Actual Play: Prey

Actual Play is where we actually play games and then review them. You know, sort of like most video game sites do.

Available platforms: PC, PlayStation 4 (played), Xbox One

Whether or not a game necessarily has to be “fun” is a debate, I think, that’s worth having. So to is the ongoing conversation about fetishising difficulty and the ability of players. The times I struggled with Prey, though, were not borne out of a challenging stretch or the moments of gut-wrenching tension. It’s when it felt like a slog.

Save scumming as radical self-care

Bloodborne is one of the most frustrating, maddening, fantastic games I have ever played. It also, somewhat paradoxically, helped me manage my IRL anxiety. That is not a sentence I expected to write before booting up my first From Software game, from which I peaced out around Shadows of Yharnam because I had other things to do with my life than spend hours on a bullshit three-on-one boss encounter, but I nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed the time I did sink into it. Even that kinda seems like the wrong verb to use for a Souls game: enjoyed. The difficulty level, patronising simplicity of the “YOU DIED” Game Over screen and general inscrutability mean that, largely, the language we use to describe playing a game by Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team it supposed to be more akin to some kind of a trial, a challenge, something you persevere through. In actuality, I found it pretty comparable to my own coping mechanisms.