Why Prey Is The Best Game I’ve Played In A Year

So here’s the moment when I knew I loved Prey:

I had just retrieved a plot-specific piece of data from deep within a gravity-free core, fighting my way out of a computerized library overtaken by alien horrors.  I emerged from the library into an open space, then braced myself for the inevitable boss fight that had been triggered when I got the plot-specific piece of data –

– and there was nothing.

And that’s when I realized: This game did not give a shit about my existence.  It was not here to provide me with a roller-coaster thrill ride of canned events driven by my magnificent activity – if I’d wanted to, I could have broken sequence to slip into this data core at any time and grab the information before the plot asked me to.  There were no artificial walls stopping me from coming here, no implacable monsters placed to block me from coming here – this library was merely one of many locations on the ship for me to explore, to survive, to investigate.

The monsters were there, sure, but they didn’t really care about me.

The ship clearly had had its own existence before I arrived, judging from the crew logs and the named dead and the very specific agendas each ship section was designed to carry out – and if I didn’t propel the plot forward, it would deteriorate without me.

I was not central here.  I was, literally, dropped into the middle of a living breathing environment, where I could affect it, but the ship was not revolving around my presence.

There would be no boss fights because that wasn’t the point of this. Boss fights only exist when the narrative agrees that the player is important that they need a challenge here.  And Prey was indifferent to me.

Which was so goddamned satisfying.

I can see why Prey struggled in terms of sales, because most games these days are power fantasies – even if you’re skulking about as a thief, you’re a legendary thief.  The whole point is to make you the center of everyone’s existence, and as you progress through the competency curve you become increasingly renowned.

Prey, however, has a vast and well-designed ship that feels like it was designed for a crew of scientists – the cafeterias, the air filtration systems, the gyms, the cargo bays.  And unlike most games, which covertly design their levels to suit your powers, Prey’s levels support a genuine variety of approaches – if you’ve put your points into being super-strong you can lift that fridge and enter the room, or you if you’ve chosen electronics then you can hack the door on the opposite side, or if you’ve chosen alien powers you can turn into a coffee cup and roll under the door, or you can use the GLOO gun to make a walkway up to the top…

Prey is one of those games where it’s almost impossible to write a walkthrough, because it’s been out for a year and players are still finding new ways to access areas.   There’s not a way to get to a place, there’s usually at least ten ways – because the game is genuinely open-ended.

It’s also really, really fatal.

In the beginning, you’ll die and die a lot, because again, the game is indifferent to your existence.  There are monsters, and if you try to take them on without strategies, they will kill you.  As you gain more powers and skill you learn to handle them better, but that’s entirely up to you – the monsters stay pretty much the same.  (Though the one nod is that as you progress the plot, worse monsters do arrive.)

Prey is, if anything, the opposite of a power trip.  The plot tells you that you’re important, but the game itself informs you repeatedly that nothing you do is that special – if you feel the flush of triumph of getting somewhere, well, there was another way to get there.  Beat a monster?  Well, it wasn’t there for you to beat.  Accidentally nabbed a plot-specific piece of data before the game asked you to get it?  Well, the plot isn’t going to collapse if you sequence break.

Which, if you’re of my mindset, makes Prey awesome.

Because when you win, it wasn’t because you figured out what the game wanted you to do.  There’s so many boss battles where the solution is “align yourself with the designers’ way of thinking” – which can get frustrating if you don’t think like them, leading to eventually looking the solution up on the Internet because there’s one way to do it and you don’t know.

Prey is nigh-infinite flexibility.  When you discover a solution, maybe that’s not the only way to do it but it’s the way you thought of it, and it’s equally valid.  Your triumph is solely due to you.

And Prey is also a game that rewards paying attention to its environment – mandates it, in fact, because one of the mainstay enemies is The Mimic, a small creature which sneaks away when you’re not looking and morphs into a copy of something nearby.  Hey, that’s a single-person table, there are two chairs there, that’s odd and WHOOMP a mimic is eating your face.

The more you go through Prey, the more you start to realize that everything fits together.  Yes, the security office certainly should have a few spare rounds cached somewhere, and in fact it does.  The lab center where they store precious materials should have a few loose materials that rolled underneath the platform, and it does.  The safe’s combination has been erased from the whiteboard, but if you look at the old security tapes you should see it, and you do.

