Every so often there comes a trailer that grabs you. It steals you away to another world, a future time where you have you finally have your hands on it — and it’s perfect. Usually I try not to get caught up in flights of fantasy about what a game could be. Hype is a dangerous thing, and I try (mostly unsuccessfully) to keep it in check. But when I saw the initial trailer for Prey, the upcoming new IP from Arkane Studios (IMO the most talented developers in the world), I lost it. I NEEDED this game. This game was for me. It was made for me.
I was swept up into the hype. I checked for news articles every day for updates on the development. I scoured the subreddit every morning for some morsel, some new tidbit about this game which I knew would be perfection. I even set up a google alert to tell me whenever an article was posted about Prey, and I read every single goddamn one of them. Hype consumed me. And finally it was launch day. I pre-downloaded it and waited patiently until midnight that Thursday to launch it. Finally it arrived. And guess what? It fucking delivered.
The reveal trailer at E3 that caused me a hundred sleepless nights, screaming into the darkness in terror that it wouldn’t be good.
What’s Prey all about? Arkane has sort of coined their own term for their games, including the Dishonored series, referring to it as an “immersive simulation.” That’s a bit on the nose for Prey actually, but it doesn’t say a whole lot about what the game is like. I’d describe it more closely as a fusion of Bioshock and System Shock with a sprinkling of Dishonored mechanics. In fact, this game, while in early development, was titled “Psychoshock.” The reason it is now called Prey is because Bethesda bought the license for Prey (from the completely unrelated 2006 game) and needed to unload the name somewhere to justify the purchase. Once they saw this game was in space, the slapped the name onto the project despite the two games having no relation to each other whatsoever. It’s a shame too, because the name Psychoshock would have sold a lot more copies of this masterpiece.
Prey wears a lot of different hats at the same time. It’s a high-octane first person shooter. It’s an RPG with experience points, leveling up, skill trees, and weapon and armor mods. It’s a platformer where you build your own platforms to access the dozens of different ways to clear areas. It’s a crafting game about harvesting and managing resources from the environment around you and then building them into items for you to use. It’s a dystopian future story-heavy narrative experience that’s sort of drip fed to you over the course of the game with several layers of mystery over every discovery. It’s a high-stakes stealth game. It’s a dual wielding Bioshock-esque where you use magic with one hand and guns with the other. Most of all, it’s a straight up horror game. If you really can’t stomach horror, this may not be for you. Here’s your exit ramp.
Talos I is overrun with Typhon taking revenge for the torture humans have inflicted upon them. Who’s the real aliens?
Still with me? Good, good. I’m going to skip the spoilers for this one and focus on the gameplay mechanics. You play as Morgan Yu (male or female per your selection, doesn’t change the story), a young astronaut who is the heir to the largest space exploration company in the world. After some shennanigans I don’t want to spoil, you’ll find yourself on board the Talos I, the largest international space station in history. Unfortunately, the Typhon (an alien race) that humans have imprisoned on the station and experimented on for years have orchestrated a coup! Taking an opportunity for revenge, the Typhon unite to rise up and kill their captors, the humans — leaving you as one of the last survivors on this massive, open world space station. A lot of the game revolves around you trying to find your older brother Alex, the director of Talos I, and get some explanation as to how this all happened.
Welcome to the arboretum! Who says space stations need to be metallic and boring?
The environments of this game are a beautiful art deco style, reminiscent of the utopian future sci-fi seen in Star Trek. There is a lot of diversity in them as well, working in everything from cavernous hallways to GUTS, the zero gravity tunnels that run through the station. There are water features, upside down ventilation shafts, offices, bedrooms, swimming pools… you name it. The world is done in the same art style as Dishonored. Think of this as the sci-fi counterpart to it. I’ll also mention that Mick Gordon, of DOOM 2016 fame, is the composer for this game. So yeah, the music slaps. And Everything is decidedly NOT going to be okay.
Weapons are sooooo cool. There’s your standard shotguns and flamethrowers and pistols… whatever. There’s a cool laser beam gun called the Q Beam and a few other standouts, like the recycler grenade, which I’ll get to later. The shooting feels good, but those aren’t what you came for. You’re here for the GLOO gun, and you will not be disappointed. The GLOO gun is the first weapon you get in the game, and its utility cannot be overstated. This hand cannon shoots out globs of a sticky substance called GLOO, which goes from a liquid adhesive to a solid rock-like substance the moment it makes contact with the air. Your first question is probably “why?” Coating enemies with GLOO will temporarily freeze them into statues, giving you a second to breathe or run away. Or perhaps you freeze a Typhon into a solid GLOO statue and shatter it with your wrench. You can also use the GLOO gun on the walls to create platforms, and use these platforms to access hidden areas and get to the high ground. The GLOO gun will help you traverse each area in the way you want to, not restricting you to what the game designers planned for.
