Reviewing Monsters: Prey

 

Prey is a 2017 video game by Bethesda that surprisingly ended up really gripping me. On the surface, it does really seem like it's a system similar to games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or the new Resident Evil 2 remake, but with a slightly-more-large-scale version of the plot of Alien and Aliens combined... a space station isolated from the rest of humanity where the containment procedures surrounding a group of shapeshifting aliens (called the 'Typhon') end up obviously failing, causing the Typhon to break free, reproduce out of control and slaughter many of the station's staff. 

And on the surface, that's a pretty basic and understandable setup for a sci-fi survival horror video game. Except... well, it's far more than that. A combination of great sound design and a lot of amazing subplots being told in the background (mixing the usual 'long-term government conspiracy' and 'super-large company isn't valuing human life' and general unethical experimentation and exploitation) with a healthy dose of paranoia, multiple factions that drag your quasi-amnesiac main character along, and generally great atmosphere and gameplay made me really get sucked into this universe in a way that I don't think I've had before. 

But while I really adore this game, I only really talk about video games in this blog if there are monsters. And in the space station of Talos 1... there definitely are monsters!

Mimic

So the very basic enemy you meet in this game is also seemingly the most 'basic' version of the Typhon 'species', and is colloquially called a 'Mimic' by the characters in-universe. Around one-third of the way through the game you unlock an item called a Psycho-scope that allows you to scan these enemies and give access to the station's database on their research, revealing that each and every kind of these Typhon are given a scientific name. The basic Mimic here is called Typhon cacoplasmus. 

And the visuals of the Mimic isn't the most interesting on a still image, and I really do have to emphasize how great the execution of this creature is. On paper, it's just a mixture of the crab/spider-based Facehugger from Aliens with the goopy, tendril-like consistency of Marvel comics' Symbiotes. And if we're judging by that alone, the Mimic isn't the most interesting thing out there. 

...except that they can mimic things. And this is the biggest source of paranoia and survival horror in the early stages of the game, where any two objects next to each other has the potential for one of them to explode out into a goopy spider-creature and attack you. A coffee mug? A toilet roll? One of the books on the shelf? Some particularly devious Mimics even mimic precious weapons, resources and med-kits. It's pretty fun from a horror-movie standpoint that you're basically trying to figure out just how many Mimics are in a room, and if you've got them all. When not hidden, the Mimics are pretty cute, and some of them will actually extend two of their four legs up as if trying to mimic a bipedal human.

We also quickly learn that the 'Facehugger' comparison is pretty apt, since when they attack a human, the Mimic will drain and desiccate their corpse, before exploding into four brand-new Mimics, using the human as a reproductive medium. Pretty standard stuff on paper, but amazingly executed!

Greater Mimic

Later on in the game, your Psychoscope is able to detect hidden Mimics even in disguise... but around the same time, you start encountering Greater Mimics. A pretty standard video game trope that these creatures exist in 'greater' versions, but a major theme that you learn as you proceed through the Talos station is that the Typhon are also adapting to the humans -- specifically you, the one human going around killing all of its buddies. The Greater Mimic is basically a slightly bigger Mimic with spikes, but they're also completely unable to be detected with your Psychoscope. 

While the lore note that Greater Mimics are able to mimic sophisticated machinery like turrets and operators (basically hovering robots), we never actually ever get to see this in-game. It's interesting that the in-universe scientists are actually baffled about just how the Mimics are able to transform so well into their disguises, with a particularly fun set of discussion notes giving various theories that range from mundane (changing the atomic structure) to far wilder sci-fi stuff like being able to access an alternate pocket dimension to draw the matter from there.

Phantom

The other poster enemy for this game is the Phantom, or Typhon anthrophantasmus. Again, on paper they're not the most scary enemy monster. They're basically goopy Symbiote-lookalikes, with a larger-set upper body and a face that could be best described as a bunch of glowing eyes that kind-of form a skeletal visage. Again, a lot of this boils down to execution, with the Phantoms being particularly threatening in the early-game where they can really do a number on you. The guttural mumbling that they keep making makes it extra-creepy when you meet them... particularly if you turn subtitles on and realize that they're saying rather disturbing stuff. Not sure if it's more or less creepy when you realize that the Phantoms are mimicking the actual humans in the station.

While bipedal and humanoid-looking, Phantoms fight by launching balls of kinetic energy that explode at you, and sometimes they unfurl their hands to reveal that they're actually a bunch of tentacles wrapped together into being hands. Even more creepily, they are able to do little bursts of super-speed to phase through objects and chase you down and/or disorient you, making it rather crucial that you either are able to immobilize or take out a Phantom stealthily, or you're just good enough to keep up with the Phantom blitzing all over the map.  

