple npcs and remarking about this to really drive this point home).
And two, that you can make stuff with the gloo gun. (With the gun being able to be used as a weapon, and with environmental hazards).

While it is true that both of these things are said in the beginning, they aren’t said in tandem. What I mean is that the game provides you with the puzzle pieces, but it doesn't really give you any direction on how to put them together.

So in the beginning of the game, I found myself getting stuck after failing to open a door. So the first thing I did was look for a vent to crawl through, or a keycard that I could use. Since both of these solutions have been successful for me. But in this instance neither worked. I wasn’t able to find a keycard, and there was no vent to crawl into. So I ended up just wandering around aimlessly and frustrated.

Eventually I found a corpse next to a lil gloo ladder. Now I assume the intention of the developers was to show the players that you could build a ladder to get up to the place where I was stuck. But despite this, my “lightbulb” didn’t go off. The npc was already dead, meaning I didn’t even understand that the “gloo ladder” was climbable, and missed out seeing a visual cue of a npc using it in action. So in reality I saw this weird npc, looked at him for like 5 seconds, and then walked away.

Ironically enough, it wasn’t until I watched a video about immersive sim’s in general, that I stumbled onto the puzzle’s solution. Sure yes, technically the game provides you with two separate thoughts, one relating to the gloo gun, and another relating to “multiple solutions” But it poorly alludes to the possibility of a ladder even being possible.

I totally understand the idea of a game offering multiple options to progress, but when you’re new to immersive sims, sure you can have just as many options as a veteran player on paper. But if you’re completely unaware of them and if the game doesn’t really tell you/point you in the right direction, they might as well not be there.

I’m aware that I’m 100% missing stuff, and not understanding what the game wants, due to my own stupidity. But I do think the game could help me better grasp what it’s trying to ask of me.

BOTW and TOTK have moments similar to this, but those games do “ah-hah” moments much better. While Prey demands experimentation to progress, Zelda provides experimentation as a bonus. Zelda makes me feel smart when I cheat through a shrine because I chose to do it on my own. But I never felt smart playing Prey. Especially when small things like story objectives are left very vague.

Despite all this shit, the final straw was Dr. Calvino's lab.

By trying to “go in as blind as possible” I’ve been mindlessly wandering around, growing more and more impatient and frustrated. I must've wasted at least 2hrs just looking around for the next thing to do.

This wasn’t at all helped by Prey’s fucking awful map. I genuinely don’t understand why the devs provide any sort of live mini-map for this game. Especially with the level of backtracking you do in this game.
Pausing and opening a menu to figure out where i was supposed to go, just to open that same shit again like 10 seconds later when I realized I went the wrong way, got HELLA OLD HELLA FAST.

At the end, I genuinely felt like someone was watching my gameplay and was actively trying to find the best way to waste my time.

Like, oh cool I found a door that needs to be opened. Every door that’s needed a keycard so far has only needed one.

Wander around for an hour and then finally get the ability to go out into space. Go outside, find a dead body with a keycard. Yay I did it. Now go all the way back to the door I was trying to open.

Oh wait what’s this, “keycard not accepted”? But why? I got it??

Google the puzzle online, apparently there’s two cards????

OHH MY BADD

IM SO FUCKING SORRY

I’m such a fucking mongrel idiot how could I not have seen that coming??? It’s not like every single fucking door in this stupid game only used ONE KEY CARD.

Backtrack allllll the way back into space, and then FINALLY GET THE CARD.

And then, I just quit.

Prey is one of the only games I’ve ever played where even after playing 3-5hrs, you still feel like you’ve done nothing. It’s painfully obvious that the devs did this shit to just pad out the runtime.

I'm not gonna rate the whole game, since I didn't beat it, but if I could rate the first couple hours, I'd give it a fucking 3/10.

"I guess no matter how hard you try, you can’t escape your past..."

God this one hit hard.

