Prey, Dishonored and the Joy of Traversal

When an open world game needs some marketing, it is a cliché that at some point someone will say “see that mountain on the horizon? You can go there!”

I am the kind of person who gets a huge amount of pleasure out of exploring vast open worlds in video games, when they are beautiful and activity-rich ones like an Assassin’s Creed or Horizon Zero Dawn.

However, the Dishonored games have a slightly different proposal for the player. See that open window on the other side of the street, past the uneasy détente between some city guards and a gang of street toughs? You can be inside that apartment in two seconds with a click of your mouse.
One of the things I enjoy most in Arkane Studios’ Dishonored and Prey games — and there are many, many things to enjoy — is getting from place to place. Whether in third person adventure games with grappling hooks and web-slinging, or an FPS like Titanfall 2 with its wall-running and gliding jumps, video games can be very good at communicating the joy and freedom of movement. There are entire games built around this, like Mirror’s Edge.

But the Arkane stuff is top of class. In fact, the studio seems to have turned the verbs for movement in their recent games into a language with which to express some of the most important aspects of an immersive sim — such as player expression and empowerment, freedom of choice, character progression, and spatial mastery.

The nature of the distances involved is key. These games don’t present the player with mountains, plains or even entire cities. In a Dishonored game for example, you are more likely to be contending with streets, alleys, and buildings and residences of varying sizes.

A strength of immersive sims like these is the ability to tell a complete story with the encounters and items contained in an apartment-sized space (often an apartment), and to then have a wide possibility space for player impact on what happens next in the game. Some of the genius at play with the Dishonored series in particular is how you get to, inside and around these places.

The spaces in these games are of a constrained size, built to incentivise and reward careful exploration. However, the abilities and power sets given to the player mean that, once explored, these areas can be re-traversed very quickly. This feeds directly into the feeling of mastering a space integral to the immersive sim, then takes it further to provide a feeling of freedom and ease in quickly crossing a space you might have dedicated half an hour to earlier. Also, slowly casing a joint then going back into rapid motion gives the game a very good rhythm.

To add to this, individual encounters in these games are high consequence. Everyone remembers the tallboys, the clockwork soldiers, or the phantoms and telepaths. But even clusters of guards and overseers in Dishonored can present a knotty challenge, and moving through unfamiliar rooms in Prey always brings with it the suspense of potentially unseen Mimics ready to leap at you. All this tension builds to a feeling of mastery and release when you take ownership of that space and are able to move rapidly around.

Dishonored: Stealthily creeping around or instantly relocating

In the Dishonored games your options for traversal are given to you as powers due to the player character’s association with the Outsider, an enigmatic trickster god. As you find additional pickups in the world, you can unlock further powers.

The signature power, Blink, allows you to aim an ephemeral marker and, on releasing your left click (or R2 trigger) teleport to that location with a very satisfying whooshing sound and visual effects. Although you can opt to play through these games without using the powers, Blink is in my opinion central to a Dishonored experience. The high drops, out-of-reach ledges and clusters of enemies that present obstacles in most games cease to be an issue. Blink past, over and up. Making a leap of faith over a sheer drop and quickly blinking to a now-in-range ledge or rooftop is particularly exciting.
As you play through these games, you become accustomed to constantly looking for ways this power will give you an advantage. In what is often referred to as a stealth game, ignoring a route through deliberately placed desks, crates and other clutter to carefully position behind a target in favour of simply Blinking directly behind them is extremely empowering. The feeling of “they never even knew I was there” is enhanced. When you are discovered, managing to instantly warp away to safety or a more advantageous spot to do battle turns the tides quickly.

A single ability turns traversal of the world from a necessity you barely notice, to a puzzle solution, a defensive verb, a stealth tool, and a source of exhilaration.

You can also unlock enhancements to Blink, letting it take you further and higher, and in the sequel it can be used through windows — shattering them as you go through.

In Dishonored 2 you can also choose to play as Emily Kaldwin. She doesn’t get Blink — her version is called Far Reach, and takes the appearance of something like a dark tentacle whipping out to pull her instantly across a space. I actually find this just as fun to use as Blink; something about the physicality of reaching out to that distant place and touching it to haul myself forward is very tactile and satisfying. The downside is that initially, you’ll be visible — so unlike Corvo, you might attract attention while in transit. The kicker is that Emily can also use this to grab objects and bring them towards her, much like BioShock’s Telekinesis.

In Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Billie Lurk gets a version called Displace, which relies on first placing a marker, then clicking again to warp to it. This puts a little bit of delay and anticipation on the movement, before you hit the button and have the rush of zapping across a space like in the other games. The difference for Billie is that she can displace into someone, blowing them to pieces in the process. Your supernaturally heightened movement suddenly becomes a potent weapon, as you literally smash into a space across the room.

More significantly, an enhancement to the ability later in the game allows you to place two markers — allowing you to potentially teleport to one location and take down an enemy or grab a needed item, then vanish without even having to aim. Between blowing people into chunks and making multiple jumps at a time, only a few enemies in the game have a chance to answer the spatial dominance that Billie’s power set presents. And in all these games, if you are wondering whether there is a movement-related way you can break the combat or overcome a challenge, chances are the answer is yes.

Prey: Overcoming your fear with mastery of spaces (and space)

In Prey, there is a focus on considered traversal as you navigate a stricken space station and make a gradual progression toward greater movement abilities. The first articulation of this is the Artax Propulsion System. This gives your suit a gentle boost that allows you to glide while falling, denying the station’s artificial gravity which would otherwise bring you falling painfully to the floor. This sounds like a pretty minor thing compared to actually teleporting, but it is consequential in the early game where progress through the areas is hard-won.

While Prey doesn’t deal with the kind of heights the Dishonored games do, its environments have a very different atmosphere that still makes movement meaningful. Especially early on, it presents a survival horror mood and aesthetic in keeping with System Shock, right down to the AI guiding you through a series of dramatic setpieces and stressful enemy encounters. It recalls Alien as Mimics scurry across the end of a vent, stopping you mid-crawl in panic. So when you might be inclined to creep through rooms and corridors very carefully, and almost any item in the environment can be interacted with or picked up, you adopt a slow pace.

I can’t think of anything that contrasts more dramatically with that than spacewalking from one end of the station to the other in a few minutes. The first time exiting the Talos I from an airlock and turning around to the see the station growing smaller in your field of vision is pretty remarkable, and certainly memorable to me. Once you have explored the station and got the airlocks open, you will be able to trivialise a journey that took maybe 10 hours by heading to the other end of the station any time you want. With the elegantly implemented zero-gravity controls, this provides a graceful as well as exciting moment of gameplay. Again, it is showing you that you have mastered a space that was once imposing.

There are other tools available that empower your movement in the game. The signature one is the GLOO Cannon. This allows you to fire globs of fast-hardening gunk at any service, including vertical ones, to create makeshift ladders. With these you can get to later areas early, get access to powerful weapons and tools you wouldn’t otherwise see for hours, and generally get ahead on the game’s power curve. Notice an item high up on a ledge? It’s yours with a few foamy blobs in the right spots. Elevator shaft inoperable? GLOO Cannon gets you up there.

Like in Dishonored you also upgrade your general mobility, so that by the end of the game you should be able to run and jump in a way that feels extremely liberating compared to the careful plodding of your first visits to the Talos I Lobby and Hardware Labs. By the end of the game, this is your playground. When the events of the endgame mean that fast movement becomes essentially crucial, you rise to the challenge by being able to sprint, leap, glide, GLOO and spacewalk your way through and around the station. Where before much of the station felt impenetrable, now you can move around with little fear of limitation (and even roll through cracks and under windows as a coffee mug like the Mimics do).

Why I love traversing these game worlds

Dishonored is a stealth game that allows you to instantly travel distances, and Prey is a horror-tinged sci-fi shooter where you gradually attain Titanfall 2-esque mobility. In each, movement, player and character progression and empowerment are closely related. Additionally, these abilities and tools provide a real sense of confidence and capability in a virtual space.

Video games are often at their strongest giving the player ways to do things they can’t do in real life. Supernaturally augmented parkour and spacewalking certainly qualifies as that for me. The first person view also helps make the movement feel impactful and real, especially in the mantling systems with their subtle screen movements and sensation of weight as you climb, and in turn makes these worlds feel more real, more tangible. Finally, many of these things — from Blink to the GLOO Cannon — take some level of familiarity and skill to use to their fullest, which adds a sense of genuine satisfaction when you can overcome challenges in the game with creative use of these tools. It is a perfect articulation of the design philosophy behind the immersive sim, and the studio’s intention to “say yes to the player”.

Originally posted on Medium.com