Monster Closets: The Prototype series made monsters into men
Monster Closets is a randomly-regular column where Brock Wilbur takes a trip back through the highs, lows, and generally bizarre elements of the survival horror video game genre. This is exceptional niche writing but hopefully funny to the outsider by the nature of just how sheerly unhinged some of these works of art come. Please enjoy ahead of Halloween!
In 2009, there was a weird battle of videogame IPs on par with the sort of movie overlap you caught in a late 90s Dante’s Peak vs. Volcano: entertainment that happened to hit all the exact same notes and get released at the exact same time. On the Playstation 3, you had access to a series called InFamous about super-powered dudes and maybe some vampires. They were open-world games about being super-powered and not really having to care about the number of civilians you murder amidst your antics because you aren’t a super-hero; you’re a super… chaotic neutral, at best? On the Xbox 360, you had access to a series called Prototype about super-powered dudes and maybe some other monsters.
The equivalent gameplay and interchangeable edgelords lead to internet videogame reviewer Yahtzee Croshaw challenging the dev teams to win his approval by drawing the protagonists in the most embarrassing way possible. Both teams did. That shows how aware everyone was and how okay it was to lean in.
I fell in love with Prototype. The two games, which were churned out so quickly that they’re almost interchangeable, have a lot going on that represented something much more horror specific than what InFamous was up to, so let’s dig into that.
In Prototype, the city of New York is under attack by a plague. Something is transforming the DNA of regular people into bloodthirsty Cronenberg monsters. In an evil underground government laboratory, a dude named Alex Mercer wakes up and finds himself in a bit of an American Gladiators-style testing chamber, where he is asked to murder weird mutants by using–gasp–new weird-mutant powers. After he does a real good job at murder, the scientists observing him turn on some fire to finish his testing and, shockingly, our video game protagonist does not die. Instead, he murders several dozen people. That’s how you know you have a hero on your hands.
Alex Mercer starts running around a city in chaos, led by his sister Dana (voiced by Lake Bell), who seems to know an uncanny amount of information about how things have turned around NYC. Dana starts picking out targets for Alex, who has recently discovered that in addition to being able to punch people to death and cut them in half, he can absorb their bodies. This “eating” of people isn’t just for some kind of vore-tainment; Alex can then shapeshift into their bodies and recover their memories. This leads to several delightful game mechanics.
The first is finding In-The-Know people across New York City, from scientists to politicians to general assholes, and absorbing them into your body. Each person you eat re-ups your health and gives you a small flashback into the greater mystery you’re trying to solve about what happened to you and what is murdering the city.
The longer it takes you to go about your task, the more the city falls into mutation. The tops of buildings become cesspool hives of monster nests that burst like cysts when you get too close. The more you level up your powers, the more the city responds by becoming an actual living nightmare. The open world starts to find more ways to box you in, between the encroaching virus threat and the increasing military presence. 2009 was the perfect time to take on a paramilitary organization like Blackwater. Hence, the game focuses on the evil Blackwatch corporation, with their evil virus program Blacklight and, you know, general evil military stuff.
On the surface, I know it sounds as bad as the worst thing you can imagine in videogames writing. I think so, too. Yet the system of interrogating (eating) people and taking on side-quests (eating people) leads to one of my favorite plot rabbit holes in games. Is this because it requires dozens of hours to acquire tiny fractions of the story? Yeah, kinda. But the climax reveals an expansive cover-up that includes the destruction of a town called Hope, Idaho (yes, I know) and the involvement of a genetic science group called GenTek (yes, I know), and you know what, yeah, maybe it is that bad.
Dammit. Okay, fine.
So you’re Alex Mercer, this guy who (it turns out) got murdered real bad and then this virus poured itself into you. It brought you back. It gave you a second a chance. Maybe this virus, the same virus that is destroying lower-class neighborhoods, is also the American Dream?
The game does something extraordinary, at least for what I’d played then, to make an open-world scary and fun. I’d tried the Dead Rising series, which I’d hated because of the unfortunate pacing of save points, so while the playground I was given was intended to be fun, the gameplay element was not. At first, neither was Prototype. You’re just a guy and you’re dying very quickly whenever someone looks at you for too long. Even when that someone is the skin of someone else. You’re just this angry guy named Alex in a weirdly stylish black jacket that, like the Incredible Hulk’s pants, never seems to break despite your bursting transformation.
As you grow in strength, Alex goes from a sort of X-Men secondary character who can hide among antagonists and occasionally survive gun battles into something else. You level-up very quickly into this Lovecraftian god who shoots tentacles of death and walls of fleshy brutality from the very core of your being. The ability to become more of a breathing weapon maxes out quickly, as the long-distance whip strike with a circular area of effect is the only attack you need, despite the variety of weird powers available. The unlockables are all based in a DNA point system taken from eating your enemies, especially the gigantic monsters and bursting cysts around the city, but also from a hilarious Tony Hawk-esque series of challenges.
There is a lot of grind involved in leveling Alex up to full God level, but you only need that one whip arm to win the entire game. Upgrading your ability to use, say, a tank or machine gun a little bit better becomes a hilariously underpowered concept to upgrade.
That said, you can turn human enemies into “bio-bombs” which cause them to explode, with tentacles bursting out to grab all nearby enemies (and explosives) and smash them all together in one small space. Outside of Mortal Kombat, it is the finest finishing move I have ever seen in a video game. Sadly, this butts heads against the fact that the city, and its draw distance, are so unreasonably limited that the joy of mayheming through NYC is entirely wasted.
