Over the holiday break, I was given the opportunity to give No Matter Studios Praey for the Gods a go whilst enjoying the much-needed holiday breather. What I found with it was an interesting open-world experience that takes the concept of Shadow of the Colossus and mixes it together with a survival adventure. It’s an interesting concept where you are requiring getting players through a meaningful narrative that is powerful on the surface, while also providing the option of not needing them to stick to the linear plan. Also, they fight giant beings.
Does it work? Not all of it, but it has some really redeeming qualities that are worth a look.
Let’s get right into it.
Story taking the wheel
The story behind Praey for the Gods is simple enough. You play the role of a hero that is either going to die from the world freezing over or explore a desolate region where the gods hang out in order to try and figure out how to stop the world from freezing. From the get-go, the story is bleak at best. Your adventure, which leads you to crash on the shores of the gods’ frozen wasteland, has shreds of the dead everywhere around it. The scattered remains of skeletons with notes, the ancient frozen statues that show some sort of struggle or history of the land, and the deadly monsters that have survived the tundra that are ready to kill; all of these are waiting for your hero. To be frank, this might be the most interesting part of the entire experience. The narrative is solid, mysterious, and it encourages you to go explore the land, even if it’s only to see what’s out there. It sends you on a non-linear quest of sorts to uncover more about this land’s history and those who failed to accomplish what you have set out to rectify. The scattered bits of tales and dead bodies that go with it will provide you with the right amount of motivation to keep exploring the entire land, and it’s a big land. Again, the narrative drives the entire game, otherwise, the rest of the game would be bleak as the story itself.
Now, saying the narrative drives the ship isn’t a knock on the gameplay. When you have a good story, it really does make the gameplay design choices a bit more meaningful, if done right. For the most part, the game’s narrative does a decent job of working well with the gameplay design. Trust me, games that have good stories generally have gameplay design in mind with those stories. The first big connection between the story and gameplay design is the survival component.
Surviving the elements and past design flaws
Since the entire story wraps itself around the idea that the world is freezing, and that your hero is trying to do something about it before they die, it makes sense that the first design is survival. Gathering items, hunting for your food, and making sure you have a good place to stay before you completely freeze over will motivate you to explore and keep laser-focused. I have never been a huge fan of survival games like this in the past, The Long Dark is the lone exception, but I felt like the game provided enough of everything (food, shelter, and time to gather) in the right amounts to make this a fun survival experience. That’s a tough balance to make survival fun because sometimes the struggle to survive in a game makes the gameplay a chore. No one wants to play a chore-driven game…unless you enjoy power washing. Anyway, the gameplay really does give you enough wiggle room to make mistakes and provides enough direction and time to make sure you are in the right place when you need to haul ass back to shelter. I never felt isolated in the middle of nowhere, even when I was exploring. As a survival game, this works well.
A knock on this survival design is that the world itself seems a bit bland. While the environment is huge and you will want to explore every nook and cranny, it can at times seem a bit empty. I’m conflicted whether this is playing off the story or if this world was so large that there wasn’t enough to fit into it. My optimistic side says that because the story supports the idea that there were several groups that went down this path and several that failed, the world here should seem empty, sans enemies and wildlife that thrives in the cold. There should be just leftovers and desolation. My pessimistic side is that the devs didn’t have enough of a plan to fill this large landscape, which is possible. For me as an individual, I think the large, empty landscape with scattered remains of people shows that the land is inhabitable and that no one managed to accomplish what your character is set out to do. In short, it’s a suicide mission at best. Then again, I can see people saying the largely empty landscape can get long in the tooth. Of course, a lot of people said that about Death Stranding and they were wrong.
Breath of the Wild-ed Us
Realism is always nice in a game. Is it a necessary design element based on a story that has someone going to visit gods in a frozen wasteland in hopes of changing the climate of the world by eliminating them? No, not at all. Praey for the Gods does enough in its gameplay design to justify it as a survival game. Gathering materials, resting, eating, and making sure not to freeze to death is more than enough to make this a survival challenge. The game sadly takes this one step further with wear/tear on weaponry, which eventually renders weapons useless. That element of this game is unnecessary realism that just slows down the ultimate mission and gives you another element to worry about while you worry about other survival elements. This part of the gameplay design is frustrating and takes away from the flow of the adventure. This is something I absolutely despised in Breath of the Wild and somehow an element that was forgiven by most reviewers of that game (and somehow they couldn’t’ forgive this game for that? Conflicted). While I fully understand that this is an extra cog in the survival machine, it simply is frustrating to have to think about this, especially when you’re in mid-attack with a boss or a strong set of enemies, and quite frankly it is unnecessary. Picking and choosing your targets due to eventual weaponry degradation isn’t a fun way to play any game, even a survival game.
This could have been completely left out and the struggle to survive would have been maintained. That said, there are different ways to play the game that have varying degrees of weapon degradation. If you set the game to Story mode it will prevent weapon breakage but will continue to damage weapons as they are used. Is that useful? I guess, but still, your weapons must be replaced at some point or repaired. The Boost mode of the game is where your weapons are completely broken but are repairable. Between the two, I don’t honestly understand the point. I get you there are people who love being tortured by a game but the game itself is not set in realism, so why include this at all? It should be the strength of weapons that eventually need replacing due to increased enemy difficulty. That is an understandable way of wanting to push forward and keep exploring to find new weapons. As this feature stands, it is very Breath of the Wild and honestly, Nintendo didn’t make a good decision with that weaponry direction. No, I don’t care that you disagree with that assessment.
