I got back another couple of rolls of film, you may have noticed I'm sharing far fewer photos on Instagram these days. That's because I just don't trust that they're feeding it into some AI training or something. Sure they're probably scraping the web and these photos will end up in there anyway but at least I'm not just handing them over. Anyway doing a post here lets me pick out and talk about specific shots and share the albums in high quality(you'll find them at the end).

First, some photos from the Candido 400 roll. I haven't shot with this film stock before and we know how that can go... This was not a disaster though, any bad shots are just me messing up the focus. I like this film, it's like Fujifilm 200 but warmer and has a bit more contrast. I'll definitely shoot it again. With the higher ISO I wasn't sure how it would be in day light but it's nice. The first shots I took with it were in the evening, it was the reason I went with 400 ISO because my attempts at sunset photos with 200 weren't great.

I'm happy with how these sunset shots turned out, for these I had my GR III with me to have a comparison.

This is the only one that works as a good side by side, they shots are similar but in this I think the way the light feels bound to the sky makes it look better. In the GR III photo below it's like the light spreads has a haze over the surrounding area. The warmth of this film is really noticeable on the grass.

Very happy with this, I had been re-learning the best way to set the aperture to blow out or not blow out the sky and I think I got it spot on for this.

The sun sets fast! I just about got this in, I was rushing to the end of the street to get the framing I wanted and just about got it. After there was a guy who crossed the road asking to see the shot, I had to disappoint him and tell him he can't. So if he comes across this, here it is.

This is the sort of shot I got the 24-105mm lens for. I shot this at 105mm you can really make a crowd look dense for street shots.

I just like how well composed this shot is, colours are great too. Makes my garden look as lovely as it is.

The other roll was Kodak Color Plus 200, another film stock I haven't used but I've used other Kodak ones so I was more confident this would be grand and it was. I get why they call it Color Plus, it has great colours! Unfortunately with the weather we've been having a lot of these were in fairly stark lighting and I don't think that's where this film shines. The ones shot when it wasn't so bright are very nice though and the ones in bright light are still nice, the colours just don't pop as well.

Any photo of Dennis is great, but the sense of depth and colours in this one are really nice. Your focus is drawn to him really well.

I really like the composition of this one, the colours are nice and the grain gives it a nice mood.

Came across this cat in Brickfield's Park, they were so nice and friendly. The colour on the grass is great, I think this film will work really well in Autumn.

Love the focal plane I got on this one and the way the depth so smoothly blurs behind the crow. Also just very nice contrast, went early-ish in the morning specifically for shots like this.

Another one that draws your gaze to exactly where it should be.

My favourite from these 2 rolls, exactly what I was trying to get! It's so satisfying getting a photo back weeks later and having what you saw in your mind right there. Great colours and I love the way the brightness changes from top to bottom.

The full Candido roll

The full Kodak Color Plus roll

NOLF 2 was released in late 2002. While I wasn't a fan of the original the reviews were more positive for this, I remember picking it up and enjoying it. It seems I liked it so much having traded in my original copy(I did this a lot as a broke teen it does not mean I didn't like a game) I at some point re-bought the budget release. I came across the "Best Seller Series" copy when taking boxes of old games from my Mam's house recently and for this play through I installed it from the CDs! Neither NOLF game has gotten an official release on digital stores although both are quite easy to find on the internet archive. Like Max Payne 2 this is not as big of an improvement over the original as I remember. It is an improvement though and I'd say this is worth a replay if you liked it back in the day unlike the original.

       

By far the first thing I noticed an improvement with was the cut scenes. They're far more succinct with a camera that has more than 2 angles and characters that move around the scenes. The writing is an improvement too and Cate isn't belittled at all. The voice acting is all much better too, there are no slip ups with Cate's accent any more and the supporting characters all sound good. I think this really helps keep things moving, at no point was I sitting through 6 minutes of the same 2 shots as characters gave an exposition dump. That said the story isn't particularly interesting and while the writing is better it's still just fine. This isn’t a game I was playing for the story.

