The promo, which you can watch above, wastes no time introducing Amber Midthunder as Naru, a warrior whose skills are put to the ultimate test when her tribe becomes the target of a highly evolved alien being. As the clip spells out, Naru and those closest to her may “hunt to live”, but this thing “lives to hunt” – and it’s going to stop at nothing until it’s extinguished every last one of them. 

At over two minutes, the teaser is a little on the lengthy side, but it makes sure not to overexpose viewers to the Predator. Much like director Dan Trachtenberg’s previous work 10 Cloverfield Lane, it keeps the threat invisible for as long as possible, as it makes light work of dispatching a bear out of frame and stalks Amber and a friend in some tall grass. Oh, the tension is palpable!

“Whatever did this… I can kill it,” Naru confidently states, seconds after a montage of action shots displays how easily the Predator can off a human. Heck, if it bleeds and all that…

Set 300 years ago, in the world of the Comanche Nation, Prey, previously titled Skulls, marks the seventh installment in the franchise, which kickstarted in 1987 with the film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Shane Black, and Kevin Peter Hall. Stormee Kipp, Julian Black Antelope, Michelle Thrush, and Dakota Beavers also feature in the new take.

“It’s [about] the ingenuity of a human being who won’t give up, who’s able to observe and interpret, basically being able to beat a stronger, more powerful, well-armed force,” producer John Davis has previously said of the prequel.

Prey arrives on Disney Plus this August 5 in the UK, and the same date but on Hulu in the US. In the meantime, check out our roundup of 2022’s biggest upcoming movie release dates for everything else coming this year. 

The post Predator prequel Prey promises a battle between hunters in wild first trailer appeared first on Game News.

Human Head is probably best known as the creator of the original Prey – not to be confused with the 2017 reboot by Dishonored developer Arkane – as well as the Rune series. It also played a support role on several games, contributing art for Just Cause 3, Wii U port support for Batman: Arkham Origins, and everything from combat to level design assets for BioShock: Infinite, among other things. As it happens, Human Head was also tapped by Square Enix for The Quiet Man, which proved to be a once-in-a-generation trainwreck (opens in new tab). The studio’s most recent game, Rune 2 (opens in new tab), was released… yesterday, November 12 on the Epic Games Store (opens in new tab). Huh. That’s quite the turnaround for a sort-of re-opening. 

“Sadly, we had to wind down the business of Human Head Studios and close its doors, which was particularly devastating due to the passion and creativity of the team we’d assembled,” explained Human Head co-founder Chris Rhinehart, who’s now creative director at Roundhouse. “We reached out to our friends at Bethesda for help, and they saw that same creativity and passion in our team. With the formation of Roundhouse Studios, Bethesda offered every employee of Human Head a position at the new company.”

We only have “unannounced projects” to go on, but it’s reasonable to assume Bethesda wants Roundhouse to work on something Prey-shaped. Bethesda acquired the Prey IP in 2009, and in 2011 it announced a sequel coming from Human Head. However, Prey 2 was eventually scrapped and the project was picked up by Arkane, which turned it into the reboot we know today. Last year, prototype footage (opens in new tab) of the cancelled sequel surfaced, and while it’s only a vertical slice, this footage suggests Prey 2 was fairly far along when it got the axe. If Bethesda is planning to get more mileage out of the Prey IP – and that is a big if, to be fair – hiring the creators of the original game under a new development arm would be a tidy way to do it. 

As we said in our Prey 2017 review (opens in new tab), the reboot was worth the wait.  

The post Bethesdas new studio is a reincarnation of Prey developer Human Head appeared first on Game News.

The Talos-1 space station is a remarkable monument to mankind’s inventive streak. Owned by the TranStar corporation, it’s a research facility that creates Neuromods. These gadgets genetically modify their users, allowing them to learn skills in a split second – ice skating, playing the violin, coding, etc. Little do the public know that the key ingredient in Neuromods is an ‘exotic’ material gathered from the Typhon (which are definitely-not-deadly aliens. Nope. No, sir). Kept a secret due to their highly unpredictable nature, it’s not long before the inevitable outbreak occurs. Experimenting with the new Typhon Neuromods that give the user alien abilities, as Morgan Yu you start out as TranStar’s most diligent test subject. Until everything goes to hell. Those who prodded you with needles begin to get consumed by the escaped aliens. Try not to enjoy the sight of them dying too much. 