The point is not to beat the monsters, but to understand how people lived here.

Which, in turn, makes it feel like people lived here.

Which, in turn, makes it feel like increasingly more of a tragedy as you come across the corpses, each named, each destroyed by this alien infestation.

So for me, Prey felt like I was creeping through two great clashing forces, genuinely trying to survive.  There wasn’t hand-holding, there wasn’t a significant difficulty curve – a monster is a monster is a monster – there weren’t boss fights to test my mettle.  There was merely scavenging and being wise and feeling genuinely smart because I could think “Hey, what if I try this?” and generally if it was reasonable there was a way to do it.

I loved Prey.  I wish it had done better.  But that’s the tragedy of fandoms, sometimes: you find something that feels custom-made for you, and it turns out there’s not enough of you out there to make it a profitable franchise.

Still.  If Prey sounded good to you, maybe it’s made for you too.  Check it out.

I Can’t Remember If I’ve Told You About Flaming Dave, But If Not, Here We Go Again

Let me make this clear: Flaming Dave was very straight, insofar as I knew, and not called “Flaming Dave” when I first met him. He was a refrigerator-sized wall of meat, as befitted his position as a college quarterback.

Now, if you’re asking, “How the hell did Ferrett know a quarterback?”, you’re on the right track. I was a weedly nerd in college as you’d expect, but for some reason they put me on the football team dorm room. So at night, I’d continually be walking past behemoth frat pledges doing shots and wrestling and discussing sports.

It was a pretty lonely year.

But Dave – soon to be known as Flaming Dave – was nice to me. He had hidden depths, occasionally asking about the books I was reading, making small talk on the elevator. He seemed a kind fellow, and I thought well of him.

Then one day, after returning from a long weekend away, I saw Dave in the elevator.

His cheeks and lips were covered in blisters.

And not fresh blisters, either. Stubble had sprouted like weeds in between the bulbous outgrowths. He clenched his fists, trying not to itch his wounds.

“Dude, what happened?” I asked, appropriately distraught.

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“It looks serious! How did you injure yourself so grievously?” I cried.

“I. Don’t. Wanna. Talk. About It.”

So of course, the moment I disengaged from Dave, I asked his friends – who were thrilled to be able to tell this story again.

And apparently, the tale was this: Last week, Dave and his buddies had stayed up late doing flaming shots. You might think this unwise, but they’d already done enough non-flaming shots that frankly, almost anything seemed like a good idea at this point.

And Dave… missed.

He splashed flaming Bacardi 151 all down his cheek.

And was drunk enough that he did not notice.

No, Dave – then a very flaming Dave – sat there contentedly as the flames consumed his flesh, savoring the taste of his beverage with a cryptic smile.

“Dude!” One of his friends cried. “Your face is on fire!”

“Mmm-hmm,” Dave said, astoundingly mellow for a man currently ablaze.

“No! Dave! Your face! It is on fire!”

“Yup,” Dave agreed merrily, the sizzle and pop beginning to permeate the room.

His friend, even as inebriated as he was, realized this was the time for action. He leapt from his seat, slapping the flames on Dave’s face –

And Flaming Dave decked him. One roundhouse punch knocked his rescuer out in one mighty blow – for, as previously noted, Dave was a muscular wall of meat.

Dave, furious that someone had dared attack him while he was lounging so happily, glared around the room, face engulfed in burning rum. “WHO ELSE WANTS SOME?” he thundered, as the blisters rose and rose.

They tackled him to the floor to put him out, of course, but by then he was – and would forever be – Flaming Dave.

So Why Not Share A Picture Of My New, More-Muscled Body?

“When I get to a year in the gym, I’m gonna take a picture of me shirtless and post it for the world,” I said.

That thought kept me going some days. Because if you’re a fat kid, particularly a guy, you understand the shame of going shirtless – days at the pool where you wore a shirt “because you didn’t want to get sunburned,” summer nights out where you sweated your pits through because revealing those man-tits could expose you to ridicule.

Some day, I thought when I was bulling my way through just one more set of weights, I’ll post a picture of me and my abs.

Yet as the day got closer, the urge faded.

Part of it was because, as I described yesterday, all the photos I was taking of myself felt like vanity. If I compared the shirtless photo I took today to the one I took a month ago, was there really a difference? Was I just endlessly focusing on a body that was mostly the same, requiring my lovers to stroke my ego?