Prototype peaks in a combination of end-game situations and unlocked talents that yield a stupid combination of problems. Some of Alex Mercer’s strongest powers are weird gamepad combinations that are mostly un-performable. The best moves —the supermoves that cause spikes to explode from the ground killing everything around–they require you to hit every button on the controller in a way that I don’t think a human person can actually finagle. I’ve tried. The scenario is very Mortal Kombat: hitting buttons that don’t exist in a combination for which nothing in the game trained you.
My first playthrough resulted in me taking on some weird monster boss with a strength level I’d never encountered–I should have mastered these nonsense combo attacks five to six hours before and, instead, I found myself trying to use the in-menu guide to learn attack combos during a final boss fight.
You don’t save the city. The disease spreads but Alex Mercer has saved his family and friends. It’s a weird end note.
In Prototype 2, the city of New York is under attack by a plague. This seems familiar, and it is, but you’re not seeing these events through the same eyes.
The game opens mid-monster attack in a situation much worse than before. Otherworldly tentacles burst through the streets and strangle buildings, yanking them into towering hybrid infernos of meat and steel. The hallmarks of Times Square crumble between eldritch spirals of inhuman flesh. There’s no time to embrace this nightmarish vision, though: your player character is on the hunt for Alex Mercer.
In a twist, your overpowered protagonist from the first game has become the antagonist in the second game. Now you control James Heller, an African American soldier who has returned from a tour in Iraq to discover that his wife and child are almost certainly dead. The military tells him that Alex Mercer is responsible and, look, you can always trust the military. A very angry James Heller hunts Alex Mercer through the streets of monster NYC, only to be killed by Mercer and infected with a strain of the virus that gives Heller a similar set of powers to Mercer. Not… not really the actions of a super-monster who is really trying to kill someone. I should know. When I played Mercer I dissolved…hundreds of people. I never accidentally made any of them as strong as I was.
Mercer seems to be spreading the virus around New York at an accelerated rate and Heller sets out to destroy him, while also now drawing power from the virus in the process. There’s an interesting power dynamic built on genetic horror that becomes a triangle of give-and-take in the sequel.
Mercer gets stronger the more the virus gets stronger, but Heller feeds from the same system, so all three enemies are constantly increasing in power. The stronger your enemies are, the more their defeat can increase your personal power through the DNA you acquire. Once Heller gets beyond the point of constantly having to run from danger, you can almost feel the hunger when you see bigger and nastier enemies running around the world. You crave them because their defeat offers you the quickest path to becoming an even nastier monster. That element is something I’ve never experienced in another game and realizing I’m nearly salivating over catching a weird pulsating tower of dark energy makes you realize that a shift in brain chemistry has occurred. It’s a horror title where the horror is constantly bouncing back and forth between the inhuman and the parts of you that desire to become post-human.
Heller’s journey is the same as Mercer’s journey: you go up against bigger and badder enemies as the city around you becomes worse and the military becomes stronger and more aware of your tricks. The biggest change in the sequel comes in the break-up of the city.
Whereas the original game featured one giant city in which the infection was ever-expanding, Prototype 2 features three distinct islands. The Yellow Zone is the poorer parts of town, where the infection runs between neighborhoods, people are still trying to survive and the military has little interest in intervening outside of their bases. In the Green Zone, the rich are living a mostly infection-free lifestyle, but the military is more present in daily life as an aggressor and their tanks and technology are more advanced. All the good stuff that cost real money is in the Green Zone. Creatures overrun the Red Zone and the military is fighting a losing battle there. That’s Mercer’s playground.
The game ends with Heller fighting and dissolving Mercer, whose final line is the flawless action movie dialogue: “Welcome to the top of the food chain.” Heller uses all of Mercer’s memories to find and free innocent people, including his def not-dead wife and child, and then destroys the virus that has taken over the city, offering a finality to the series.
The interesting parts of the game carry over between both titles. Stealing the identity and skill sets of the people you sneak up behind and absorb never stops being fun. Just as developing a set of tentacles that allows you to grab helicopters out of the air and eat the pilots never stops feeling insanely fun.
There’s a weird mash-up of unending blade attacks and Spider-Man style city transversal that makes this one of the few games I enjoy revisiting. There are some downsides, even with the remastered versions created for modern consoles, primarily the sexism. There’s no fixing that fact that both protagonists–both growly videogame men–cannot stop choking and threatening women at every turn. That it is somehow worse in the sequel, with the Black protagonist, is unforgivable. While that sucks, it’s nice to know that I can skip those cutscenes on my replays.
What the Prototype series represents is an X-Men-style power fantasy that you can unlock via hours of survival horror. It’s a cat and mouse game until you become both cat and mouse and also mousetrap and, I dunno, a grenade. It is also a deity simulator. You keep rising towards godhood, but you are not beholden to the humans trying to live their lives around you. You can be their salvation, but with no thought at all, you can decide to destroy them for personal gain or even weaponize their bodies against your enemies.
How many people can you kill and still be a symbol for good? Strangely, it feels like the old “contractors on the Death Star” problem, except here you have to look each one of your sacrifices in the eye. Perhaps those are the real trade-offs that a god must decide upon. If your throne is built from corpses and you can weigh the cost-benefit of those corpses against a city of millions, then you deserve exactly what you achieved.
Survival horror can be about how difficult it is to survive, but it can also be about how difficult it is to cope with surviving. Hell has no economy of scale, but purgatory is built on it.
