I wanted to wait until I had finished playing Prey before writing this column. I was hoping that my worst fears would not be confirmed, but unfortunately, they have been.

Prey has some interesting things to it that certainly keep it from being a bad game. The gravity-changing walkways are neat. The spirit aspect makes for some interesting (albeit repetitive) puzzles. The guns all are basically modifications of the standard assault rifle-shotgun-rocket combo, but they, too, have a style that’s kind of interesting. However, it has one aspect that makes it yet another in a disturbing trend of videogames.

You can’t fail.

Hmm…do I overuse the one-sentence-paragraph-for-dramatic-impact? Probably, but that’s not the point here. Before I go further, let me describe to you how I play first person shooters. I only quicksave and quickload; and I hit that quicksave a lot, usually before an encounter (which every FPS veteran can feel coming a mile away). Sometimes I come out of an encounter with lots of health and plenty of ammo, and when I do, I move on. If I come out severely weakened and/or really low on ammo (being a pacifist, I’m terrible with guns), I quickload to before the encounter and do it again. I don’t quickload if I just lost five health, but if I walk away from an gun fight with fifteen health and four armour, I’m going to try better. You see, I always look at the next encounter and how well I’ll be going into it after the one I just finished.

Then all went out the window when I started playing Prey. In that game, you can die relatively easily; there are a lot of monster-swarming parts, and the tougher monsters tend to be fairly hard to beat in some of the situations. But here’s what happens when you die: you go into a sort of mini-game where you shoot evil spirits—or lost souls or something—with your spirit bow. As you shoot red ones, your health goes up; blue ones raise your spirit level. Slowly, you get sucked into a chasm in the middle of this “world”, which takes you back to where you just died, with replenished health and spirit based upon how many of those lost souls you dispatched. To make a long story short (too late), you don’t need to save, because you can’t die. The only time you have to save is when you quit the game. And that brings up a disturbing trend, which is also the title of this column: Mollycoddling.

One of the games that we at Aggravated Gamers champion is the classic Star Control 2, which you can still get today from fans who ported the 3DO version to the PC under the title The Ur-Quan Masters (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/). Check it out; you won’t regret it. But if you play the game, what you will regret is not planning ahead. Star Control 2 was merciless. Mining minerals and biologicals off planets was the only way to get RU’s (resource units, the game’s currency), which you would then use to upgrade your ship. However, since resources were limited, you will start having to go further and further to find them, having mined all the local planets dry. The further you went, the tougher enemies got and the more it cost you in fuel to get to your destination. That meant that if you didn’t strategically plan your upgrades early, you’d find the game quickly devolved into limping home with a small mineral load. Eventually, you knew that you had to restart the game. Frustrating? Sometimes, but was it rewarding? Absolutely.

Yet, that possibility to screw up is starting to disappear from games, especially those in adventure, FPS and RPG games. You might change outcomes and events, but rarely is there a game where you can get to a point and are forced to say to yourself: “I wish I hadn’t (pushed that button/killed that NPC/wasted my rocket ammo) in the last session; now I’m going to have to go back and try that again.” Some would argue that this is a good thing, as it removes player frustration. There is some legitimacy to that argument, but I would counter that it removes any of the planning that makes games so enjoyable. Why bother saving your more powerful weapons’ ammo when fighting the weaker enemies? You know that every boss battle will have plenty of ammo strewn about, and plenty of health packs to be had. Seriously, those bosses, if they truly wanted to kill the player, would ambush him (or her) in a tiny corridor far from any ammo locker or health station.

Maybe Prey is an exception to the future course of gaming; I really hope that it is. What I wish, basically, is that designer avoid these easy-outs, and bring some challenge be back to videogames. I know that a game has to be relatively easy for everyone to beat, or else it wouldn’t sell across various consoles and demographics. But I think game designers are insulting players’ intelligences by making these games that they can’t screw up in. They should be making traps that a player has to avoid, because once they’re caught in ‘em, the only option is the quick load. This will (a) force a player to think ahead and be more involved in the game, and (b) give a player a greater sense of triumph when he solves a challenge. Both these things will make the gaming experience more enjoyable.

The Monsignor

PS: Lookin’ at you, Half-Life franchise…you’re on thin ice in this regard.