Praey for the Gods

This week in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Praey for the Gods.

Transcript
Things have gone a bit off the rails here on the Zero Punctuation express, but now we're getting back on track, and the buffet car has tentatively brought out the individually-wrapped pastries again. Let's talk about a game from last year I've been meaning to review: Praey for the Gods. Apparently, they couldn't call it "P-R-E-Y for the Gods" 'cos of concern it'd get confused with P-R-E-Y, the other game-- I mean, the other other game. And they couldn't call it "P-R-A-Y for the Gods", 'cos that's not a pun. Still a better option than "Praey for the Gods", I'd say, 'cos that's both not a pun and not a fucking word.

Anyway, quick summary: Praey for the Gods is a third-person open world game that I imagine one would probably look upon a lot more charitably had one never heard of Shadow of the Colossus; inconveniently, however, I have, and even less conveniently, I very clearly remember it being really good. And Praey for the Gods is Shadow of the Colossus, but shorter and not as really good. You're a traveller who comes to a distant land and gets told by a weird mystical disembodied voice in a temple to go to a series of ambulatory historical interest sites and duff them up. Only, where, in Shadow of the Colossus, you're doing it for very coherent and emotionally affecting story reasons - i.e., your girlfriend has carked it, and you're hoping, if you murder a few skyscrapers, her spirit will be caught by the gravitational pull of your gigantic balls - Praey for the Gods doesn't make it quite so clear. The world is boned - and also, in the plot of the video game, the world is boned - and killing the seven colossi will in some way help; maybe they've all been widdling in the rivers.

And then the game seems to start fretting that we're not quite invested enough in proceedings, and goes, "Wait! I know what will fix this: survival crafting elements!" Oh, here we fucking go! 'Cos of course, while I was playing Shadow of the Colossus and getting mashed into the dirt by a concrete hoof the size of an above-ground swimming pool, I remember thinking, "Boy, this would be so much more engaging if my dude was also hankering for a sandwich!" In fairness, while the crafting, you're stuck with, you can choose your preferred level of survival elements, and here's Yahtzee's gameplay hot tip: you want the lowest fucking setting. I don't care how many dead girlfriends you need to pull across the giant balls event horizon; anything else just isn't fun.

See, on the medium setting, you die if you run out of stamina while swimming, and the first non-tutorial colossus in the game is basically a cylinder jutting out of a pond like a late-night kebab shit in a public toilet. And if you fall into the pond, it'll be because you fell off the colossus, in which case, you won't have any stamina because you used it all up leaping across the sweet corn kernels embedded in its turd-like form, so that's as assuredly instant-death as if you'd fallen into a volcano full of sharks who were already very annoyed about the volcano thing. And any time you die, you have to start the colossus fight all over again, no matter how many inexpertly timed dodge-rolls you were towards victory.

But maybe I'm being too hard on Poo for the Gods. It deserves a non-zero quantity of props for effectively recreating the feel of Shadow of the Colossus: the authentic weightiness of these ancient crumbling titans against the smallness of the protagonist, as they desperately scramble along their patches of fur, flailing limbs, and fanny pack straps. (The ones that don't resemble gigantic poo-poos, at any rate.) There's even a couple of innovations that Shadow of the Colossus could've done with, like a parachute ; yeah, Wander was kicking himself in the giant balls for not packing one of those around the time he was trying to scramble across the second airborne one. 'Course, the parachute uses stamina, so if you have just had to fall off a colossus from overexertion, then the parachute is only good for writing your last will and testament on before you hit the ground like a bin bag full of wet yard clippings.

Oh yes, and it also adds a grappling hook; some crafty sod watched my Halo Infinite review, I see, and thinks a hookshot is the easy way to grapple into my heart. Well, that just might backfire on you, Prairie for the Dogs, because while it's true that I'm a fan of hookshots, that also means it makes me especially sad to see a hookshot break. And the hookshot is perishable, see, necessitating that you craft new ones, manufacturing a sophisticated combination rope launcher and high-powered winch by holding some twigs and some string in your hands and wiggling them together a bit. And what is having to repair and craft your hookshots really adding to the experience except fresh annoyance, when you're already pretty annoyed from getting shaken off a large, crusty man and blatted across a field just as you were trying to pick yourself up out of a snow angel that looks like it was having a seizure?

I had to restart the very long and frustrating final colossus fight more than once, 'cos it turns out, the hookshot was basically essential, and I hadn't realized at the time of the autosave at the start of the fight that all the hookshots I'd brought were about three uses away from going to the big mechanical engineering YouTube channel in the sky. So you understand why I come away from Pogger for the Gogger with some negative feelings; maybe it was my fault for not remembering to pack properly before going out building-hunting.

But I think this building-hunting game overestimates how much non-building-hunting I want to do. I hate to bring it up again, but if you go around dressed exactly like Michael Sheen and wearing a Michael Sheen mask, you probably shouldn't complain about being compared to Michael Sheen a lot; Shadow of the Colossus understood that the colossus-fighting was such a strong gameplay element, you kind of didn't need anything else, and this effectively builds anticipation by having nothing in-between but riding around empty landscapes, looking for the next colossus, with nothing to concern you except saddle sores.

Prolapse of the Gut seems to have been worried that wouldn't be enough, like a flustered parent hanging around a sleepover, constantly asking if there's enough pizza or if we want more fizzy pop, when we'd much rather they piss off so we can put on the violent splatter movies we snuck in. "Oh, are you bored searching for the next colossus? Perhaps you'd like to fight a few random shitheads or a mini-boss on the way. Ooh, did you find a treasure map? That looks like a lot of fun! Maybe you'll find some new shoes with +5% Michael Sheen Resemblance." I'd really rather just find the next colossus fight, thanks, game. "Oh, sure! Remember to pick up some random twigs and string on the way so we can make friendship hookshots!"

There's a lot of random bollocks sprinkled over the overworld like so much glitter on a pig, but none of it makes the bacon tastier, and I wish it hadn't let the focus slip off the colossus fights; some means to indicate where the colossi's weak spots are wouldn't have gone amiss, so we didn't have to ruffle their every pubic thatch looking for the sodding things. I'm glad we're all in agreement that Shadow of the Colossus was good, Pride Parade for the Gay, but the shit you've thrown in to enhance the formula is like a plastic drumming monkey toy sellotaped to the shoulder of a majestic gorilla: you've just made it slightly more confusing to offer it a banana.

Addenda

 * A giant among titans: Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
 * Maybe they didn't want to have to stand up in court and say "Actually we're trying to rip off a completely different game"
 * Maybe I'll hold out for Last Guardian 2 in about fifty years