(Judging from the way some of my flirtations stopped responding to the photos, I’m pretty sure I was. Or maybe they just got busy. We read our own stories into the gaps, and not all of them are accurate.)

Then there was the impact, man. I only got to reveal my New Shirtless Self once, after which it became, you know, just who Ferrett is. (Kind of like a debut novel gets all the PR, after which it’s a struggle to get the same heat on for, say, a follow-up novel.)

And when I took pictures of me, I didn’t really feel my bathroom selfies reflected the changes. The strong ripples of my lats looked like smudges; the framing of my abdomen could have been a stray shadow. And as usual, the man-tits consumed all.

The improvements were there, but I wasn’t capturing them, and while I love my wife you don’t want her to take pictures.

Maybe I should hire a professional to take shots of me?

Wait, isn’t that more ego?

And if I was going to hire a pro, shouldn’t I wait until I had, you know, the body I was aiming for instead of chronicling this soft waypoint?

Which was weird, because I’ll tell women, “Hey, you’re attractive, just own it.” And I know damn well there’s plenty of women who actually want dudes with a bit of belly to them, that the dad-bod fetish is very real. It’s not like who I am is entirely unattractive, and if someone finds my meat-sack repulsive, well, fuck ’em, I worked hard to get here.

Yet the more I thought about it, the more I spiraled into this weird cycle where it felt too egotistic to get the photo I wanted, yet if I was going to be that egotistic then I should represent more fitness than I was, and what the hell was I doing?

But the truth is, if I’m gonna eventually show some skin, I do want it to be more than “Ferrett snapping shots in the bathroom.” I want someone good with photos to take a picture that kind of shows who I am, as opposed to me dorking around. Because if I’m going to expose myself to ridicule – because I know dragging my mild audience around, I’ll get a few folks sneering that yeah, this isn’t anything to brag about – then I at least want it to be for the proper reasons.

And it’s weird, because honestly, I promote body positivity. But I think one of the things that confuses the Internet is that everyone falls short of the ideals they promote from time to time. You have good intentions, but that assumption that good intentions invariably get spun into good outcomes is, well, a little simplistic.

If I was as good as I claimed, I’d probably have posted a shot already, wouldn’t need the rigamarole to get this party started. But I do. And if that’s what I need, well, eventually I’ll find someone I trust to take the kinds of photos that showcase me in the way I want to be showcased.

So I’m skinnier. I’m healthier. I have baby abs, and baby lats. And eventually I’ll show you, but I wanna show it to you in a way that feels like it looks normally, not the imperfect chemistry of squirming around trying to selfie a torso.

The process is imperfect. Like me, physically and mentally. But that’s okay. Like everything else, I’ll get there. Eventually.

A Year And A Week Of Personal Training

About a year ago, our daughter revealed she was having nightmares about our funerals.  We were out of shape, and didn’t seem to be doing much to fix that; we’d both had heart problems.  She was panicking, because she was going to lose her beloved Mom and stepdad, and they were old and set in their ways.

“I mean, I’d go to the gym, except I don’t know what I’m doing.  And your Mom needs a cheerleading section, and I’m not that.” 

“So get a personal trainer?” she suggested. 

“We’re not rich, sweetie,” I told her.  “I can’t afford a personal trainer.” 

“I did.” 

“…what?”  

“I got one.  To help me out during a rough patch.”  

I pondered.  When I was growing up, hiring a personal trainer was something only the richest of the rich did.  But apparently, according to my daughter, personal trainers were kind of ubiquitous now, like Uber drivers.  You could get them at affordable rates.  

“Lemme look into it,” I said. 

————————–

“Hi,” I said.  “I need a personal trainer who can train both my wife and I simultaneously.” 

“We do separate appointments,” they told me.

“No, that won’t work, because then we’ll skip out.  Gini and I have to do it together, so we’ll guilt each other into going.” 

“Well… maybe we could accommodate that, for a fee – ”

“Oh, and we’re both heart patients.” 

*click* 

But we finally did find one place – Fitness Evolution – that agreed to take us on.  It was not a comfortable place – it had that gym atmosphere, people in shorts who were way more muscular than I was, people discussing supplements, folks who moved with a practiced grace between complex pieces of equipment. 

