Morality via Immersive Sim Gameplay and NPC Writing in Prey (2017), or; Why Danielle Sho is One of the Greatest NPCs Ever

“With unclean hands, a fire to feed.”

Prey is a 2017 game by Arkane Studios. As memory-erased player character Morgan Yu, you quickly discover your plush flat and the executive helicopter ride you just took were a simulation, and you need to learn who you truly are on a space station where human survivors are few and alien threats are multiplying. Prey’s powerful character portrayal and storytelling is key to its moral core, which rests on the player becoming invested in the other humans on the station. That investment and the player’s connection to the characters articulates via rich, detailed immersive sim design. This echoes the balance between lethal ability and morality that the studio’s previous masterwork Dishonored asked the player to navigate.

Unlike Dishonored though, Prey presents you with an interconnected game world for its large cast of characters to live in, and lets you engage with itas much as you want. Which is why your journey through the game is about expanding your access to that game world (the station) as the plot and your abilities unfold synchronously.

In plot and ludology Prey is about identity and self, and dilemmas in morality. You learn who Morgan and Alex Yu are as you develop new abilities, and you engage in moral decisions through the gameplay.

The story wrestles with humanity’s relationship to technology and our innate desire to advance and improve ourselves. The Yu siblings are Promethean figures. Brilliantly sketched pastiches of startup CEOs, these genius “unicorn” founders are drunk on a sudden ascent to the apex of both business and thought leadership. Chris Avellone and the other writers on the project knocked it out of the park, as did the voice cast — particularly a gravelly Benedict Wong as Alex Yu, by turns vainglorious and biting his tongue with regret.

But while moving the player forward and enticing them to explore the world at the deep level of zoom it offers, these operatic themes are mixed with the stories of far more ordinary people than Alex and Morgan. The inclusion of such characters, characters that remind us of ourselves, is critical to the sense of stakes in the Typhon outbreak. Prey is preoccupied with questions of the value of human life — it has you answer the trolley dilemma before it introduces its signature monsters. We see that Morgan and Alex have put lives at risk and even conducted experiments on Transtar employees, believing their goals noble enough to justify their methods, putting an idealised image of a superhuman before their fellow human beings.

So the game offers you as many opportunities to learn about your erstwhile colleagues as it does opportunities to augment yourself with these same preternatural abilities and alien powers. Here are the powers your forner self thought it was worth experimenting on Mikhaila’s father to develop. Here are Mikhaila’s emails to you. And eventually, here is Mikhaila.

These are characters that past Morgan may not have cared about, but that the player might, particularly when they are extremely relatable. Two of which I will always remember. They offer you the chance to exercise a moral choice via the player agency in the game, and they are along the critical path.

Danielle Sho and Abigail Foy provide the player what, due to the central narrative and themes and their social status, its lead characters Alex and Morgan Yu probably won’t. I can relate to Danielle and Abby a whole lot more than celebrated technology leaders, who were elevated to their success and wealth through nepotism, no less. Danielle and Abby dork out over tabletop games, laugh, goof around, bicker, try to balance careers and a (seemingly recent) romance, and they have moments both sweet and bitter, as well as one very destructive falling out. These are beats from ordinary lives, which we’ll return to in more detail. The delivery of these beats is key, however: You have to be interested enough to go looking for each character’s resolution.

NPC stories are conveyed organically as you progress. Prey wants you to build up a picture of what happened, who these people were, while constructing your mental map of the station. At the same time as Morgan reconstructs their memories, their identity and their relationship with Alex, the player learns the station’s layout, purpose and inhabitants.

Arkane’s approach to creating sims where you can interact with almost everything in the environment lends itself to rich and detailed environmental storytelling, much of which is completely optional. You’re very unlikely to get it all on a first pass. Computers contain emails between employees, transcribes (audio logs) are found lying around, notes can be unstuck from monitors, and the station’s Looking Glass terminals even allow you to see holograms of the crew members as if they are right there with you. These stories unfold gradually as you progress — you finally find a reply to an email chain you read on someone’s computer in a different part of the station, or the next in a series of transcribes, and ultimately there are encounters with survivors and those who weren’t so lucky. You might hear a voice recording from someone whose body you saw earlier — or find a corpse whose personality and profession when living you know from their emails, hobbies and living quarters.