With well over 50 hours of gameplay at least, death will be a familiar face by the end of your first hour in Prey. Given a wrench to start with (in a nice nod to BioShock and the original Prey), it’s inevitable that you’ll start thwacking inanimate objects in blind paranoia, thinking they’re Mimics. These alien bastards will disguise themselves as mugs, ornaments, pretty much any harmless everyday object. They’re not particularly strong, though, so they’re a mini-jumpscare each time you find one. However, hit one when it’s disguised and the ‘Ha! Got you!’ catharsis is bliss. The real star weapon in Prey is the GLOO Gun, though, which is versatile enough to use as a way to access the out-of-reach sections of Talos-1 (by building a bridge of GLOO bubbles) and then stop a Typhon in its tracks before you murder it to bits with a shotgun. It all makes you feel every inch the ingenious scientist that many emails paint Morgan out to be. Combat feels natural and incredibly freeing, as you can hulk out and chuck tables and chairs around with abandon. Or more agile types can mix in the effortless use of alien powers, tapping the left trigger to cause a wave of thrilling devastation. Prey’s weapons aren’t about upscaling to a new, shinier type. They’re about finding the perfect tactic for each enemy, but having improvisation waiting in the wings as your deadliest weapon. When you meet new enemies, that’s when your instincts take over and you use Prey’s weapons inventively. Panic and paranoia, oddly, will help you most. Give in to them. 

Jazz up your gun

How to get Prey’s Golden Gun (opens in new tab)

Think of the Mimics as stepping stones to the lurching other types of Typhon. You won’t know what they are at first. Seeing ‘???’ above the head of an enemy instead of a name is a smart, fitting way to introduce new foes – you work in a research facility, so ignorance is by far your greatest weakness. Those question marks never stop being unsettling. Proving how unknowable the Typhon fundamentally are, being attacked by unnamed enemies means that eventually getting your hands on a psychotronic scanner is revolutionary. Suddenly being able to scan creatures to learn their name, weaknesses, as well as research their power, it comes across as exactly the leap in technology that Prey’s backstory paints it to be. With enough research you’re able to steal these alien abilities and use them for yourself. Doing so is an intense high. Each new discovery becomes drenched in intrigue, as underlining every new alien attack that hits you is the smug knowledge that soon it’ll be yours. Despite the admittedly tough difficulty at points even on Normal mode, Prey isn’t scared of making you potentially overpowered with the sheer variety of Typhon skills available. The more you use these powers, the more you understand what makes your enemies tick. Because you’re using them in eerily, worryingly similar ways. 

You see why the Typhon have beaten the humans: they’re simply better. Prey seems to think so too, as human perks are left behind in the wake of all this alien advancement. That’s not just a nod to the corpses strewn around the space station. Although the Typhon perk tree grows bigger with the research you do, the human perk tree stays the same size. There’s no way to expand it, even though you can scan the man-made floating robots and turrets making their way around Talos-1. You’d expect that to give you a couple more buyable skills in the engineering section at least. It comes across as a bit of an oversight, giving the impression that Prey is pushing you towards embracing the alien perks. 

That doesn’t mean humans are treated as props, with their corpses scattered around to look shocking. Each body is named, and (as long as they haven’t had the life pulled out of them by a Typhon) every single face is different. Initially it looks like these might just be randomly-generated names. Brilliantly, they’re not. Reading emails, post-it notes, hearing audio logs, and seeing the names on bedroom doors makes it clear that these people you’ve been stepping over were integral to the ship. Stumbling upon the body of someone you remember reading about is a startling reminder of Talos-1’s casualties. There’s a pang of regret in there too that they didn’t make it. 