I remember saying to Gini, “I know you wanted to sign up for a month, but we have to do three months.  That’s long enough to make a life change.”

“It’s expensive.” 

“And if it saves our lives?”  

She sighed.  “…okay.”

But signing up for three months felt like joining the army – a stint that would last forever.

——————

The first day, my trainer called the other trainer over for a consultation. 

“Look how he stands,” she whispered in horror.  I didn’t understand what she meant, but now I do – my feet were splayed out, my spine hunched, my knees locked.  “We have to work on that.”  

Instead of working out on my first day, she rushed me in back like I was a cardiac patient and began squeezing me into position, a painful process I was then aware was called “body work.”  

I failed standing, I thought.  On my first day.  But at least this can’t get any worse. 

After the body work was over, she had me do some stretches.  Then she called the other trainer over again. 

“Look at how he breathes,” she whispered, and I realize that yes, things could get worse. 

—————-

The trainers were cruel in odd ways. I thought they’d push me until I either wept, or threw up, or both.  But they told me to work until I was unable to maintain the proper positioning, then stop – which was useful, as before I’d work out until my muscles absolutely failed.  

They were cruel because they never hit me where I expected it. 

I had good biceps, and great quads, so of course they avoided those.  Instead, they focused on tiny muscles I never knew I had – the muscles between my shoulderblades.  The muscles anchoring my hips to my legs.  The muscles in the arches of my feet.  

It wasn’t strength training, it was rehabilitative training.  “You can’t lift weights yet,” they said.  “You’d hurt yourself.  We gotta get your core up.”  

I wanted Wolverine-buff abs, and here they were working on the range of motion of my shoulders.  Parts of me ached that I didn’t know could ache.  “I didn’t have these muscles before you got here!” I cried, complaining about these mysterious “lats” they’d discovered.  “And I’m never gonna use ’em!”  

“We’ll see,” they said.

——————

“You’re taller,” people said, repeatedly.  Which was true.  After a few months, all those tiny exercises had pulled me into position, hoisted my spine tighter, got my legs aligned.  I’d gained two inches.  

But I had to keep shuffling my feet to do it.  It wasn’t natural.  I’d stand slumped, then remember to put weight on my heels.  I’d breathe in to the bottom of my lungs.  

Everything was in flux.  

But the compliments got us to sign up for another three months.  

——————-

“You must feel great,” people told me, and no, I didn’t.  Despite my daughter’s fears, I was healthy enough for my previous lifestyle – I could walk the dog around the block twice a day, lift furniture when I had to.  My cardiologist thought I was in fine shape.  

Now I ached all the time, because I was forever recovering from yesterday.  My body was nothing but twinges.  

For some reason, I thought if you worked out, you’d get to a plateau where you’d just coast on your old fitness – where it didn’t burn or hurt.  But no.  They just make it harder, all the time, so you’re always a little sore the next day.  

The trick, I learned, was just getting used to being forever uncomfortable.  

——————-

Going to the gym three times a week was weird, because I’d never been a gym guy.  I crept around the space like a spy, never sure what to do with these barbells, keeping a wary distance from these healthy folks with their bulging muscles.  

I looked as gangly as I felt.  

I made Rachel, my trainer, get all the equipment for me, because I was afraid to touch it.  Not that I’d break it, but… I wasn’t qualified to work gym equipment. I’d probably screw something up.

But going three times a week became a rhythm to my life.  I got to know the regulars – not like buddies, but in that sense that I knew the other dog-owners in their neighborhoods.  I have no idea whether the guy who owns the white Samoyed votes Republican or is married, but I do know he walks that beautiful dog twice a day because she needs a lot of activity. 

Likewise, I came to know the diets and weak spots of the folks around me, learned which ones bore down and which ones whined (I was a whiner), which ones liked the band exercises and which ones wanted stretches.

(Not squats.  Everybody hates squats.)  

Eventually, I felt the anxiety dissipate as this became part of my routine.  I knew how to set the machinery to work for me, fathomed which exercises activated which muscles.  

And one day, Gini called in sick.  “Go without me,” she said.  And so, solo, I went to train with Rachel. 

“I’m surprised you made it,” she said pleasantly.  “I thought if Gini took a day off, you’d take the excuse.” 