Talos I and its denizens, much like the Nostromo and its own in Alien, is the lynchpin of the experience of Prey. But instead of watching as the Nostromo is transformed from a brilliantly realised blue collar workplace to a haunted house in space, you experience the last hours of the Talos I for yourself as the stricken station is overrun by the Typon. The way you put Danielle and Abby’s jigsaw of a story together is the standout part of this. It also seems that Chris Avellone and Arkane Studios wanted you to learn about them and engage with Danielle’s sidequest, as you need to actually recover samples of Danielle’s voice in order to progress to Deep Storage.

So finding out about the character is part of your critical path, and this quest-line also features two of the game’s most memorable set-pieces to make sure you remember it. From email chains between Danielle and Alex as well as recorded conversations between Danielle and Abigail, you form a picture of them. Danielle is a by-the-book information systems manager. She is an ethical counterweight to Alex within Transtar. Hired apparently for her abilities and work ethic rather than through the very Silicon Valley connections-based hiring the Yu family seems fond of, Danielle clashes with her employers over the unorthodox way in which they run Transtar. In fact, she seems to see through their entire operation, viewing their psychological evaluation methods as a way to undermine inconvenient truths or dismiss dissident opinion; referring to it all as “psych eval bullshit”. Several pieces of evidence show her as un-frightened of her powerful higher-ups, and (because she is awesome) condemning of her CEO’s hubris and attitude towards his employees.

The vocal sample everyone remembers though is the one you get by going to the theater and playing the recording of Danielle’s band and their song ‘Semi-Sacred Geometry.’ Not only does the song slap in its own right but the noise you’re making seems to attract a bunch of Typhon. The upshot of this is you’re battling possibly the largest crowd of enemies you’ve encountered yet while this fabulous slice of future pop plays in the background. After spending hours creeping through vents and sneaking past combat wherever possible, this set-piece was a striking punctuation mark. I think this is the writers telling you something; this person is significant, remember them.

Abby meanwhile contrasts with her partner. While senior exec Danielle lives to work, unable to contain her frustration with her bosses’ lack of integrity even when on a day off, Abby (deployed in station sanitation) works to live and loves her hobbies. A lot of the email and transcribe dialogue you get from Abby involves her (adorably) planning her D&D sessions with her onboard friends. One of Prey’s best remembered set-pieces when I’ve talked to people about it is when you find the abandoned game of Fatal Fortress in the Recreation Centre, including the character cards Abby has made everyone make and the game’s rule book. According to Reddit detectives the game is a reference to an older Arkane Studios title, Arx Fatalis, and each character card has a different art style to show how everyone drew their characters individually. It is a lovingly composed and filled out scene, standing out even in a game so detailed that every crew member’s quarters or bunk was designed with the routes to bathrooms and their place of work in mind. I think it is that way because the designers and writers hoped to entice you to carefully examine it all. The game wants you to find a very important transcribe at this point, with the D&D group midway through playing — when Danielle arrives:

Abigail Foy: “You hear nothing from the darkness. It has swallowed Stabfellow — completely.”

Zachary West: “All right, let me light a torch and…”

Danielle Sho: “Hey guys. Sorry I’m late. Stationwide OS upgrade, had to hold Bellamy’s hand through the whole process. Abby, do you have my character sheet?”

Abigail Foy: “You made it… Yes, right here.”

There’s so much personality in this window into life onboard Talos, and Abby’s voice actor imbues her geeky line with so much earnest enthusiasm for her beloved game nights your heart just melts. But the real kicker is her reaction when Danielle shows up from more overtime. You can hear Abby’s life just become complete in that instant. (IMDB doesn’t list Abby’s VA; neither does her page on the fandom wiki — presumably this is the work of one of the “additional voices” actors and it is a pity they didn’t get specific credit for this wonderful performance).

This warm and fuzzy moment takes on new significance when you know that the couple had a huge argument just before the station was overrun. The last conversation between them is on a transcribe, and has Danielle throw Abby out when she feels she is comparing her to Alex — a man she regards as a pompous, immoral maverick. You then find emails (sent post the argument and as shit is hitting the fan on Talos I) titled “Where are you?”, “Are you OK?”, and “Come find me” (referring to the fitness centre where she wants Abby to meet her). This is Danielle getting more and more worried about Abby, who she clearly still cares very much about and has not made amends with. There’s a panicked call from Danielle to Emma in the fitness centre trying to find out where Abby is, but it seems that Emma is already losing herself and becoming a Phantom.

The final email is titled “Please be there”. The body of the email simply reads “please.” These two had a falling out and Abigail died before Danielle could apologise — this was the tragedy that made me invested in Prey not just for its immensely engaging systems and game world, but emotionally as well.