It’s not that surprising, though, as the odd unscripted explosion shakes Talos-1 and reminds you that everything is falling apart. Yet the drive to explore pushes you to new areas. Once you’ve cleared out the enemies in these locations Prey becomes practically a walking simulator, allowing you to uncover more of the rich backstory that fleshes out your understanding of Morgan Yu and his/her world. In these moments the environment shines. In-depth sidequests make the rooms and computer terminals strewn with personal effects mean something, and more than make up for the admittedly bare main storyline. Most of them are anchored around the stories of the Talos-1 staff: lovers meeting under a special tree, finding a treasure hunt for tabletop roleplayers, or simply hunting down a stowaway. Coming across as heartfelt rather than sanitised fetch quests, they echo what it must have been like before the Typhon outbreak. Poignancy bleeds into each one as a result: Prey cares a great deal about its human factor. So will you. 

Where the hell is he?

Where to find Josh Dalton in Prey (The Blackbox Project sidequest) (opens in new tab)

Yet you’re still breathing because you’re every inch the survivor Morgan Yu is. The recyclers and fabricators dotted around the station don’t feel contrived at all. Recyclers turn your junk into crafting resources, which fabricators use to create ammo, medkits, or even guns. Their placement makes total sense: recyclers in the staff breakroom for their rubbish, fabricators in the kitchen to create food. It means that it’s easy to predict where you’ll find one, telling you that you’re taking advantage of Talos-1, turning what were basic amenities into crucial survival tools. Plus the actual process of recycling and fabricating is unbelievably satisfying. The noise the blocks make as they tumble out of the recycler, the fact that each one has to be picked up individually and slotted into the fabricator with a weighty click: it feels so damn good. You’ll become conscious that you’re managing your resources with the cold, clinical eye of someone who has no space to spare, and no time to waste. 

Talos-1 isn’t just a location. The space station is a story in itself, with every inch of it marked by the people who used to live and work there. Walking through its corridors and gradually ridding them of the Typhon brings it closer to what it used to be. Weirdly, you wouldn’t belong if everything went back to normal. Because over the course of the game it becomes increasingly impossible to stop thinking with your GLOO Gun and Typhon powers. Prey is a playground for creativity where you control the variables. It’s time to start experimenting. 

The Verdict

4.5

4.5 out of 5

Prey

With a setting that tells a story better than any human voice, Prey’s combat and quests will suck you even deeper into its world.

The post Prey review: “A playground for creativity where you control the variables” appeared first on Game News.

The usual warning applies here: this is a complete speedrun from start to finish, and as such it shows one of Prey’s possible endings. Mostly it just shows the untextured, transparent side of walls though, because this run relies heavily on Prey’s oh-so-exploitable wall glitches.

The kneejerk reaction to a sub-10-minute speedrun for a new (and fully priced) game might be one of derision. But honestly, these people are playing Prey in a very specific, carefully practiced way. Unless you’re interested in speedrunning yourself, you shouldn’t assume it will have much bearing on your experience. If anything, I think it’s complimentary of Arkane Studios’ work that Prey is flexible enough to let you finish the game even when you do so many clearly unexpected things.

If you want to speed up your own Prey playthrough without missing out on all those delicious sidequests, check out our growing series of miniguides:

• Where to find Josh Dalton in Prey (opens in new tab)
• How to get Prey’s maintenance tunnel code (opens in new tab)
• Prey’s The Corpse Vanishes – how to get into the morgue without a keycard (opens in new tab)

The post Prey speedrunner clears the game in under 10 minutes and its glorious appeared first on Game News.

As you can see, there are far more options available to you than just shapeshifting into random environment objects. Try broadening your horizons a bit and maybe…

Become a “turret lord”

Repair the many auto-turrets you find scattered throughout Talos-1 and use them to do your dirty work for you. After all, why waste your own bullets?

Upgrade your reflexes to superhuman levels

By activating the combat focus ability, you’ll move faster than your enemies and be able to dodge incoming attacks much easier. Truly, you are more human than human.