And I thought of my social anxiety, how I’d hate sweating in front of strangers. All my former terror.  Then I pondered thought of how I’d gained a foothold here – yes, there were still people I didn’t know showing up, but this was in part my space and I didn’t feel nearly as foolish clomping about.

“I would have a few months ago,” I admitted.  “But now things are different.”  

“Attaboy.  Let’s get to work.”  

——————–

My lovers noted my body’s changing.  I didn’t quite have a six-pack, but I’d acquired enough definition that I looked like a guy working towards a six-pack.  Sometimes, in bed, they’d frown and ponder the difference. 

I even got the “You’re still gonna love me, even though I’m the same, right?” a few times.  

I became more willing to send out photos of my body, and then less.  Because eventually, it felt vain, continually sending variants on the same shirtless pose, the one that kinda-showed off my lats.  And I wondered if my sweeties were thinking, “Oh, God, it looks the same as the last one.”  

Because this had never been about quick change.  This is stop-motion change, little alterations that pile up over time, so incremental you question their existence until you run into someone you hadn’t seen in a while.  “Your arms,” a friend stammered.  “They’re really… yeah.” 

They weren’t really yeah, but they were definitely more yeah than they’d been when I’d last shaken hands with him a year ago.

This was a slow journey to yeah.  

——————–

It’s a year now, and I look back at old photographs of me, slumping forward.  I literally don’t know how I stood like that.  

Because in the last few months, it’s not only my spine that holds me up, but my belly.  If I relax, I can feel my lats and obliques tugging me into place.  I joked with Rachel that those muscles hadn’t existed before she made me work them, but the truth is they’d been dormant – now they’re awake, and actively participating in my body, which is a bit unsettling at times.

Because that means I didn’t know my body at all before.  Which I should have; I lived in that fucker for forty-eight years.  But now I’m being shown new things that it can do, baseline functions I’d somehow functioned without, and if that’s the case then what do I really know?  

Rachel smirks sometimes.  I think she knows.  But she can’t tell me until my body knows first.  

——————–

Last thing:  “Let’s do the inverted pull-up,” she said. 

The inverted pull-up consisted of stepping on a bench, grabbing the bar, and seeing how slowly I could lower myself to the ground.  

The answer: I plunged straight down.  My arms sucked.  

But after a bit, I began to lower myself slowly – all my muscles working in conjunction.  This was a combo platter of lats and biceps and triceps and stomach muscles.  

And I realized: After a year, we were working up to pull-ups.  We were finally getting around to actual weightlifting, because I’d gotten there.  

It had been a year, and I had become somewhat of a gym rat.  I can’t say that I’d crave this if we couldn’t afford it any more.  But I can say that I don’t mind it any more, which is a huge change in and of itself.  

We signed up for another year – a whole year’s commitment at once, which helped lower the price.  And frankly, if that lets us live another couple of years, well, think of it as paying rent on our bodies.  

I’m more fit than I need to be, probably.  I am way overqualified to walk the dog.  And truth is, outside the gym, I don’t have much need for pull-ups or bench-press strength.

But my daughter doesn’t have nightmares any more.  More important, I think she feels that we’ll listen to her if it’s important enough.

Old dog, new tricks.  

Let’s see what the next year brings. 

It’s Not My Job To Fix Your Insecurity.

At this point, I can tell whether it’s going to work out with a new lover based on how they phrase their concerns. If it’s “That made me feel insecure,” well, we’ve got a good foundation to work on.

If it’s “You made me feel insecure,” we’re probably doomed.

Because polyamory is filled with so many kinds of insecurities, it’s hard to avoid them unless you’re either preternaturally self-confident or so detached from your partners that you’re stepping into psychopath town – and that’s not most folks. Most polyamorous relationships have that little sting of concern to them: that fear whether you’ll still be desired in the same way when they come back from a new date. That discomfort when you discover that thing you thought was Your Ritual turns out to be something they do with everybody. That hesitation as you wonder whether that’s harmless flirting or something deeper forming, and should they have told you if it’s getting serious?

But let’s be honest here: As much as I’d like to be Fix-It Felix, darting around with my golden hammer to whack away your insecurities, I’ve discovered that doesn’t work.

You gotta own your own insecurities for polyamory to work.

Because there’s a subtle difference between “That made me feel insecure” and “You made me feel insecure.” “You made me feel insecure” implies that:

a) I did something wrong, and;
b) If I just fine-tuned my behavior properly, you wouldn’t feel insecure.