While a bit of a minor mystery about where they show up from, we later find out that the Phantom is created by another type of the Typhon called a Weaver from human corpses -- where the human corpses are reanimated and making the Phantoms' name a bit more literal than it originally seems. It falls into the idea that the Typhon are 'mimicking' not just human items but even humans themselves. Again, this feels very much Alien, with the Phantom being the equivalent of the 'adult' Xenomorph stage that takes traits from human hosts. 

Thermal Phantom

We also have a bunch of 'superpowered' versions of the regular phantoms. Because shape-shifting parasitic murderous aliens aren't quite enough, they're also psychic -- the regular Phantom, after all, shoots telekinetic blasts. Some other Phantoms are mutated to be able to utilize other types of psychic abilities. The Thermal Phantom here, Typhon anthrophantasmus psychothermal, is consistently on fire and is able to generate explosive fields of fire wherever they point, which the game identifies as a 'spontaneous eruption of superheated plasma'. The Thermal Phantoms are also able to 'radiate lethal levels of infrared energy'. In video-game terms, they have an aura that constantly damages you and melts your GLOO Gun -- which is the go-to item to immobilize regular Phantoms in the early game. 

Voltaic Phantom

Meanwhile, the Voltaic Phantom doesn't actually have a formal entry, indicating that the Talos 1 breakout is the first time that the Voltaic Phantoms are first encountered and created, which leads to credence that these things are actively adapting to face off against the technology used by humans. One of the first Voltaic Phantoms that your main character Morgan Yu encounters is actually shown to be created in front of you from a human corpse, and as its name implies, the Voltaic Phantom emits massive auras of electricity all over the place...

...which disables all your technology. Your guns, your Q-Beam lasers, your Psychoscope... it really is kind of interesting to see that the Phantoms are, in-universe, adapting in real time to your character as he/she also gets stronger. That's fun. It's a bit rare to see in-game, but the Thermal and Voltaic Phantoms can apparently 'charge' Mimics to share the same abilities as them temporarily. 

Etheric Phantom

The coolest and the most 'psychic' of the Phantom variants is the Etheric Phantom, Typhon anthrophantasmus psychoetheric, which glows purple and zips around with its phasing abilities a bit more than the regular Phantoms. Their most surprising ability, however, is to split itself into two bodies. Or to 'clone' itself, to use a more video game-y jargon. One of the Etheric Phantoms has much-reduced health, but depending on how much resources you have at the time and how many other enemies are also in the area, Etheric Phantoms can spell disaster for you. I like the Etheric Phantom the best because it does really feel like it fits more into the 'psychic' aliens theme of the Typhon. 

And when the Etheric Phantom dies? It leaves behind a cloud of toxic gas that is 'disruptive to normal matter'. The Mimics and Phantoms all have this effect where they seem to be vibrating in place or seemingly phase in and out of existence, and this cloud seems to be a representation of everything that's not quite right with these Etheric Phantoms. 

Weaver

With the Mimics and Phantoms forming the bulk of the 'common' enemies in the game (plus 'corrupted operators', but those aren't quite as interesting to talk about as enemies), the rest of the game's bestiary are basically other more specialized members of the Typhon reproductive line. Again, there's a very Aliens vibe to all of this, particularly with the Weaver, or Typhon geneocratis. Our main character Morgan Yu gets to witness a very old video of one of the first encounters where the human scientists have locked up the Typhon, seeing a group of Mimics gang up and 'stab' one of their own, causing it to transform into a Weaver. While the specifics are obviously different, it's rather similar to how certain types of ants are able to 'promote' the healthiest soldier into a reproductive queen should the original queen die. 

The design of the Weaver is basically a floating, glowing version of the Mimic, looking a little bit like an octopus. It's able to move around and create a substance known as 'Coral' (which we'll cover below) and generate other types of Typhons -- if there are corpses nearby, the Weaver will turn them into Phantoms. It's also got a 'Backlash' shield that negates damage and strikes the 'fear' effect to our main character. Failing that, it'll divebomb our hero with Cystoids, all the while flying around and trying to keep out of reach of our guns.

And it's this Weaver that's recovered from the original Russian satellite that the Typhon were first discovered in that was the original source of many of the controlled Mimics and Phantoms studied by the Talos 1 base... before, of course, all hell breaks loose. While initially built up to be a counterpart of the 'Alien Queen' from Alienx, the Weaver in practice shows up a fair bit more, with multiple representatives of its subtype showing up all over the station. Pretty interesting, and the name 'Weaver' really does imply that this thing is just specialized at expanding the colony and creating soldiers like the specialized Phantoms as needed. If the Typhon colony works similarly to an ant or termite colony, perhaps it's these Weavers that gauge the amount of resources to be spent to create certain amounts of other Typhon? 