Staying on the topic of difficulty, I will commend the good folks at No Matter for allowing a hodge-podge of mix/match with difficulty settings. They open their game with varying degrees of difficulty and how comfortable a player feels with survival elements. For me, I’m a pure story person that doesn’t like worrying about survival (unless I’m playing Metal Gear Solid 3, then survival away!), so it was nice being able to choose the type of game I wanted to play. It is a good out, but still, the weapon-wearing-down thingy is just a bad direction for any developer to go. *whispers* Unless you do it in the Dark Souls games. That makes sense.
Mechanics
The mechanics laid out in Praey for the Gods can be complicated, but pleasantly so. The fighting mechanics are generally based on what you feel comfortable with as a weapon, and they are hit and miss (literally and figuratively). When I was armed with an axe/sword/whatever and engaged in close combat with enemies, it felt like any other game, which was a good thing. It worked, it felt natural, and I got results, though the weapon damages quickly over time.
The bow and arrow mechanic was more frustrating. The aiming system for the bow/arrow was just weird, especially early on. When you pull back the string on the bow to fire, you get a circular targeting system that gives you a varying range of hit/miss in correlation with circle size. How long you keep the bow back, how tight it is, will result in how accurate you are with your strike. It’s literally a 40/60 (hit/miss) ratio with the bow/arrow firing mechanic, which is baffling. It will set a tone early on that you have no interest in using the bow and arrow, which is regretful because that takes away, at least in my mind, any chance of doing a long-range attack. It would have been much better had there been a crosshair and accuracy based on how long you can keep that bow tight (tightest being almost 99% accurate). It seemed like the devs wanted to challenge people, but timing is a tougher challenge and less frustrating than simply making the accuracy of it loosey-goosey. Long story short, I didn’t enjoy this weapon at all because of the mechanic decisions.
Other than this complaint, I think the game does several things right that most games of this type get wrong. For example, climbing a mountain is a wonderful mechanic in this game. If you don’t choose a glacier, you can climb any mountain you want in Praey for the Gods. Do you know how long I have pined for such a mechanic in an open-world adventure game? You will find most of my hours in Skyrim are based on ‘Can I climb this mountain? Let’s find out. The fact that this game allows you to do this opens a bevy of possibilities when it comes to exploring. This alone will motivate you to go explore the game. Add that ability to the fact that you get a glider like in Breath of the Wild and you’re set with making this open-world experience interesting and engaging.
The core mechanics of this game, fighting and exploring, were simple and thought through, outside of the bow/arrow. The additional goodies of crafting and surviving were fine as well. I like that you can repair broken or damaged items. I like that you must gather certain pieces to make that happen. Considering how small the development team for this game was, it’s a good game when it comes to these items of interest.
Fighting the bigs
You’ll know from the get-go with Praey for the Gods how much influence the PlayStation 2 game Shadow of the Colossus had on the design of the bosses. You’ll see this firsthand with the primer boss, where you will have to jump on top of a giant god, activate some pull/push attacks located in specific places to bring down the mammoth creature. While attacking, you’ll also have to hang onto the creature with limited stamina, then make your way back onto it after you get exhausted and fall off. This is incredibly similar to SotC and something that is actually quite challenging and fun. Of course, not all bosses are built the same in the game and you’ll find yourself going head-to-head with tricky ones, but they’re massive and intimidating, which makes them interesting instantly.
Other items of interest
There are puzzles in this game and they work and don’t work. The survival element of the game can get in the way of the puzzles, though the puzzles are creatively done. For example, there is a puzzle in a cave where you must light lanterns as you move back and forth on moving platforms. You must shoot your arrow through a torch and into the lantern area to light it. Easy enough, right? The catch is that you must have enough arrows to accomplish this. Since the bow/arrow mechanic is a chore when it comes to accuracy, there is a great chance you’re going to absolutely miss the torch/lantern connection. You have a finite number of arrows to deal with, so when those run out, you must go out and gather more. You can do that by defeating enemies, which can be tough to find. To accomplish the puzzle, you must be accurate. To be accurate, you must have enough arrows. To have enough arrows, you must go defeat enemies or other ways. Regardless, it’s a pain in the caboose when things hit the wall.
Some of those puzzles aside, other puzzles simply require you to look around and figure out how doors can be opened and accessed. For example, there is a room that has a large creature casting magical balls of light at you from the ground. You must position yourself behind huge lamps to get the creature to light them, which will unlock the solution of the puzzle. It’s clever, not that tough to figure out, and it works. Most puzzles in this game follow this suit, but some fall flat due to survival mechanics.
Okay, enough of my jibber-jabber. Let’s wrap this thing up.
Conclusion
Praey for the Gods from No Matter Studios is a game with potential. It has some good survival gameplay design and is an interesting open-world adventure that encourages exploration of its desolate landscape. There’s a lot to like here, though not completely perfect in some gameplay aspects.