Hot on the heels of cut scenes when it comes to improvements is stealth. There are loads of cool mechanic that have been introduced to improve this aspect of the game, you can now hide in dark areas, turn out lights to create said dark areas, alarms turn off after a period of time and the state of the level gets reset. There's a gadget that allows you to fire tracking darts at enemies to keep tabs on them and you can move the bodies of enemies you'd knocked out or killed. It's just such a shame you're given so few opportunities to really put all of this to use outside of one level during the section set in India. For most levels the layouts don't lend themselves very well to stealth and the fundamental unpredictability of the enemy AI still undermines everything. I was quick saving before peeking out from a corner in case the enemy facing away from me some how spotted me instantly. Beyond this, there's very little benefit to being stealthy when it's just as easy to go in guns blazing which is what most levels feel designed for.

When combat does kick off it's fine. There's a decent amount of enemy variety both visually and in their weaponry but outside of 2 late game enemies the tactics required against them are piratically non-existent. Enemies run towards you shooting whatever weapon they have at you and you shoot back at them. Even the arsenal at your disposal rarely matters. There are a number of machine guns, a shotgun, a handgun and a sniper rifle. There are maybe 2 occasions where the sniper rifle is of use and otherwise it's a case of using whichever gun you have the most ammo for. It's not like there's an advantage to having a shotgun in tight corridors, even outdoors it's so easy to close the distance that it's useful. Even the different ammo types for these guns make little difference, you’ll never have a reason to need to use fire rounds for instance.

Gadgets make a streamlined return, they've been pared back and their use is usually context sensitive. This is a good move even if all it does is add a bit of visual variety to the various gates in a level. The one exception to the context sensitive use is the camera which I had to use once. The more I think about all the systems and items in these games that go barely used the more I wonder what sort of cohesion there was between the game and level designers.

A new addition is an upgrade system. Completing objectives nets you points that you use to upgrade abilities in a system that feels very "other games do this so we will too". It's all very plain, weapons do more damage, you get bugger health and armour bars etc. The one bit of it that stands out is stealth. Fully upgraded it makes stealth actually useful as the time required to hide and evade alarms drops massively and if this was just the baseline stealth system it would be great! But instead it's hidden behind a simplistic and unclear levelling system. God knows what putting points into gadgets does, maybe you use them faster and if so why would you ever bother with that? Again, systems that just don't fit in with the levels at all.

Let's wrap this up with what kept me playing. Visually it's still a very nice looking game, there's strong art direction and we're hitting that point in games where animations and textures are of a high enough quality that you can tell what everything is meant to be still. The music is nice and the feeling of being a spy is very much there. Searching through folder of documents, zapping an enemy with your stun gun and hiding in a room are all very fun. The variety of locations is nice and the story zips along at a nice pace. I don't think this is shorter than the original and if it is it's not by much but this flew by in comparison to the first, I got through it in 3 sittings. The pacing is very good and they know when to slow things down after a prolonged period of action. It's a fun few hours for sure.

A while ago I bought a Charmera which is a fun gimmicky toy camera. I like the lo-fi early 00s digital camera aesthetic you get from it.

       

It can also record video and inspired by this video I wanted to create something in the style of the tour diaries I remember seeing from bands in the early/mid 00s on MTV2. But I don't know much about video editing and without getting a bunch of software I'm not going to get far. I also wanted to capture the DVD player aesthetic I remember from then and had the idea of exaggerating that.

