Funny / Prey (2017)

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

• There is an achievement for killing yourself on the helicopter blades on your first day of work.
• There's another one for killing everyone on the station except for yourself and Walter Dahl. It's called "Awkward Ride Home".
• There's yet another one for turning yourself into materials via a recycler charge.
• The fact Morgan can use the Nerf gun stand-in to press buttons and touchscreens. Get clever with it and you can engage in some hilariously low-tech Remote Hacking.
  • You can find development notes for the gun, and they are completely straight-faced, like it was an actual weapon or engineering project. Beware the soft, foam fury of bored engineers.
    • The first of these is in the opening area, on a PC that needs to be hacked, and it even gives you the replicator plans. It feels like a game playing a prank when you spend resources on what might be your first ranged weapon and out comes an obvious NERF crossbow, complete with the tutorial calling it a toy!
• In the moral reasoning portion of your test at the beginning, one of the questions asks you whether you'd push a fat man into the path of a train to save five other people, or do nothing. The next one asks whether you'd jump in front of the train yourself to save five people, but in the available responses you can still push the fat man even though he's not even mentioned in the question.
  • If you kill Alex you get an achievement named "Push the Fat Guy".
• When approaching Morgan's office for the first time, you can go through the secretary's desk and access their computer. The password to Morgan's secretary's computer? "0MG!hotboss".
• It's possible, by using the Phantom Dash ability, to scan yourself. What does your scanner have to say about you?
  Strength: Devastating beauty/handsomeness (female/male respectively)
  Weakness: Toxic family
  Immunity: I wish
  Resistance: Good advice
  • And what is shown in Morgan's file afterward? "I always feel like somebody's watching me".
• With all the horror and tense atmosphere the game creates, there's something cathartically hilarious in using Mimic Matter to turn into a coffee cup and scurry around the room like a cockroach.
  • Even better: if you or a Mimic copy a FlexiFoam bolt, you can hop around making squeaking sounds.
  • Shoot a FlexiFoam bolt in the GUTS. Watch (and listen to) the hilarity of it bouncing around in this completely serious game, making the same noises as a squeak toy.
• In most games where zero gravity is involved, the player's character catches themselves on walls or generally just floats around without much problem as more of a gameplay set dressing than anything else. Here? Well, don't boost too hard into that wall or Morgan (and thus the player) can very well hurt or even kill themselves by forgetting that momentum in zero-G doesn't stop.
• In Psychotronics, one researcher looking for mimics went nuts labeling literally every object in his lab with "Not a mimic" sticky notes.
  • Bonus points: apparently at least one such sticky note IS a mimic.
• Mimics can be unintentionally hilarious on occasion, sometimes changing into a blatantly obvious object in the middle of the floor, when that medkit you really needed decides to jump off a table and scurry out the door...still in disguise or when they switch objects...while you watch, possibly ending up throwing loads of other objects around in the process.
  • Come back to the sim lab later in the game... and you'll likely witness a Mimic, disguised as a cup, rolling on the floor and bouncing around you... without attacking. For a good while.
• There are multiple emails related to a piece of equipment called "reployers", which nobody on the station seems to know the function of. One audio log has a frustrated cargo bay worker complain to an engineer about an order of them that he has no idea what to do with. There's also an email from Dr. Igwe that has him profusely thanking someone for being given a Reployer... then asking them if they could send an engineer down to show him what it does.
  • One even appears in The Stinger.
  • According to Ricardo Bare, not even the developers themselves know what the reployer's model is supposed to represent.
• The corrupted Operators can be pretty terrifying to face, with their distorted voices and bright red optic sensors. But if you're stealthy in your first encounter with them, you can watch as one of them repeatedly smacks itself against a wall for a solid minute before finally altering its course. The fact that they make an exceptionally goofy-sounding "boop" every time they collide with something (or when they're just laying around) that sounds like an off-key jingle makes it hard to take them seriously.
  Corrupted Medical Operator: We'll have to cut you off to save your appendix.
• Hardware Labs scientists created a foam spray that expands and hardens a short time after coming in contact with air, named GLOO. It's ridiculously useful on-the-fly in smothering fires, sealing leaks, insulating electrical current, creating improvised cover, trapping enemies and even building short-term pathways or ladders. Their small-scale test: building a GLOOman and naming it Mr. Glooey McGlooface, then egging each other on finding stuff for Glooey to wear.
  • Morgan's journal also mentions that it has been used to stop bar fights in the Yellow Tulip.