While I have yet to play The Last Of Us Part 2, or the first game before, this game's story has been unmissable due to its impact on internet culture. Hell even though I spoiled myself many years ago and watched Markiplier's play-through of the game, it still managed to hit so fucking hard.

To start, the game is incredibly cinematic. But not in a over-the-top bombastic way, rather a reserved and emotional way. More than anything else, the developers wanted to tell you a story, and I was sooo down.

The Last Of Us's acting is phenomenal. This is one of the few games I've played where I feel like almost every actor could've earned an award for their performances. But Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson easily stole the show.

The writing for this game was amazing as well. While it was difficult for me to block out the spoilers I've been exposed to for the second game, I still found so much nuance in this game's story and dialogue.
Even if the second game was never made, Jole and Ellie would feel like fully realized characters. All of the credit goes to Neil Druckmann and all the lovely people who worked on this game.

As for the gameplay, I actually really liked it. In many ways it felt like a much faster Resident Evil 2. Limited ammo and supplies, and lots of scary enemies that need to die. While the combat took me a while to get the hang of (fuck the clickers), once I started playing aggressively I was mowing through EVERYBODY

But yeah, this game is a MUST PLAY, and I can't wait to try out Part 2

Wow i didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did.

Ghost of Tsushima isn't a groundbreaking openworld game, but it is REALLY REALLY fun :3

Easily the weakest aspect of this game is it's story. While I wouldn't call it bad, it is very bland. The game has the pieces to a good story with Jin's weakening honor, his quest for revenge, and his pursuit to free his people, but it doesn't say much with any of this. The acting is pretty much the same. Very serviceable, with only a few stand out moments.

But the gameplay? That's a whooole 'nother story.

While exploration is also kind weak, that is wear the faults of this game end. Ghost Of Tushima's traversal is actually really fun. Sure it's not groundbreaking or anything. It doesnt come close to a game like TOTK, or Spiderman 2, but it's much better than GOW or FF7 remake.

While riding your horse, running, jumping, and climbing are all ok, it's how these aspects mix together with the grappling hook that really make things fun.

There's these optional shrines that can give you a strong charm if you complete lengthy platforming puzzle. And while I found little use for most of the shrines (since most of them just give minor stat upgrades), I'd still do the shrines because of how much fun it was to jump, climb, and swing around. :D

My only problem with the grappling hook is that the game barely takes advantage of it, so ends up feeling missed potential. Sure there's a few enemy camps, and Iki island puzzles where you can do some cool platforming, but I would've liked more.

Combat is fucking FIREEE thooo. Sure it's not as crazy as something like Bayonetta or DMC, but it's still really fun :3

The game really shines when it gives you an enemy camp, and says "Go". Ghost of Tushima gives you soooo manyyy options to kill your enemies. You can stab them, blow them up, shoot them, assassinate them, trample them with your horse, and sooo much more.

The boss fights in the game are pretty great too! Again, they aren't insane, and they do take away all of your combat tools other than your sword, but I didn't mind that. Ghost of Tsushima's combat system is honestly strong enough to make pure sword fights really fun.

You can get pretty fancy with you combos if you know what you're doing, and mixing up your attacks on a boss with a Ghost stance, or a dance of wrath never got old.

Oh, also the clothing in this game is FIIIIREEEEEEE
THANK U SUCKER PUNCH FOR GIVING JIN SO MUCH SAUCE

Man...

What a fucking game.

While I have my small nitpicks with the game's overworld and it's reliance on chance events and lack of freedom or experimentation due to the honor system and scripted missions, (unlike something like TOTK or BOTW) I still ADORE this game.

Red Dead Redemption stands out as one of the greatest games I've ever played, not because of it's overworld, combat, graphics, attention to detail, or realism, but because of it's story. (this game does look AMAZING tho, I played it on a PS5 slim and it looks fucking fantastic)
Sure I loved riding around on my horse, or freeing the random stranger from a bear-trap, but ultimately the story is what kept me going.

And holy SHIT what a story.

