Watcha Playin’?-Prey for Pride
June is Pride month, which means it’s time for some quality queer gaming content here on YGGP. I have some pretty neat stuff lined up on the writing side, but wanted to do some more interactive stuff as well, so I decided to do some streaming. We’re straying away from our usual Bloodborne fare to try out some games that are either queer focused, or have queer elements. First up was Prey (2017).
A lot of people seem to have slept on this game, so you might not know that if you play as a female Morgan Yu, you’re canonically queer. In the tradition of immersive sims, you find notes and audio logs throughout the environment which clue you into the backstory of characters and the happenings on the Talos I space station. Some of these notes reveal an awkward break up Morgan had with a coworker, a coworker who is a woman, regardless of your gender. These audio logs and notes also shed some light on another wlw (women loving women) couple on the station.
This was my third time starting Prey, and my first doing so on stream. I thought having an audience would help ease the tension a little bit, but it actually made it weirdly scarier. Like I talked about in my previous Watcha Playin’? about Bloodborne, environments really freak me out, so Prey is essentially a horror game to me. But when I’m alone, I know that about myself and can just kind of chalk all the jump scares and whatnot to me being a big baby. But with an audience who’s also getting spooked, it becomes waaay harder to brush it off as just a personal failing.
Trying to talk and stay engaged with chat also meant I wasn’t paying as much attention to what was going on around me, which led to making stupid mistakes, or walking right into scares. When I play alone, I’m usually so hyper-vigilante that I’m always prepared for something to jump out at me, but with the chat, that was definitely not the case.
Despite it being much scarier this way, I actually preferred playing with the audience. It was validating to hear other people have the same issues with the game’s difficulty and pacing, and paying less attention meant I was scared right along with the chat, even though I’ve already seen the opening three hours before. It also encouraged me to try out different methods of navigating the station and handling situations that were more daring and entertaining, because I knew how to do it a different way if my experiments didn’t work out.
I don’t know if I’ll stream Prey again for Pride since it was a very stressful experience, but I am looking forward to streaming it again at some point in the future. Maybe third time’s the charm and we can all beat it together.