• A minor one, but still gives players a chuckle or two: the dusty, unused treadmill in Alex's room with all manner of junk and boxes stacked on top of it. A humorous case of Art Imitates Life.
• One of the scientists studying the Mimics tries to figure out the precise mechanism of their shapeshifting and comes up with three complicated and vaguely plausible Techno Babble explanations. Some time later he adds a fourth theory out of frustration: magic.
• Commander Dahl mentions that his pay is disguised as HR expenses in TranStar's books; he jokes that "they're right; I do solve people problems."
• The aforementioned journal has a few good chuckles in it, including Morgan's little chart of what the recycler will and won't recycle (the latter being a bowl of noodles and Alex).
• The Tabletop RPG Fatal Fortress and the audio transcribe found near it, detailing the misadventures of a certain Elias— er, Captain Stabfellow dying in the darkness somewhere. Other hilarious character names of note: Hordinbaffle Flagdasterous.
• In hindsight, everything to do with the tests during the tutorial is funny. The scientists grow increasingly frustrated by the player's failure to manifest any Typhon abilities; the best part is how completely baffled they are in the "stealthy" test, as the player makes no effort to mimic the chair.
• Alex really does not like Morgan going into his office without permission. Smash the crystal statue there, and he will immediately call to reproach you.
  • He will even call you to tell you off if you accidentally destroy it in a fight with Operators.
• In Psychotronics, it's possible to come across a Mimic sitting on a toilet. Which you can then flush (and watch spin around in the bowl a bit before exploding). It will spend the rest of the game as an oily puddle in that stall, squeaking at you.
• One e-mail mentions what seems to be a Mimic that turned itself into an electrical component, only to get fried when it was mistaken for the real thing and inserted into a circuit.
• Use the main lift in the lobby too much and eventually it'll lose power mid transit and a Phantom will board the elevator. Why is this funny, and not nightmarish? Because by the time you would even consider riding the lift enough times to trigger the event, you're probably toting a shotgun, at least a couple Typhon Neuromods, and absolutely zero shits about some random baseline Phantom trying to play games with you, resulting in a fight consisting of about two seconds of action and one splattered opponent, followed by irritation as the lift takes its time to come back online.
  • This troper will attest that the Phantom can appear as early as your second ride. However, considering that to use the lift at all you need to travel over half of the station and defeat at least one Technopath, you'd likely be pretty strong anyway.
• At least twice (when you first enter the Neuromod Division lobby and during the credits), you can witness a Mimic run smack into a bench, comically flip over backward, then just keep going like nothing happened.
• Don't collect enough voice samples for Danielle Sho to unlock Deep Storage before encountering her in the Fitness Center, and she'll give you an override code instead. What are some of the words used to describe Alex? "Pompous", "nepotist", and "Oedipus Complex". She really doesn't like Alex, and even grudgingly apologizes for insulting him to your face.
• One of the ways to escape in the Mooncrash DLC is to upload your consciousness. Of course, then there's the typical Sci-Fi plot of "well now there's two of you, since it's just copying a brain scan". The game solves this by killing off your original body while your scanned self zooms away, and the ending message (which congratulates you on escaping and describes how you escaped) adds a "(sort of)" to lampshade this.
• The shoe Mimic - as in a Mimic that's somehow producing and throwing random shoes from somewhere else. Bonus points for a small collection of shoes in front of its containment unit.
• January's commentary when the endgame well and truly begins.
  Morgan, you anticipated the kind of appeal Alex would make. Sibling bonds. History. You programmed me to refute him point by point. However, we can skip that. A Typhon the size of a skyscraper is currently eating Talos I for lunch. Ergo, Alex is wrong.
• The description of medical operators states that they performed as well as human doctors in medical procedures. The human doctors have better bedside manner but not by much.
• The reason Grant Lockwood never showed up for the shuttle after he was fired: he stole a neuromod and tried to spacewalk back to Earth.
• During the helicopter ride in the intro, look down; you'll find that Morgan is tapping his/her foot to the beat. Why is this funny? The Morgan you're playing as is actually a Typhon. Apparently dance really is the universal language.
• If the player is exploring thouroughly rather than going straight to Morgan's office they'll be spending a long time avoiding dangerous Phantoms with only their wrench and GLOO gun to rely on and be desperately hoping to get a real weapon to help survive. When they finally get to the Conference Suite they'll likely be very excited to finally find a dead security guard with an actual gun, only to be blindsided when the gun turns out to be a Mimic. You can just hear the developers laughing at you, but thankfully they're kind enough to have a real pistol there too, just out of sight.

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