Prey
There is a neatness to Prey that is really impressive. The opening is a masterpiece in itself, immediately drawing you into the rude awakening and throws you the first surprise just after the short opening. Plenty of games have used amnesia and in medias res for openings, and Prey did hint about it in the trailers, but it does not dwell on it. Rather than dwell on the mysteries of what happened, Prey reveals what happened fairly quickly and makes the quest all about figuring out why. I’m not usually swayed by moral ambiguity in videogame stories, but Prey delivers just enough background to keep it interesting without revealing so much that the answers become obvious. Whatever shortcomings the game has otherwise, the story will happily compensate for.
Not that there’s a lot of shortcomings, mind. Prey controls well, gives you a reasonable amount of freedom in choosing your own path and rewards caution and attentiveness. If anything, the game contains remarkably little actual character progression for a game with so much exploration, the lack of resources make sure even early game enemies never stop being an annoyance and the constant respawning makes backtracking an adventure in itself. It feels like an intended nod to System Shock, but it makes exploration tedious and since the game is always very clear on what will advance the story it almost feels like it is punishing you for being thorough.
Still, it’s not that Prey ever gets bad, only occasionally slightly repetitive. And that can itself be chalked up to ludonarrative dissonance at worst. Prey really is a neat game.
Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd
Trails 3 feels like fanservice – a way to expand on the stories and backstories of the characters in the first two chapters without having to produce too much new content or influence the world in any significant way. Gameplay-wise it is about as good as the previous games – functional, but not deep or innovative – and it offers a good slew of long flashbacks that are essentially hour-long cutscenes that do nothing but give you exposition on the character backgrounds. Building a game that’s specifically targeted only to the big fans of the previous games is a bit of a gamble though, so it’s nice to see them catering to their community at least.
One interesting part is that while the story doesn’t take center stage, it is in many ways a better story than the first couple of games offered. The main character Kevin has many more things going on than most of the other cast combined, and even though the game is about him overcoming his internal struggles he never comes off as a weak or unlikable character before working through them. It is an uncharacteristically human portrayal that shows that even characters that seem to have it together can have inner demons, and even though there are a bit too much magical mystery in his background story for it to become intriguing the resolution leads to more subtle and mature changes in his manners. It could well have been a bigger part of the game, but on the other hand it is difficult to say if it had worked as well had it been fleshed out more.
I have grown somewhat fond of the Trails series at this point, but after spending 130+ hours in the games it is difficult to tell how much of that is due to quality and how much is Stockholm syndrome. The series starts out with a cast of characters that are mostly comic relief goons or tortured loners with a dark past, but fleshes them all out during the game – I don’t know if this makes them better characters or if I’ve just gotten used to them. There is something to be said for knowing your form, and if you know the reader or player is going to be engaged for a considerable amount of time you can allow yourself to have characters that are initially unlikable – I think there are games that take advantage of this better than the Trails series, but if anything Trails in the Sky 3 shows that banking on familiarity is not necessarily a bad thing.