Coral

Not exactly an enemy, but a feature that is 'woven' by the Weavers through their spinnerets. The crew of Talos 1 call it 'Coral' for lack of a better term, but these things aren't even like, vines or webbing that can be cut down. They're just static strings of light that humans can just pass through with no problem, as if they're just holograms. But as the Typhon infestation becomes worse and the Weavers are able to access more parts of the space station, they begin to infest the locations with more and more Coral. 

The Talos 1 staff would realize that these Corals are very similar to a neural network, and the aesthetics are partially based on scans of electromagnetic signals travelling through nerves. Worryingly, some reports of the Coral note that there's a similar pattern of Coral connections and the psyche-scans of the staff of Talos 1, making some researchers theorize that the Typhon are mimicking or even storing the minds of Typhon victims within the Coral. Whatever it is, however, it's definitely 'calling' for something, which we don't learn what until the end of the game. 

Poltergeist

Oh yeah, this motherfucker's creepy. The Poltergeist, or Typhon dysmorpha, really does look like it crawled out of a far more horror-themed setting than the other goop aliens. The Poltergeist is basically portrayed as a straight-up ghost, particularly the first couple of Poltergeists that don't really give any indication that there's even an enemy until you start to see things move around. No, it's not a game glitch or the space station shaking... it's an invisible, psychic enemy that lobs heavy crates at you and sometimes creates gravity-nullifing fields that toss you into the air. 

It's a bit hard to really see because you inevitably turn and rapidly try to shotgun or GLOO-gun everywhere you see that has the slightest bit of visual disruption to try and hit the invisible Poltergeist (invisible even to your scope!), but the actual model is basically the crawling upper-half of a humanoid with a tail-like 'spinal cord' trailing behind him. Unlike the Phantom or the Nightmares below, the two pinpoint eyes on the Poltergeist also look a fair bit more 'human', so to speak. The end result really does look like the upper half of a human zombie crawling around on its skeletal and very well-defined hands. 

There has interestingly been a fair amount of data collected by the Talos 1 staff on the Poltergeist, identifying them as a 'rare mutation' that occurs in <5% of the creation of Phantoms by Weavers, making it an especially powerful mutant that doesn't fall into the well-defined 'normal Typhon ecology', though obviously our human scientists have a very limited idea of what normal Typhon ecology is like. But the fact that these things are explicitly created during 'Phantom genesis', which involves human corpses, does mean that the Poltergeist is yet another thing that's artificially added to these things' reproductive strategy. 

Cystoid / Cystoid Nest

It's a bit hard to tell these in the official 'database' entries, but the Cystoid Nests are basically huge balls of radioactive tumours that are implanted and immobile on the walls of certain parts of the station. At the slightest hint of movement, however, the Nests explode and out roll a half-dozen spiky balls of Typhon organisms called Cystoids, which glow and spin around and chase down anything that moves and explodes.

It's really interesting that these Cystoids are explicitly identified as being unable to detect humans by conventional means like the Mimics and Phantoms, instead relying on proximity movement, which means that the most efficient way to deal with the Cystoids is to grab something like a chair (or your NERF gun) and cause the Cystoids to self-destruct by chasing a completely unrelated item. These guys are particularly numerous in the outer-space 'microgravity' segments of the game, which I really appreciate the execution of. The microgravity segments are so disorienting and really does sell the 'there's no real way up' vibe of working in a space station... which also makes the Cystoids' ability to chase you down from any direction to be a bit more scary and forces you to try your best in cleaning out areas as you travel through them. 

The Cystoids or their Nests are not explicitly given a scientific name, because a lot of the researchers identify them as more of a 'living mine' that Weavers leave behind to mark their territory from intruders. They're also constantly leaking radiation, which is yet another thing that can afflict your character. 

Telepath

The last three enemies here probably are the ones that count as true 'minibosses' in the sense that they are much tougher to take down and tend to be located in specific rooms that you need to enter to get a plot coupon or two. The Telepath, or Typhon psychocratis, was foreshadowed very early on in the game when you start finding signs of the Typhon being able to do much more than just mimicry and generic energy beams -- when you find the brain-fucked Trevor Young held within an isolation chamber. There are also a lot of notes about how a lot of members of the staff (your main character included) have been experiencing terrible dreams, a nice highlight to how psyche-breaking these Typhon actually are. 