So, on to resources. Remember, this is a survival horror game too, so we’ve got to do some crafting. You’ll find Recycle Machines scattered about Talos I, accompanied by Fabrication Machines. Dump your items you’ve been collecting, everything from antibiotics to Tyhpon parts to mugs, into the recycler machine to break them into one of 4 basic parts — organic material, exotic material, synthetic material, and minerals. Those are the only 4 things you build from, so it’s easy to remember. The fab machine will turn those parts into ammo, guns, health kits, neuromods, and even new items if you find a schematic. You WILL run out of ammo in this game. You will be in a very inopportune place when it happens. You will need to crawl on your hands and knees to a fab machine to create more GLOO canisters as the Nightmare stalks around the storage facility looking for you. It adds exactly the right amount of panic while not being too cumbersome. Crafting is shoehorned into a lot of games nowadays, but Prey was built around it.
You also have a brilliant little device called a recycler grenade. You can toss it and everything, yes I mean EVERYTHING, in a 10 foot radius will be sucked into it and reduced to its composite parts. Running low on organic material again, huh? Well there’s a bunch of corpses right over there… and no one’s using them…
Prey forces you to be resourceful in everything you do. I remember the exact moment early in the game I realized this was a masterpiece. I was trapped in the power plant on a catwalk a hundred feet above two Voltaic Phantoms, and I had no exit. I had run out of ammo. I had nothing in my inventory. I was about to jump in and die valiantly wacking things with my wrench when I saw the recycler grenade. The inspiration that struck me in that moment was so powerful, I’ve never felt anything like it. I waited for the two Phantoms to walk near each other and tossed the recylcler grenade at them. And they were recycled alive in front of me, screeches echoing around the room, into exotic material. I could not believe how smart and resourceful I felt in that moment. Reduce, reuse, recycle. These are the core concepts of surviving in Prey.
Alongside your guns, you’ll utilize Typhon powers, which are magic spells written off as telekinesis to match the sci-fi aesthetic. You obtain these powers with neuromods, which function the way runes do in Dishonored. Inject them into your eye to gain abilities like flight, fire, electricity, mind control, and more! You trade in X of them for something on a massive skill tree, which has both enhanced physical abilities and Typhon powers. You have mana as well, called Psi, that you need to keep an eye on. Psi refills are scarce, so you can just go wrecking everything with magic powers. Hot tip: as soon as possible, take the perk that allows you to refill Psi by drinking water. It will be a lifeline in your darkest moments. And keep an eye on how much Typhon blood you inject into your body. The more powers you gain, the more Typhon you become, and there are real repercussions for that. Will you choose to sacrifice your humanity for absolute power?
Phantoms were the scariest enemy for me to cope with.
Finally, we’ve made it to the monsters. These designs are incredible. I wish there was a bit more diversity, but the dozen or so enemies have 3–4 variations each that keep things relatively fresh. Remember that many of the Typhon are intelligent, sentient beings. And many of them are VERY SCARY. You all know the mimics from the trailer — they’re small, spider-like monsters that can transform into literally anything in the game. Wait, I think you may have misheard me. You may have heard me say “they can turn into a lot of things in the game.” No. What I said was “they can turn into LITERALLY ANYTHING.” That door over there? Could be a mimic. That pillow? Mimic. I once found a fucking health pack that was a mimic, who promptly killed me. Everything you see anywhere in the ship could be a mimic waiting to kill you. A lot of it isn’t, but the constant threat keeps you on your toes, even when an area looks completely cleared out.
The Phantoms are, in my opinion, much scarier. The reason being that when they kill humans, they consume them. And when they consume a human, they will continue to repeat the last words of that person in slow, broken, scratchy English as they stalk around a room looking for more prey. Hiding under a desk and hearing a monster that’s looking for you say “Please… my children… they can’t lose their father” in a broken guttural tongue will make you shit your pants. Similarly, the operators (robots) are infected with a Typhon virus, turning them against you. Hearing the dead silence of a maintenance tunnel interrupted by an echoing robot voice screaming “SOMETHING’S BROKEN” is the real shit I came for. This is slow burning, earned horror. These scares are not cheap. This is constant, chronic fear. The other enemies like telepaths and weavers are scary too, but I want to leave some surprises for you.
