In Prey, water is life

In most games, you are out of luck if you have been hurt and don’t have enough medkits or magic to heal your character. But in Prey, you can game the system instead.

Bethesda’s Prey debuted last Friday on the PC and consoles as one of the big budget video game releases of May. One of its features is emergent gameplay, where just about anything can happen on a vast space station infested with aliens that take the shape of their surroundings. In emergent games, the designers don’t script every action. Rather, they set up a system where the player can roam and make things happen. It’s up to the player to discover the best way to play, and this one little example shows how modern video games are becoming virtual simulations of real life.