The design of the Telepath also makes it look very distinct, looking like a giant, bulky jellyfish with tendrils trailing behind it as it floats around, and it has a single glowing white 'eyeball' in the center of its orb-like body, from where it shoots psychic blasts. This kind of reminds me of a floating enemy like Dungeons & Dragons's Beholder or Zelda's Arrrghus, actually. 

And, as mentioned before, the Telepath is able to mind-control humans and all Telepaths tend to have a couple of your crew members under its thrall. These mind-controlled humans won't just attack you, they'll also bum-rush you and have their heads explode, meaning that it does fall into your skills and how much you care about these (mostly innocent) crewmembers on whether you just let them die for an easier takedown, or subject yourself to a sneak attack or to stock up on specific anti-psychic grenades to take down the Telepath. 

Interestingly, despite being an eldritch psychic tentacle-eyeball from deep space, the Telepath are recorded to actually be rather selective with the people they dominate, with the mind of a particularly vile serial killer (who also serves as a non-Typhon antagonist) being so repugnant to the Telepaths that they actually refuse to make mental contact with him. 

Technopath

The most artificial-looking Typhon, the Technopath, seems to have merged with several metal blocks, giving the general silhouette of what seems to be a corrupted, bloated version of an Operator -- the hovering robots that serve the space station. I don't think we ever really learn if the smooth, sleek metal-looking parts of the Technopath's anatomy are natural parts of its carapace or if it's merged with the technological parts of the station. 

Where the Telepath controls humans, the Technopath is able to take control of Turrets and Operators and turn them into corrupted, malfunctioning robots that is intent on taking you apart with blowtorches. In a detail that's more plot than gameplay oriented, Technopaths are also able to hijack elevators and life-support systems and disable them.

And, just like the Telepath and Weaver, the Technopath is able to float around out of reach, leaving its thralls to fight their battles. I do feel like these 'miniboss' enemies to not quite have the same vibe of survival horror creepiness as their lesser siblings, but I do find their existence to be very cool... and the Technopath's presence at all really does show just how much these Typhons are able to mutate to match the humans and the technology they're facing off against. 

Nightmare

And the most recurring and sometimes most difficult enemy you'll face is the Nightmare, which is a dinosaur-sized hulking brute. Again, like the Phantom, design-wise the Nightmare isn't the most spectacular. It's just a really big Phantom, all hulking with a lot of extra eyes... but the way that the Nightmare is executed is that it (or rather, they) are this game's equivalent of Mr. X/Tyrant from Resident Evil 2 where they're super-powerful and they will hunt you down throughout the map if they find you. And they hit really hard and can tank a lot of punishment. 

The difference is that the Nightmare can be killed, and it's not ultimately that hard if you're well-equipped with Turrets, Recycler Grenades and maybe some Typhon powers of your own. It's just that the Nightmares will constantly respawn, particularly if you dawdle in exploration a bit too long. Again, a lot of the sound design and musical cues to indicate the Nightmare's arrival is pretty well-done. 

Also, while it initially looks like just a big hulking humanoid brute, the Nightmare is actually more amorphous, being able to reduce itself into masses of tentacles to get through doors, and its long 'neck' and 'head' can actually split apart to reveal itself to be tendrils. Far more interesting is that the Nightmare are basically the 'white blood cells' of the Typhon, if we're taking the Corals to be the nervous system -- they're being created to hunt down anomalies in their new habitat... which, by the way, is you. The Nightmare is literally created to hunt you down as an anti-Morgan-Yu Typhon. There's even a sidequest to create an anti-Nightmare technology, but that will only work for the next three or four Nightmares you meet until the Nightmares actually adapt to it as well. 

The Apex

The gigantic Apex is the true Typhon, with the revelation that all of the threats we've been facing all throughout the game being just extensions of itself. The big blobby screenshot really doesn't do it justice, because it literally just tears into existence out of space like and really makes us feel like we're plankton faced with some vast, giant whale. Except this whale is a mass of radioactive tentacles that is destroying the space station and is actively hunting you. 

 A very cosmic horror vibe, with the revelation that the complex ecosystem created by the Weavers and all of the Phantoms and Mimics and other Typhon is just a way to signal for the true giant organism (or colony?) that the game dubs 'the Apex' to arrive. Again, from a visual standpoint the Apex is basically just a giant version of the Typhon, essentially a space Venom-Kraken, but the buildup to this thing, and the visual imagery of it wrapping itself around the gigantic space station and dwarfing a structure that the game spent its entire runtime in, makes the Apex as a pretty cool final spectacle for the game.