So my first port of call as it is for many thing like this, what Python libraries are there for video editing? I found moviepy and it looked to cover the sort of things I wanted to do. Overlay text, merge clips together, create specific clips etc. so I got to work grabbing some samples and hacking them together. The first version just read AVIs from a folder and put them together chronologically, that was pretty easy.

for file in files:
    current = current + 1
    filename = path + os.fsdecode(file)
    if filename.endswith(".avi"):
        clip = VideoFileClip(filename, audio=True)
        clip_list.append(clip)
final_clip = concatenate_videoclips(clip_list)
# without setting the audio codec to aac there was no sound on my iPhone
final_clip.write_videofile(folder + ".mp4", audio_codec='aac')

This is fine but a bit too simple and not quite what I'm going for, so next I wanted to add in a title screen that would be like an old DVD player in style; blue screen with low resolution text. I searched for the shades of blue and found some free to use fonts in that style and a few minutes of playing with moviepy I had some code to generate such a screen.

# Create the blue background
bg_clip = ColorClip(color=(3,0,239), duration=2, size=(width, height))
# Create title text
title_clip = TextClip(font="VCR_OSD_MONO_1.001.ttf", text=title, size=(width, height), font_size=72, color='white', horizontal_align='center', vertical_align='center').with_start(0).with_duration(2)
# Create subtitle text
subtitle_clip = TextClip(font="VCR_OSD_MONO_1.001.ttf", text=subtitle, size=(width, height), font_size=36, color='white', horizontal_align='center', vertical_align='center').with_start(0).with_duration(2).with_position((0,0.1), relative=True)
# Create the 'play' indication
play_clip = TextClip(font="VCR_OSD_MONO_1.001.ttf", text='>', size=(width, height), margin=(10, 10, 10, 10), font_size=72, color='white', horizontal_align='right', vertical_align='bottom').with_start(1).with_duration(1).with_position((-0.1,-0.1), relative=True)
# merge them together and add to the clip list
clip_list.append(CompositeVideoClip([bg_clip, title_clip, subtitle_clip, play_clip]))

That's better, now it has some identity. With the clips being short I wanted to give the idea of someone quickly skipping through chapters on a DVD, at first I was just going to add the skip indication but it was too subtle so I exaggerated it with a brief full blue screen as well. I don't think any DVD player was every like this but it works well to get the aesthetic across. I went back to the original bit of code that puts the clips together and added in the blue frame. This was a bit tricky with making the timing work as I wanted the skip text to appear just before the blue frame and stay during it. When I did this I also decided to add in an end clip, so I kept track of how many files were being put together in total to do that.

total = len(files)
for file in files:
    current = current + 1
    filename = path + os.fsdecode(file)
    if filename.endswith(".avi"):
        clip = VideoFileClip(filename, audio=True)
    if current < total:
        skip_clip = TextClip(font="VCR_OSD_MONO_1.001.ttf", text='skip', size=(width, height), margin=(10, 10, 10, 10), font_size=72, color='white', horizontal_align='right', vertical_align='bottom').with_start(clip.duration-.3).with_duration(.6).with_position((-0.1,-0.1), relative=True)
        bg_clip = ColorClip(color=(3,0,239), duration=.3, size=(width, height)).with_start(clip.duration)
        clip_list.append(CompositeVideoClip([clip, bg_clip, skip_clip]))
    else:
        bg_clip = ColorClip(color=(3,0,239), duration=2, size=(width, height))
        end_clip = TextClip(font="VCR_OSD_MONO_1.001.ttf", text="END", size=(width, height), font_size=72, color='white', horizontal_align='center', vertical_align='center').with_start(0).with_duration(2)
        clip_list.append(clip)
        clip_list.append(CompositeVideoClip([bg_clip, end_clip]))

And now I had everything I wanted for it. Here's a couple I've created so far.

London

Galway Film Fleadh

What I like about this it that I can generate these videos really easily, just put the clips I want into a folder and run this with a title and subtitle and I have my MP4 ready to use. No I do not plan to add a way to mute it and put music over it the horrible sound is part of it.