 Set enemies aflame with psychic fire 

Purposefully starting fires on a space station sounds like the worst of ideas to me, but then, this is a research facility where people decided that modifying themselves to be part alien was a good idea. So I suppose it’s all relative.

Confuse foes with a doppelganger

Use Phantom Shift to teleport a short distance and leave behind a fake version of yourself from where you activated the ability. Useful not just for avoiding alien attacks, but getting out of that board meeting you’re required to attend.

Just throw stuff at them

Bonk.

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us (opens in new tab)! 

The post Prey trailer shows off new powers both alien and human – see, its not ALL about Mimic appeared first on Game News.

If Prey sneaks in an intentional glitch to subvert the gaming expectations we’ve built up over years within the first five minutes, I can’t wait to see what clever tricks it pulls in the hours after that. It’s been far too long since we’ve had a good “Would you kindly?” moment, don’t you think?

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

The post Watch Prey tease its “Would you kindly?” moment right at the start [SPOILERS] appeared first on Game News.

But I think we might be about to hit that moment. Because Prey, coming in 2017 from Dishonored developer Arkane Studios, might well be that game. Set in a world where Kennedy was never assassinated, and redoubled his efforts in the space race, it presents a 2035 in which the Talos One space station has orbited the moon for 70 years. Humanity has evolved its presence in space exponentially since the station’s launch, building layer upon layer on the habitat to create a technological onion of different eras, modern sheen peeling back to reveal the ‘70s, and then deeper still, the environment’s chunky, clunky Russian roots.

But humanity is trying to evolve in other ways. Experiments are being done in an attempt to expand the human experience. And they’re about to succeed, though not in the ways intended. The human experience is about to get really shitty.

As Morgan Yu – the gender-agnostic name is deliberate; you can choose at the start – you wake up on Talos One immediately after an unnamed atrocity has begun wreaking carnage through every deck and hall. Alien beasts are running rampant, swirling, skittering nightmares of rag and fog and shadow. People are dying unpleasant deaths, and the monsters are everywhere. The monsters are everything. These extraterrestrial wraiths have the ability to mimic any object on the station, only revealing their true form when they’re close enough to strike. That trash can on the floor? Don’t trust it. That suitcase discarded in the lobby? Better double-tap it, just to be sure. And hang on, did that chair just move?

But if you can’t trust the world around you, at least you can trust yourself, right? Well not necessarily. Where BioShock brought us DNA-warping Plasmids, Prey allows you to upgrade yourself with both human tech and alien material. Get close enough to the monsters and survive, and you can study their abilities. Learn enough, and you can emulate their behaviour. But should you? The choice is entirely yours. You can harness or reject any alien ability you wish. They bring great power, naturally, but Prey’s dynamic, reactive world will be watching you, and it may not like what it sees.

“When you do that there are consequences”, Arkane’s Ricardo Bare tells me. “The more alien material you put into yourself, the more things start to change. Things like the station’s turrets. They protect humans and shoot aliens. But guess what? You’ve got alien material in your head now. And some of the aliens themselves are sensitive to other creatures that have powers like them. So they’ll start to detect the fact that you are upgrading yourself that way, and they’ll come after you.”

That’s the risk, but what about the reward? Well here’s where it gets silly. Forget the simple process of jamming oversized hypodermics into your arm to gain multiple elemental Hadokens. In Prey, things are much more freeform. Much more Dishonored, in fact. Your abilities aren’t so much solutions to specific problems, as malleable tools to do with whatever the hell you wish. In much the same way that Dishonored’s Blink teleport is ostensibly a handy traversal tool, but also opens the way to as many ludicrous, almost game-breaking combat puzzle strategies as one can imagine, so too are Prey’s powers building blocks rather than linear solutions. You might use them to kill enemies and bypass obstacles, but Prey’s gameplay looks to be far more about creation than destruction.

Take the Gloo Gun, for instance. A large, sticky goo cannon, its ammo will rapidly set, freezing any enemy you train it upon. So far, so good. Throw in a grenade. Hit them with a flame attack. That will work. Or maybe those stricken bodies will work as cover? Or maybe you can skip the fight altogether. Maybe you can sneak to a safe spot at the side of the room – stealth is abundantly viable in Prey – and spray the goo up the wall, letting it coalesce into a set of convenient platforms with which you can merrily skip up to a higher level.