But the truth is, in polyamory, quite often someone did nothing wrong to trigger someone’s insecurity! Sometimes what I perceived as heavy flirting was just, you know, how they talk to people at parties. (I’ve got a couple of Italian friends who touch my knee and lean in close all the damn time, and I have to remind myself, “Nope, that’s just how Angela is.”) Sometimes that emotional valence you’ve attached to “Watching The Crown together” is so internalized that you’d never bothered to discuss it, and so your partner had no way of knowing that introducing Ian to this show you love felt like a betrayal.

And sometimes, insecurities trigger even when people are acting within the proper boundaries. Like I said, I’ve told my partners “Absolutely, go on dates!” But they go, and I feel like a forlorn dog looking out the window as their owner leaves for work, convinced ZOMG THEY’RE NEVER COMING BACK.

In that case, the person didn’t make me feel insecure. The situation did. Saying “You” made me feel insecure is an avalanche of tiny assumptions that usually add up to “If you just acted better, I wouldn’t feel this way.”

And I’m sorry. That’s not true. Because as someone who’s struggled with lifelong anxiety, I can tell you that my wife and my lovers have often been beautifully supportive to me, and I still questioned my own worth. Implying, even with the subtleness of a single word, that somehow they inflicted this upon me consciously, would be doing a great disservice to the immense love they felt for me.

Sometimes, I have to look around and ask, “So is this something I should fix, or is this a discomfort I should learn to accept as a part of this relationship?” And more often than not – for me, as someone prone to depression and anxiety – I discover that a lot of what’s making me uncomfortable is, well, me. Specifically, the fact that I can’t ever really believe that anyone would voluntarily stay with a mess like me.

They didn’t make me feel insecure. I had insecurities, and a situation jabbed into those insecurities.

I was a participant in my own hurt, whether I intended to be or not – and if I can hurt myself without meaning to, isn’t it possible that they can hurt me without meaning to either?

But even more:

I’ve found that the people who say “You made me feel insecure” are, more often than not, the last ones to break up.

Now, this isn’t as guaranteed a bond, but… when people say “You made me feel insecure,” that puts the onus on me to get better so the insecurity goes away. If I tell them I mean well, then they’ll stay no matter how mismatched we are, because to them, if I made them feel insecure, and I didn’t mean to, then clearly it’s a question of refining my behavior.

And in my experience, that means they’ll continually hammer away on me, enduring all the hurt that they believe I do to them, and because it’s entirely about fixing me, they never ask about themselves.

Whereas the people who’ve said, “That made me feel insecure” distance their discomfort from my intentions. It doesn’t matter whether I meant to make them insecure by not texting them “Goodnight” before I went to bed – it’s something they need to function in a long-distance relationship, and I’m not providing it. And what ultimately matters for them is not my intent – because maybe I’m forgetful, or maybe I just fall asleep without warning – but, rather, that my actions are insufficient for what they require to maintain happiness.

You might think it’d be easier to break up if you believe someone made you insecure – but then you get their actions entangled with their intent, which usually leads to an endless series of second chances and resentment.

Whereas what I’ve found is that people who separate those issues are more clinical. Maybe I didn’t intend to trigger someone’s insecurity by continuing to search for new partners after I started dating them – but they realize that I’m not making them insecure, it’s that for them, they need a polyamorous partner who’s not quite so tomcatty. And they’ll decide that regardless of how I intended to make them feel, the relationship we can actually have will make them miserable, and so…

Splitsville.

This is generalized, of course. There are always exceptions. But looking back, for me, the exes I tend to be on the best terms with, and the relationships that turned out to be the most fulfilling even if they didn’t last, were the ones where people didn’t link their own discomfort exclusively with my actions. I certainly did things that made them uncomfortable – just as they did with me.

But in the end, it wasn’t up to me to make them feel secure. It was up to them to communicate their intentions clearly with me, to tell me what would or would not work with their own personal fears, and to decide whether I was someone who was ultimately good for them.

Because in my experience, when someone says “You made me feel insecure,” that all too often means that I’m at fault if the relationship doesn’t make them happy. And sometimes, broken relationships aren’t anyone’s fault. Human beings are complex, and sometimes you wind up in a situation where the only way you can stay together is for you both to lop off enough parts of your personality until you’re squatting in a narrow, bloodied circle of pure Lowest Common Denominator.