This is the full script. You need to install ffmpeg and point to it, the font I used is this one. Also thanks to highlightjs for the code blocks.

import os
import sys
from moviepy import *

os.environ["FFMPEG_BINARY"] = "C:\\Users\\paulh\\Documents\\ffmpeg\\bin\\ffmpeg.exe"
os.environ["FFPLAY_BINARY"] = "C:\\Users\\paulh\\Documents\\ffmpeg\\bin\\ffplay.exe"

if len(sys.argv) != 4:
    print("moviemerge.py [title] [subtitle] [clip_folder]")
    exit(0)

title = sys.argv[1]
subtitle= sys.argv[2]
folder = sys.argv[3]
width = 1440
height = 1080

clip_list = []

# Create the blue background
bg_clip = ColorClip(color=(3,0,239), duration=2, size=(width, height))
# Create title text
title_clip = TextClip(font="VCR_OSD_MONO_1.001.ttf", text=title, size=(width, height), font_size=72, color='white', horizontal_align='center', vertical_align='center').with_start(0).with_duration(2)
# Create subtitle text
subtitle_clip = TextClip(font="VCR_OSD_MONO_1.001.ttf", text=subtitle, size=(width, height), font_size=36, color='white', horizontal_align='center', vertical_align='center').with_start(0).with_duration(2).with_position((0,0.1), relative=True)
# Create the 'play' indication
play_clip = TextClip(font="VCR_OSD_MONO_1.001.ttf", text='►', size=(width, height), margin=(10, 10, 10, 10), font_size=72, color='white', horizontal_align='right', vertical_align='bottom').with_start(1).with_duration(1).with_position((-0.1,-0.1), relative=True)
# merge them together and add to the clip list
clip_list.append(CompositeVideoClip([bg_clip, title_clip, subtitle_clip, play_clip]))

path = "clips/{0}/".format(folder)
directory = os.fsencode(path)
files = os.listdir(directory)
files.sort(key=lambda x: os.path.getmtime(directory + x))
current = 0
total = len(files)
for file in files:
    current = current + 1
    filename = path + os.fsdecode(file)
    if filename.endswith(".avi"):
        clip = VideoFileClip(filename, audio=True)
    if current < total:
        skip_clip = TextClip(font="VCR_OSD_MONO_1.001.ttf", text='skip »', size=(width, height), margin=(10, 10, 10, 10), font_size=72, color='white', horizontal_align='right', vertical_align='bottom').with_start(clip.duration-.3).with_duration(.6).with_position((-0.1,-0.1), relative=True)
        bg_clip = ColorClip(color=(3,0,239), duration=.3, size=(width, height)).with_start(clip.duration)
        clip_list.append(CompositeVideoClip([clip, bg_clip, skip_clip]))
    else:
        bg_clip = ColorClip(color=(3,0,239), duration=2, size=(width, height))
        end_clip = TextClip(font="VCR_OSD_MONO_1.001.ttf", text="END", size=(width, height), font_size=72, color='white', horizontal_align='center', vertical_align='center').with_start(0).with_duration(2)
        clip_list.append(clip)
        clip_list.append(CompositeVideoClip([bg_clip, end_clip]))

final_clip = concatenate_videoclips(clip_list)
final_clip.write_videofile(folder + ".mp4", audio_codec='aac')

First up, recently in person a few people have chatted to me about things I've shared here and that makes me so happy! It's nice to know people are reading some of what I'm putting up here but also discovering new things because of it. If one person discovers a game, movie, article, book or whatever because I've shared it then it was worth it. Don't be worried about dropping me a message or saying it to me when you see me if there's something I've shared that you liked, that's part of why I'm doing this.

       

This was a busy month! The weather was fantastic here so I spent a lot of time just enjoying it, so nice to just relax in the garden listening to music and napping. I feel the need to make the most of it because I'll miss getting to do that come October.

I went to see Big grande and then the day after got to perform a monoscene with one of the members along with John Spillane. I haven't done a monoscene in a while and it was fun to do one again, it was also great that we were all on the same page.

Then on the following Monday I woke up and was quite sick for a few days. Some sort of cold or flu, I was mostly just exhausted but thankfully it cleared up in time for the weekend because it was a big weekend for me...