Sorry, did I say that was where it got silly? I lied. Because now I’m going to talk about that stealth. And this is where it gets silly. That thing I said about how the aliens can mimic objects on the station? And that other thing about how you can adopt the aliens’ powers? Yep. Becoming more alien might attract the aliens, but they’ll have a much harder time finding you if you’re a teacup.

And the best part? You maintain your other abilities whether you’re made of flesh or porcelain. So forget the Gloo Gun if you don’t want to use it – or perhaps aren’t in a position to. Turn into a ball, roll over to that platform – you can move around as any object, by the looks of it, including the cup – drop a kinetic charge underneath yourself, and tee off to wherever you want to go.

If all of this sounds potentially ‘exploitable’, then you’re right. And Arkane is not unaware of the issue. But, being Arkane, it doesn’t seem to care as long as the gameplay is good. As Director Raphael Colantonio explains,

“It’s a weird balance, allowing the things that are not initially pre-planned until it becomes a game-breaker. If something is too much of an exploit then we need to fix it. But usually – if there’s something that is cool, but it’s not quite polished, like some sort of weird interaction that works magically, but is a little bit of a problem – then we’ll support it, because now we want it to be part of the game. But ultimately we really like this. We like it when players break the game in a good way and find some weird shortcut to a situation, and feel really proud that they could beat the game in such a way.”

But isn’t that a nightmare from a designer’s point of view? After all, Prey is no linear, point-to-point game. It has far more in common with Metroid. While its story and missions will lead you along the ‘correct’ path, the whole station is being built as “one giant space-dungeon”, according to Bare. “You can go anywhere you want as long as you have the means to get there. And just like in those old-school RPGs, we let you go to parts of the station where you might not have any business being there, because the monsters there will just smash you down. But it’s still cool knowing that I can do that, that I can try if I want to.”

And with secrets, other survivors, and the overwhelmingly human instincts for exploration and rebellion driving you, you will want to. But how does a studio reconcile that sort of structure with the knowledge that – just as happened in Dishonored – its players could quickly concoct combinations of powers that no-one making the game ever considered? According to Colantonio, it’s all about breaking down obstacles into core challenge types, and trying to stay on top of – and open to – the appropriate tools the player might have.

“We look at it like challenges that are not quite directly linked to a power. So for example there could be the challenge of elevation. ‘How do I get on the other side of this thing?’. Then we have a set of systems that can deal with that. And so it doesn’t really matter which one you use. You could use the Gloo Gun there, you could have a lift power to create some sort of field of upward force which you could use to propel yourself.

“We could say also there’s the type of challenge where you have to get on the other side of a wall and there’s some opening somewhere. And you could turn yourself into a smaller object if there’s one around you, or just drop one from your inventory and turn into this object if you have the power. Or maybe you could turn into smoke and go through that way.”

Not that Prey is all puzzle solving and rule breaking – though there is a “heavy element” of that, according to Bare, growing from the team’s love of environmental disaster-management in games like FTL. The station is also “infested” with enemies, ranging from skittering crab-bastards to hulking great ghost-ogres. Direct combat is entirely feasible, but with weapons at a premium, you’ll again have to get more creative. And again, you’ll have to the tools to do that. Most interesting among them is the Recyclotron, a grenade that breaks down matter into its constituent parts and then hoovers it up into resource units for crafting. Imagine a throwable version of No Man’s Sky’s Multitool and you’re basically there. Only rather than deconstructing rocks and plants, the Recyclotron works on anything that isn’t nailed down.

And once you have those resources? Time for crafting. The crafting of pretty much anything you want, in fact. Weapons, gadgets, human tech to gain further abilities, or just nondescript junk for throwing on the floor and turning into. And if you’re still stuck for ideas after all of that, why not craft a propulsion system for your hazard suit and go outside for a nice, head-clearing space-walk? Because yes, you can do that too. You can freely fly around the station and re-enter the structure anywhere you fancy.

