The clever trick that defines both Prey and Planescape: Torment
And In The End…
I wrapped up my multi-part review of Arkane Studios’ Prey this week with a deep dive into the game’s twist ending and how it played into the themes that were being established all along. Readers kept the discussion going down in the comments. Mr. Smith1466 pointed out a fun callback:
The achievement for killing Alex is called something like “Push the fat guy!” That’s a wonderful callback to the psychology test way back at the start of the game. That in itself is purely genius, and the casting of the wonderful Benedict Wong and his resulting character design is a lovely byproduct of that gag.
As for the twist itself? Eh. An interesting take on the “it was all a dream!” ending is still an “it was all a dream!” ending. Points for cleverness, though. I don’t really see the ending itself as being a sequel hook. It’s more in keeping with the kind of nutty ending Philip K. Dick would hammer out for one his countless wonderful druggy short stories.
Captain Internet disagreed with that last part:
Well, it wasn’t quite “it was all a dream.” They could have had you waking up in your apartment with Alex on the com again. Moreover, there wasn’t a denial that any of it had happened—something happened on Talos 1, even if it wasn’t exactly what you experienced, but the characters and relationships between them almost certainly existed.
What I really liked about the ending was that it managed to at once stay in character but also get you to reflect on what you’d been doing, much more successfully than BioShock managed with the “Would you kindly” moment. BioShock never gave you the option to disobey orders, and had a largely linear path throughout, so when you’re told you’re a puppet of Atlas it’s rather hard to agree. It even wussed out of making you suffer for not harming the Little Sisters. They’d leave you little gifts if you saved them, and it is clearly the right thing to do, so there’s very little reason not to.
Prey reveals that you’ve been playing a game, but not the one you thought you were. All the incidental stuff gets put front and center, and it gets you to reflect on how you got where you were going rather than the endpoint.
This Fellow Right Here points out another conversation Prey’s ending digs into:
I think the twist is also meant to invoke the usual debate about stories and empathy. A lot of people talk about how stories help put us in other peoples’ shoes, how reading stories about people from other cultures helps us understand them better, etc. And in this case, the twist is that we are literally invoking the power of stories to build empathy and understanding (via sci-fi super-science). The Typhon you play was made to believe he was Morgan, so that the Typhon’s emotional horizons are expanded.