I took a trip to Galway to attend the World Premiere of The Badger of Balylbog in the Galway Film Fleadh. It's a feature length movie created by my friend John with pretty much no money and starring loads of amazing people from the Irish comedy scene. I never in my life dreamed I'd see myself in a film screening at a film festival! It was a really fun experience and it was so nice to be in Galway with loads of my friends, it felt like a school trip. Whenever there are screenings of The Badger of Balylbog I'll relay the info here.

       

I caught up on backing up my photos. I had gotten into the habit of doing this at the end of each month, deleting anything not worth saving to clear up my cloud storage and then whatever was worth keeping gets backed up to my media server. I haven't done it in a year though, so it was nice to have a year of good memories to look over. I was also recently looking over some photos I had printed, I want to get them into some albums because it really is nice to have a flick through a photo album to appreciate how good things are.

I was over in London for a day to see Oh, Mary!(more on that below), I went over with my friend and it was a fun trip and a good chance to catch up. I also very briefly caught up with my friend who lives in London who very nicely always gives me a bed to sleep in when I'm over.

I was out at my Mam's and now that I can drive I've started to move lots of the boxes of ym stuff from her house. I came back with a few boxes of old games and DVDs, going through them brought back so many memories and there's some proper rare stuff in there. I was reunited with my copy of Raising the Bar which I've wanted to go back through recently. I'm looking forward to going through it properly and also getting some of these old consoles working. I now have my old Dreamcast, N64 & GameCube but my PS2 has not surfaced yet. 😞

The end of the month was pretty busy with various comedy activities. On Thursday night it was MAyor of Comedytown, it's a show my friend Mikey co-created and involves the audience voting throughout the show using a voting system I created that lets them go to a web page, fill in a profile and vote for their preferred candidate. It was lots of fun and seeing charts on what demographics are voting for who was fun and best of all nothing broke on the night! Unfortunately that means as I'm writing this the day after I have the usual post-great show blues. I'm going to Comedy Bang Bang in the evening though so that will cheer me up.

Oh, I made this site display better on mobile and there's now an RSS feed for anyone who would like to keep up with new posts using that.

       

!!BREAKING NEWS!!
Dee had been missing all week, I hadn't see her since Monday and I was getting very worried. I was getting ready to start making posters to put in the area after there being no sign of her when I was walking around the place. Then on Friday I heard frantic meowing from across the road, it was Dee rushing home! She was starving so I think she got trapped in a shed or something, but I'm so happy she's back home.

From my blog

I wrote about shooting a new film stock and a food tour in Berlin. I have a bunch of drafts so hopefully I get more posts out next month.

Some good things I read & watched & listened to

Let's get the AI being bad stuff out of the way:
📃 How AI Is Ruining Education, In One Handy Chart
📃 Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
📼 The Space Data Centers Situation is Insane

I wonder how much of this he believes and how much of it is part of the grift.
📃 Pickup Artist Mystery Has an AI Girlfriend

Good.
📃 The Backlash Is So Strong That People With “Pervert Glasses” Are Afraid to Use Them in Public

The Gist from Simon McGarr is always an interesting read on Irish politics.
📃 The Gist: The End of the 100 Year Government

I enjoyed the sentiment of this, it's an approach I have also taken on lately. I have lots of projects and I get to them when I can, I'm not stressing about them too much. Apologies to those waiting on more Hivemind, it'll be ready when it's ready.
📃 Reality just keeps unfolding

A good and fairly brief history of multiplayer games that goes a bit beyond video games.
📼 The History & Evolution of Massively Multiplayer Games

A very fitting game for Jank to cover. A nice story of someone's first foray into making games and covers the wonderfully broken but ahead of its time Boiling Point. Also Jank is very much worth subscribing to if you're into articles like this.
📃 The making of Boiling Point: Road To Hell, the most broken game I've ever loved

Second/fourth wave emo music is great.
📼 Ultimate Emo Fan Goes Deep on the Genre

Making an album as an indie artist is a lot of work.
📼 I tried making an album in 30 days

Summer Games Done Quick

I always enjoy catching up on the Games Done Quick events, there's one in Winter and one in Summer raising money for Cancer Research & Doctors Without Borders. It's a great success story within games for stamping out the more hateful side of gaming and I recommend reading the article below about that. I've also shared a few speed runs that I enjoyed watching from it.