Prey is silly. Prey feels almost too freeform. It feels vaguely impossible to wrangle. But that’s why it’s exciting. That’s why it feels new and important. Most of all, it’s Arkane’s willingness to allow the game to get out of control, to only reel it in when needed, that makes it feel like a step forward. Prey’s developers seem as willing to break the rules and remake them as the game’s players will no doubt eventually be. And if the studio’s previous game proved anything, it’s that a blatant disregard for the rules is often where the most fun comes from. 

The post Prey: Breaking and remaking the rules, as BioShock meets Dishonored appeared first on Game News.

Being essentially 10 years old, I asked every developer I interviewed at QuakeCon 2016 what kind of cool moves and outfits their respective characters would have in a theoretical Super Bethesda Bros. Again, this is all hypothetical, and I have no reason to believe Bethesda is working on a cross-franchise fighting game (but if it does end up happening I take full credit). All that said, these are the designs we came up with.

Corvo Attano, Dishonored series

Special Attack: Harvey Smith, the co-creative director of Dishonored developer Arkane Studios, was tempted to go with the “creepy and fascinating” Possession ability for Corvo’s special attack. But since his defining hour in the original Dishonored was set against the Rat Plague, Smith had to go with Corvo’s equally disturbing Devouring Swarm power. That’s the one that makes dozens of rats emerge from the void and devour everything in their path, alive or dead. Maybe don’t let Corvo build up his special meter.

Alternate Outfit: “I guess Corvo’d probably have something more romantic, right”, Smith reasoned. “So he’s got his Royal Protector outfit, muddy boots and all that. But he probably also has something like a billowy pirate shirt, for the romance [novel] cover.” I think I ripped my bodice a bit just thinking about it.

Emily Kaldwin, Dishonored series

Special Attack: In Dishonored 2 (opens in new tab), Emily has grown up to be just as deadly of an eldritch-powered killer as her proud father. But they’re not exactly alike. Emily’s powers reflect both her status as a ruler and the disturbing events of her childhood. One of her most powerful “gifts” from the Outsider (and Smith’s pick for Super Bethesda Bros. special attack) is Domino, which lets her chain the fates of several people together. Pop off a Domino, then KO one opponent and you KO them all!

Alternate Outfit: Emily would be a little bit more conservative than Corvo the romantic swashbuckler. She “probably has something that allows her to blend in more,” Smith said, “the brown riding jacket, or something that she takes out for fox hunts”.

Morgan Yu, Prey

Special Attack: Prey (opens in new tab)’s protagonist can turn into a coffee mug. He or she (you could play as either gender in SBB, just like Robin and Corrin in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U & 3DS) can use the Mimic ability to transform into a bunch of other stuff, too, but the mug was the clear crowd favorite at QuakeCon’s extended Prey gameplay demo (opens in new tab). Lead designer Ricardo Bare insisted that the coffee mug form in particular would be Morgan’s special attack, despite it leaving you quite small and literally unarmed. Maybe you could tip over and spill your scalding hot contents on the other players?

Alternate Outfit: “That’s kind of both in one!” Bare exclaimed about the coffee mug. He got me there.

Doom Marine, Doom series

Special Attack: After I assured Doom (opens in new tab) director Marty Stratton that his character could have a weapon in this utterly derivative game we were making up, his response was immediate. “It would probably have to be something where he grabs the other player by the chest and pulls out the Super Shotgun and blows their head off. And a big fountain of blood comes out of the top of it.” So Super Bethesda Bros. is going for an M-Rating, I asked? “We’re Id, we don’t do anything lower!”

Alternate Outfit: “I would have to go with the classic bare midriff, no sleeves, leather gloves [Doomguy design from the original game],” Stratton said. Then we tossed around some ideas about why the Doomguy originally had an armor cutout over his tummy; Stratton said with a six-pack like that you pretty much have to, while I speculated that he was on his way to belly dance class when the demonic invasion broke out.

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