Bro this shit is better than some movies, some shows, some books.. God this shit made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me jump out of my seat in panic. This game had me HOOKED. Absolutely all praise to the writers, actors, and directors of this game's narrative. Y'all murdered this.

I won't comment much on the actual story or it's characters as to not spoil anything, and because it's kinda been talked to death from all the youtube video essays, but know that they're telling the truth.

If you haven't played this game yet, then DO IT. It'll ask a lot of your time, and it might take a bit to get invested, but in the end I promise you it WILL be worth it.

You're a good man Arthur Morgan..

Pretty damn fun, grind for Fantina sucks tho
The team:
Infernape (Blaze)
Luxray (Surge)
Staraptor (Falco)
Gardevoir (Tetsuo)
Garchomp (Destoroyah)
Lucario (Gojo)
Featuring: Durty Dan (The Bibarel I used as an HM slave)

(btw all of the nicknames are references, try and guess what they're from ;3)

No shinies on the team, but thats ok. My team was pretty similar to @TheSnuffles so that's cool. We played this together on Discord, so major shoutout to him for helping me through some ungodly and confusing parts (cough cough victory road).

anyways fun game, really happy i loved the game that Lucario came from, since he's one of my fav pokemon ever :D

guys wouldn't it be really fun if we made you grind really early and lock an exp share behind a gym that you need to beat in order to get access to the exp share?
Which leaves your starter and every other pokemon you catch at a massiv power gap?

i think that'd pretty fun ngl

PSA: Everybody is completely allowed to like this game. I just didnt vibe with it in the beginning. I'll prolly come back one day to actually progress lmao. I'm just being stubborn :p

I bought the treasure trove collection out of impulse due to it's positive word of mouth, and I wanted to see what all the hype was about, and what I got was an extremely "stiff", side-scrolling platformer that's """""retro""""" aesthetics and difficulty completely failed to win me over.

Lemmie start by saying that I have no nostalgia for old 2D side scrollers such as Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man, or Contra. So my expectations for this game are only built off of previous 2D "modern" platformers. And I'm gonna be honest, this is very overhyped.

Easily my biggest gripe with this game is it's movement. It's a little hard to put to words, but I'd say it feel's "stiff". The best way I could describe the game's platforming is like instead of pressing a button to jump, you instead press a button to move up or down on an analog chart. There's no sense of character momentum, or weight, or even balance. The only ways you can feel these qualities are on a select few levels, but that's only due to their environmental design, and not a part of the core movement in gameplay.

Comparing this experience to something like Ori and The Blind Forest and it was like night and day. I'm aware that Ori and Shovel Knight are different games, with one being Metroidvania, and the other a more "traditional" 2D side-scroller, but I wholeheartedly enjoyed Ori's movement MUCH more than Shovel Knight's. It's very hard to be charmed by a game when the simple act of moving feels unpleasant, even if this is due to an artistic choice. Call me bougie, shallow, or pampered by modern games, idc. Shovel Knight is not immune to criticism just because people hold it as an indie darling.

At the moment I have absolutely no motivation to return to this game. Maybe I'll play the other campaigns, maybe not. But for now it's probably staying unfinished.

THIS GAME IS NOT GOTY MATERIAL. But it IS good.

This is probably the lowest 9 I'll ever give a game. Insomniac basically improves everything that the first game does. From an almost complete combat overhaul, traversal improvements, faster load times, and larger action set-pieces. In a way, this is just a better version of the first game and not much more.

And yk what? That's ok.
Not every game needs to be some genre defying masterpiece, sometimes you can just build upon the foundations of the orignal, and expand further.

Yes this game has issues. There's some inconstant character motivations with Venom, Miles has nothing to do after beating Li, Kraven kills off all the old villains off-screen, the entire 3rd act feels incredibly rushed, Miles' final suit looks like ass, ect.

No this game isn't perfect and it's pretty short (and yes, it 100% should've launched with NG+). But I'm pretty happy with what I got :D

I do hope they do some Carnage DLC tho, since they did a ton of DLC for the first game