I’ve got some stellar exes. The way we interacted made me feel really insecure, and I couldn’t handle that. That doesn’t mean they’re bad people; just bad for me in a romantic relationship.

They couldn’t fix me. But I mean, hell, I’ve been trying to fix myself for almost forty-plus years now and still haven’t managed it, so how unfair would it be to think they could do it, y’know?

Why Vampyr Is The Worst Game I’ve Ever Finished.

I hated Vampyr. I mean, like actively loathed it.  I wound up beating the game on its hardest difficulty, despising every additional minute I spent with it, just to show it that I wasn’t quitting because I was bad at the game, I was quitting because it sucked.

But you know the worst part about Vampyr?  You could see the goodness bubbling underneath the surface.  With some additional experience on the developers’ part, this could have been a game I loved.  My hatred sprung from a visceral understanding that this roleplaying game with elaborately-scripted characters was meant for people like me, that I was in fact its target audience, and yet with every aspect it was distorting the things I wanted to adore about it into a tedious grindfest.

After all, I don’t hate most games.  I go, “Meh,” wander off after an hour or two.  This is a hobby.  Lots of games don’t do it for me.  Indifference is a sane reaction.

But Vampyr made big promises – you’re a British vampire during the influenza epidemic in World War I! Now, that’s a great setup.  And as a bloodthirsty vampire, you’ll get to know your victims intimately – each person in this disease-stricken London is a fully-fledged character, with hopes and dreams!  Should you decide to murder someone for the power in their blood, you’ll have to live with the fact that their death may affect the other people you have come to care about.

Yet the game will be difficult if you don’t feast.  You won’t get the XP you need unless you feed on someone.  Do you have what it takes to be a pacifist vampire?  And if not, who will you slaughter for your selfish gain?

Great setup.

Poor (m’haw) execution.

Because while the characters are well-written insofar as they go, they’re also really static.  Each character is about seven to ten spokes on a conversational hub, with some aspects of their conversation tree locked off until you discover secrets about them that make them open up.

They also never change over the course of the game.

So what actually happens when you get to the flu hospital after an hour or two is that you discover an exciting cast of doctors, nurses, and patients, and say “TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR CONDITION” about sixty times, and then run out of things to talk about for the rest of the game.  As the situation in London worsens, nobody has any new adventures or reactions or revelations – which means that if you’ve talked with them all early on, about twenty hours later they’re exactly the same, which highlights them as the mindless quest-givers that they are.

The only way to get them to open up after you’ve talked to everyone is to stumble across letters left in obscure areas of the map, at which point you can bring up another conversational spoke.  Which doesn’t feel like an adequate reward.  You’ve murdered your way across London, leaving a trail of dead bodies through plague-stricken apartments to find a ragged note in a locked safe, and all you get is four more sentences?

“But wait, Ferrett!” you say.  “I thought you were trying to be a pacifist vampire!  Aren’t you specifically not killing anyone?”  And that’s another problem with Vampyr – when they say “Don’t kill anyone,” what they mean is “Don’t kill any of the characters we have arbitrarily marked as having personalities.”  Because during the course of the game you’re obliged to kill about a thousand vampire hunters, who swarm out of the woodwork relentlessly, none of whom apparently had hopes or aspirations.  It’s fine to eviscerate these faceless goons by the bucketload, and in fact annihilating anonymous peasants is the only other way you can get XP, albeit trivial portions of it.

Which might be an interesting moral dilemma – okay, the people you can talk to are nice people, worthy of protection, and the vampire hunters are all bastards, right?

Well, no.  At least one of the named citizens you talk to is a serial killer.  One’s an unrepentant murderer.  Another is a landlord who’s extorting his renters for sex.  And keep in mind, the game specifically asks, “Do you have the moral courage to play the game on its hardest mode?  Can you the player starve yourself of the XP you’d get from eating fully-fledged citizens to achieve victory on the hardest mode?”

Yet the people you’re actually chastised for killing in-game are actually worse than these poor local boys who said, “Golly, these vampires murder people, I don’t want them in my neighborhood.  I’ll get out my shotgun.”  (And yes. You only get the good ending – the one where your character ends up happy – if you abstain from named murders.)