So I decided I would neither leave the station nor blow it to hell without getting to the “good ending” for their quest. By this time, I was invested enough to go digging through the abandoned clutter of the station and get the ending to the story. Little did I know there’s no good ending for them, and once a certain other character gets loose on the station, the security terminals start showing Abigail Foy as deceased. Prey made me feel responsible for the sad death of a character I’d been allowed to get to know and wanted the best for. I’m a believer in video games as pathos and empathy machines, and finding Abby crumpled in the freezer genuinely depressed me.

Lastly, the final, cruel twist –Danielle is living on borrowed time, breathing the last of her oxygen tank as she floats outside the station, hanging in the utter cold and darkness of space hoping against hope that Abigail is OK and will follow the instructions to go to the fitness centre. You can’t get to Danielle. You knock on the plexiglass and she comes over, but you’re inside and she’s outside. There’s no option to bring her inside the station or meet her at one of the airlocks. All you can do is, tell her the bad news. After ramping up how invested in these characters you were, how well you knew them, how much you cared about them and their story, all Prey gives you is a frozen corpse and a figure in a spacesuit much like your own, inaccessible and heartbroken. More than that, it gives you agency to find Danielle’s voice, then find her — then takes it away at the last second. It is a very effectively orchestrated NPC encounter for what it wants to achieve.

It wants you to care.

Because you are then given a mission by Danielle; avenge Abigail, kill the murderous escaped volunteer responsible for her death. This is another test. The game has made sure you recognise this character as villainous, even suggesting he is a cannibal. This is where Danielle becomes one of the most complicated character quests — you have to be compassionate or a completionist to find her, but to finish the quest you need a taste for revenge.

Your decision here will not be forgotten. Once you beat the main campaign, you awaken to find a scruffy, unshaven Alex and several operators looking at you, and it is revealed that far from unlocking humanity’s true potential, the Yu family has brought an inexorable apex predator to Earth, which is now covered in the shimmering orange coral that coated Talos I. Earlier on you would have heard Morgan say to Alex, “The people that come after us will be smarter, stronger, immortal. They can judge us if they want, but they’ll know they exist because of the things we did.” It turns out that Morgan is, most likely, dead and humanity is screwed — and you, the player, are being judged right now. One of the operators is named Danielle — and if you tracked down Volunteer 37, she notes your “sense of retribution”.

I was initially cool on the game’s surprise ending — I rarely like any version of the “it was all a dream” get-out clause. But on consideration of why the characters and gameplay are so well-suited to one another and to the main theme, as well as having delved into the excellent analysis by Noah Caldwell-Gervais on YouTube and the podcast on the game by the Cane and Rinse network, I’ve begun to appreciate what it is trying to do. It is telling you how your interaction with the game’s systems, and your choices in a deeply interactive world, relate to the moral quandary at the core of the Yu siblings’ abuse of alien technology. Did you take the Typhon power for yourself? Did you make an effort to save whoever you could? And did you show mercy? Since it is all a simulation, what mattered was the morality of your behaviour and what you believed was right — the trolley problem from the beginning of the game, as set out in a Gamecrate piece from near the game’s release.

You can of course kill everyone on board. The game is banking on you behaving differently to the aliens, but making it optional. Alex says to you that, “The Typhon kill us without hesitation. But it’s not because they’re evil. It’s because they can’t do otherwise. Do you know what we discovered? They lack mirror neurons. For all their wonderful abilities, there’s one thing we can do that they can’t — empathize with the suffering of another living creature.” Perhaps the retribution Danielle’s quest is asking you to experience is another test of humanity, as a creature as unfeeling as the Typhon wouldn’t recognise the desire to redress that balance.

Without the tension of well-written characters, engaging exploration and tempting alien abilities, these would be simple statements about a scary alien lacking human compassion. But with such a sophisticated combination of systems and narrative converging to produce a judgment on the player’s actions, some of which may have been harsh, others merciful, the comment has real resonance. It’s different when you yourself exercised, or didn’t exercise, empathy or retribution.

Creating a character as good as Danielle and having her story first tempt you along an optional path and then present you with a moral choice is a master stroke. There are many more key characters with enormous significance to Prey’s plot and morals, like Mikhaila, Dr. Igwe, the Yus themselves — but this started as me talking about what a cool NPC Danielle is, and snowballed into an examination of why she makes you care about the game’s immersive aspects and story. Maybe that shows some of the depth of this game, too.

Originally posted on Medium.com