📃 Games Done Quick's Long, Difficult Journey To A Better Gaming Future
📼 Super Mario and Luigi World: Brotherhood

Just some funny things I saw

Cats in boxes
A funny web comic

TV

Such Brave Girls

I re-watched this show, it's a very funny show about mostly unlikeable people.

Funboys

A odd comedy set in a small village in Northern Ireland. Some very funny stuff in this, worth a watch.

Make That Movie

I actually watched this last month and forgot to include it, Sam Campbell's show for Channel 4 is a lot of fun. The school episode was my favourite.

Info Wars

The now owned by The Onion Info Wars has been really funny, the lat episode I watched with the whistle blower who kept steering the conversation to Japan was fantastic.

Films

The Invite

Incredibly funny and surprising through out, perfectly paced and a wonderful use of sound.

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie

Easily the best move from TV show to movie there has ever been. Goofy, silly, incredibly funny and leaves you wondering how they did this.

Carolina Caroline

A fun film about a criminal couple on a trip across the southern USA with good tension and heartfelt moments. Looks fantastic, great music and 2 leads that work really well together.

Games

Prey(2017)

I wrote loads about this here.

The Incident at Galley House

I've only played the first couple of hours of this but love it so far. The presentation is excellent with some great voice acting and the interface that's been created works really well and removes the cumbersome-ness of the  original from Type Help. I'm looking forward to getting back to this, I'm playing it with my friend and it has definitely been a case of two brains are better than one. This remake is done by the people behind the previously recommended The Roottrees Are Dead and incorporates some of the useful elements from it such as letting you know how much info there is left to find in a scene.

Get it here.

Escape from Ever After

Another that I haven't finished yet, clearly inspired by Paper Mario this is a fun light RPG that doesn't really do much new. I'm playing on Steam Deck and it works well in 30 minute sessions.

Get it here.

Factorio

I'm not late to this, I've actively avoided it because I know myself. I finally picked it up and played it for about 6 hours in one day. It's a game where you automate a big mad factory on a planet to build a space ship to leave it, it's basically an abstraction of programming and I just get too into that sort of thing and lose hours of my life. It happened with Satisfactory a game that had me drawing diagrams on my white board for new sections of the factory. But if you're having fun with it isn't that the point.

Get it here.

Kaz

A great game to play in between meetings. Lots of variety in the unlockable characters to keep things interesting and a fun high score chasing game.

Get it here.

Theatre

Big Grande & Tiny

Two great improv groups in one night, a really fun show and always nice to see improv in the main space of Smock Alley.

Oh Mary!

This is one of the funniest shows I've ever seen. I knew very little about it going in so it was a real surprise. Absolutely worth a trip to London to see it.

Comedy Bang Bang

This cheered me up! I've seen Comedy Bang Bang live before and it was good but this time they were great. Fred Armisen was a surprise guest start too, I was srying with laughter.

Music

The Strokes – Reality Awaits

It's more modern Stroke, its grand. Lonely in the Future is excellent though, one of their best.

Charli XCX – Music, Fashion, Film

A contender for my favourite album of the year! A short fun album with no misses. The guitars across the album are class and the end of the album is weird and brilliant.

Books

Beautyland

I'm re-reading this, a wonderful book about humans and our world. I find it hard to explain exactly what I love about this book but I heartily recommend it.

This is going to contain spoilers for Prey if you haven't completed it, so if you plan to you have been warned. If you like slow paced systems heavy games I absolutely recommend Prey replaying it was such a joy. I had forgotten so much of it since its release 9 years ago this felt like a fresh play through which is always a great experience.