So basically, Vampyr participates in a weird colonialism, where it’s okay to kill seven hundred people as long as they’re no one you sat down for a drink with.

I would have adored this game if it had actually presented you with moral choices by not enforcing explicit outcomes!  It would have been a fascinating balance to make – “Gosh, the game is hard, and I need the XP, and nobody will miss this landlord.”  And you got to make your own judgments about who deserved life and death, and then saw the effects on the neighborhood as that death affected the people around them.

If the game hadn’t made a decision on what the good path was, I would have had to live with my own outcomes.

But no.  The story says that killing anyone – well, anyone named – is Bad, and you will be Punished for that decision as a Murderer.  Whereas I was a Good person, and got the Good ending where my vampire was happy, and only at the cost of filling up four morgues full of people whose main crime was thinking that a vampire might be a hazard to their home town.

The “moral” choice is worse than no choice at all.

And remember, the characters stop being characters after a set point in the story.  You exhaust their conversational options, and they turn into repeating squawkboxes.  After twenty hours, I tried to remember that they were supposed to be human beings, but there was nothing new to be done with them.  They didn’t want anything else, they didn’t react to the deteriorating conditions, there were no new quests they could give, they were just… there.

I’m told they do react if you start killing people, but remember, the game explicitly poses the challenge to you of whether you can play pacifist.  And if you take that unique choice, they’re boring.

I imagined a game, a better game, where the characters didn’t just wander endlessly through the same halls through the game.  Where new conversational trees unlocked as the game went on, where they said, “Gosh, the hospital has been invaded by an army of angry militia, I’m changing my attitude!”  And maybe they would need reassurance or help or had to be talked out of getting revenge.

But that was not this game.

And if the core gameplay loop was good, I could forgive it, but Vampyr oscillated between “crushingly difficult” and “tediously numb.”  You’ll run into the same five enemy sets throughout the game, and the same strategies work on most of them.  So you arm yourself with your weaponset and have the same dull battle a hundred times.

(Not to mention most of the best powers are static ones – more damage, more health, more healing – so levelling up largely feels unexciting.)

But for the boss combats, the camera is in tight – and the worst bosses spam the area with blooming area effects that you can’t see until you back into them, so you’re faced with the choice of “know where the boss is, or know where you’re retreating to.”  That turns a lot of boss combats into luck-based missions where you hope she doesn’t plant the exploding blood-roses behind you.

Which is also a weird reality-breaking issue, because there’s no save system in Vampyr – the game saves for you, and you can’t return to an earlier save if you regret eating that guy or making that decision.  That would be good, except the game also doesn’t acknowledge the save system – if you die, you reform out of a cloud of ashes and then go back to fight the boss with all your former inventory depleted.  Time has clearly passed, but the characters have not moved except for you.

This decision makes the world feel even more artificial.  The characters, as noted, have the same conversations with you throughout the game.  And after you’ve reformed, the bosses just stand there, stoically, waiting for you to arrive.  When you reform, the same damn ghouls – sorry, “Skals” – will be waiting in the same damn group in the same damn place.

It doesn’t feel like a living world.  It feels like a setpiece, and not a particularly good one.

And alas, the lead character’s a bit of snore, too.  It took me a while to realize that I was supposedly falling in love with the other lead female character – if there’s an opposite to chemistry, they have it – and I had no choice in that matter.

So the game wanted me to make Bold Decisions about Morality, yet shoehorned me into a singular plot where I got to make no significant choices.

Admittedly, that’s because I went for Pacifist run.  The game challenged me to git gud, and I got gud, and I beat it to prove that I wasn’t terrible at the game, the game was terrible.  And when I got to the end, there was another hour of exposition dump afterwards to explain things that could have been explained by dynamic characters in-game.

I don’t hate most games.  I get bored, and walk away.  But Vampyr was so close to what I wanted on literally every level that I felt the game designers wanted exactly what I wanted from a game – and then had no idea how to implement it competently.  There were ways to do this game so it would have become what they wanted.

But what I interfaced with was a game that consistently thwarted its own magnificent dreams.  I felt this game should have been better.  I was rooting for it, and watched it sabotage itself.  And now, alas, it’s returned to GameStop for credit, because I won’t be going back.

Later in  the week, I’ll talk about a game that was good: Prey.  My God, Prey was flawed, but what it executed well,it executed better than any other game out this generation.

More on that later.