I beat Prey when it was released in 2017 and I liked it, but didn't love it even though it feels like a game tailor made for me. With this replay I absolutely loved it and remembered that my first time playing both Deus Ex & System Shock 2 I bounced off them and it wasn't until I returned to them years later that I enjoyed them so much more. For Prey something I realise now is that I took the cowards way out on my first play through but for good reason and that reason might also be why I didn't enjoy it as much the first time through. I'll get to what that is shortly.

Prey is a sci-fi FPS immersive sim about trust. Or a lack of trust. The game starts with you waking up in an apartment about to start your first of work for a new company with your brother. You get up, get dressed, look out over the skyline of the city and get a helicopter to your new office. Upon getting there you meet your brother, take a series of tests with what the testers see as odd results before an alien attacks one of the testers and you're knocked out. Then you wake up in an apartment but this time you don't get a call from your brother. You retrace your steps from the day before and the janitor form the day before lies in the hall dead with a wrench lying next to her. It's a game so you pick it up and wander around looking for somewhere to go but all the doors are locked, but your balcony door is made of glass so you can just smash the glass to get out. You smash the glass revealing the behind the scenes fo the facade you've been in. There is no city, it's been an image on a screen made possible with Looking Glass a technology that accurately simulates a 3D world on a screen. None of this is real and as you begin to explore you find the helicopter is nothing but a motion simulator with screens. In many games the theme of trust would be in the story but Prey takes it into the game mechanics as well. The first enemy you encounter is a mimic, an alien creature that can mimic any object in the game to hide in plain site. For the remainder of the game you will be weary of two identical objects sat next to one another. It's a brilliant start to a game that perfectly sets up the main theme that will persist throughout.

Once the game starts proper you find our you're on a space station that is overrun with aliens known as the Typhon who have the ability to not only mimic objects but also people along with various gnarly powers such as telekinesis and mind control. Catching you up on what's going on is January an AI Operator created by you for this exact situation, you find out that you were previously researching the Typhon but for some reason were reduced to a test subject by your brother. Also speaking to you is your brother. Then December, another AI operator created by you to tell you not to listen to January. Or was it? January shows you a video you recorded telling yourself to destroy the station. December shows you a video of you with your brother telling you to nullify the aliens. There's a chef who has locked himself in a kitchen who asks for help getting an item from his room. If you're observant you'll cop he neither looks or sounds like the person he claims to be in the logs you find. Or if you encounter another character before him they'll tell you he isn't who he says he is, but at that point can you trust her? I love how much the game is filled with these situations, even the fish tanks aren't real they're just Looking Glass screens! There's a pond in one location that on this play through I accidentality shot and it revealed the whole pond and waterfall are just an illusion, a Looking Glass screen.

Before I get to what I enjoy so much in terms of game play I want to touch on another way Prey integrates the fiction with the game play. In BioShock's story Rapture has gone to shit after the discovery of plasmids, a way for people to splice their genes to have super human powers such as shooting fire or lightning from your hands. You too can get these powers but the fiction never feels relevant. You come across people driven mad by plasmids, no longer fully human and desperately killing and looting to survive. I never really felt that as a player, getting plasmids never felt like there was a downside it was all upside. In Prey you can learn to harness the powers of the Aliens using Neuromods, a technology that allows humans to learn various skills(such as piano) that you learns the cause of this whole disaster was the research into infusing Alien abilities into these. The difference in Prey is that you're warned the use of these will turn the station's defences against you as the more you get the more you will be recognised as an Alien. For my first play through I never learned a single Alien ability which is essentially a voluntary hard mode. The Alien abilities are incredibly powerful especially when it comes to combat and the reason I took the aforementioned cowards ending, which is escaping on a private shuttle and just abandoning making any decision on the mess you created, was because of how difficult it was to survive an onslaught that occurs at that point in the game. I realised on this play through where I learned Alien abilities from the get go what a difference they make even beyond combat and I had a much better time having learned these abilities. I will argue that the punishment is pretty mild and it won't take you long to learn more abilities and strategies that nullify the punishment, I would have liked to see this pushed further. I do still like that the game lets you forgo them  with a good reason for why you would and Dishonored 2(another Arkane game, probably my favourite game there is) also allowed this with an explanation but in that case I saved doing so for a later play through.

Prey really shines once it comes to the actual game part of it, it allows a great level of freedom and never feels like the designers have spotted something and clocked up from doing it. To the contrary it feels like they've spent an enormous amount of time giving you choices and making sure they all work. Take the security stations you encounter in each area, within each one is a terminal that will give you a map of that area and access to the locations of people. Every one of these are the same design but how you get in changes; some are locked, some are just open, some you'll already have a key for or you will find the key on a body nearby. All of them have a small slot like you'd find at a teller in a bank and if you have the power to become any object you can just become a small object and you're in, I don't think I ever found one arbitrarily blocked. You get a small nerf gun that you can use to active the unlock door button inside rooms if you can get a shot at it. At one point there was a locked office I could not figure out how to get into, then I just smashed the glass window and walked in. Of course I can do that, this was just some offices that in every day life no one would do that but now it's a fair approach to take. They're not some how indestructible as a way to force you to find other solutions, sometimes the simple brute force approach is the one to take. You can set up explosives as traps for enemies, sneak past them ignoring them entirely or just run away from them. You're never forced into a way to play and while your choices might leave you in a pickle there is probably some way out of it. Even the power curve of the game is something it lets you abuse, save for a small roadblock you can manufacture as many upgrade items as you like so long as you have the resources allowing you to become absurdly powerful later in the game. I had an amazing moment where I was away from the starting area for hours and when I returned it felt familiar but I was no longer the same terrified Morgan sneaking around and running away, I was now near indestructible and that flip feels so satisfying. Rooms that filled me with dread before I now passed through without realising. IF I have one criticism of the game it's that the enemies never evolve much and the mimics turn into more of a nuisance than anything else, half way through you've seen almost all of what's on offer and shortly after you're so powerful that they pose little threat.

The last aspect I want to talk about is the station itself and how well realised it is. I've already brushed on the realistic approach taken to the office spaces & security stations and unsurprisingly that extends to every aspect of the station. From developer interviews there's one aspect of the station that is faked when you're looking at it from the outside but otherwise it all fits together logically  and doors between areas are where they should be. Every crew member exists on(or just outside in a few cases) the station and can be found. These people who's bed you can find with emails you can read through to piece together what their life was like are all real people not something that's there for the sake of exposition. The crew works as a great device to flesh out the politics of the station, who knew what was really going on and who was oblivious. You'll discover bitter enemies and lovers, two people who couldn't stomach what they were working on any more and were in the midst of exposing the truth, a tabletop RPG group and their character sheets, colleagues trying to undermine one another to give themselves an advantage. It's all really well written and does a lot to make the station feel real. As does the architecture, there's a great variety and the sort of things you'd imagine would be there. Accommodation of various quality depending on your status within the company, a level that is a small garden area right down to a power plant area that is as massive as you'd imagine it to be. Every department has an office area complete with desks for the people who work there. Everything holds together incredibly well and the thought that went into creating something so cohesive is clear.

I'll touch briefly on the ending, I'm not sure what other people think of it but I like it. In the end you find out that you're not really Morgan or at least not Morgan living through the events. Some of the events have probably played out, it seems like Transtar doomed the Earth to be overtaken by the Typhon(or the Typhon did so independently) from their reckless research but Alex is looking to put things right by seeing if the Typhon can have empathy for humans by injection a Typon(you) with Morgan's memories. It's not super clear but it is one of those endings that gets away with being open to interpretation. Thematically it's a great fit, as I said at the start at no point can you trust what you're seeing including the entire story that has just played out.

If you want to know more

• The Making of PREY - Documentary
• How Prey's Mind-Bending Opening Level Was Designed | Noclip