The story of the game focuses on you finding the remaining survivors on the ship, and either saving or slaughtering them. That’s right, you can side with the Typhon if you want. There are 3 very distinct endings (one of them is the true ending). If you side with the humans you’ll find lots of side quests and story bits that will make your heart soar and sink. I personally loved the true ending and got it on the first try, but I won’t spoil it for you here. The story is well written and responds to your actions appropriately. Will you save the earth, save yourself, or save humanity?
So just a paragraph about the DLC, Mooncrash. It is, without contest, the best DLC I have played in my entire life. It’s a first person shooter rogue-like with a procedurally generated moon base you must escape from over and over with 5 different characters trapped in a Majora’s Mask-esque time loop. Every run you take will affect your future runs, and no two runs are the same. The goal is to learn how the world works and then get ready to get fucked, because it’ll just change everything around on you on the next run. This DLC is the ultimate test of your improvisational skills and your resourcefulness. It is like the base game on speed. Get it.
Prey manages to take pieces of almost every action game ever and do them all better, fitting them together with unbelievable seamlessness. Stealth, shooting, magic combat, platforming, death lasers, completely destructible environments, crafting, resource management, skill trees… the game absolutely shouldn’t work as well as it does. And yet the core gameplay loop is 100% effective. Collect resources, save lives, build new items, and fight the alien invasion… or join it. The monsters are terrifying, the music from the impeccable Mick Gordon is an A+, the open world is gorgeous, and your resourcefulness will be tested to its absolute limit. The theme of holding onto your humanity is prevalent during the entire game and never gets lost. Would you sacrifice your own humanity to save all of humankind?
I was swept up into the hype. I checked for news articles every day for updates on the development. I scoured the subreddit every morning for some morsel, some new tidbit about this game which I knew would be perfection. I even set up a google alert to tell me whenever an article was posted about Prey, and I read every single goddamn one of them. Hype consumed me. And finally it was launch day. I pre-downloaded it and waited patiently until midnight that Thursday to launch it. Finally it arrived. And guess what? It fucking delivered.
The reveal trailer at E3 that caused me a hundred sleepless nights, screaming into the darkness in terror that it wouldn’t be good.
What’s Prey all about? Arkane has sort of coined their own term for their games, including the Dishonored series, referring to it as an “immersive simulation.” That’s a bit on the nose for Prey actually, but it doesn’t say a whole lot about what the game is like. I’d describe it more closely as a fusion of Bioshock and System Shock with a sprinkling of Dishonored mechanics. In fact, this game, while in early development, was titled “Psychoshock.” The reason it is now called Prey is because Bethesda bought the license for Prey (from the completely unrelated 2006 game) and needed to unload the name somewhere to justify the purchase. Once they saw this game was in space, the slapped the name onto the project despite the two games having no relation to each other whatsoever. It’s a shame too, because the name Psychoshock would have sold a lot more copies of this masterpiece.
Prey wears a lot of different hats at the same time. It’s a high-octane first person shooter. It’s an RPG with experience points, leveling up, skill trees, and weapon and armor mods. It’s a platformer where you build your own platforms to access the dozens of different ways to clear areas. It’s a crafting game about harvesting and managing resources from the environment around you and then building them into items for you to use. It’s a dystopian future story-heavy narrative experience that’s sort of drip fed to you over the course of the game with several layers of mystery over every discovery. It’s a high-stakes stealth game. It’s a dual wielding Bioshock-esque where you use magic with one hand and guns with the other. Most of all, it’s a straight up horror game. If you really can’t stomach horror, this may not be for you. Here’s your exit ramp.
Talos I is overrun with Typhon taking revenge for the torture humans have inflicted upon them. Who’s the real aliens?
Still with me? Good, good. I’m going to skip the spoilers for this one and focus on the gameplay mechanics. You play as Morgan Yu (male or female per your selection, doesn’t change the story), a young astronaut who is the heir to the largest space exploration company in the world. After some shennanigans I don’t want to spoil, you’ll find yourself on board the Talos I, the largest international space station in history. Unfortunately, the Typhon (an alien race) that humans have imprisoned on the station and experimented on for years have orchestrated a coup! Taking an opportunity for revenge, the Typhon unite to rise up and kill their captors, the humans — leaving you as one of the last survivors on this massive, open world space station. A lot of the game revolves around you trying to find your older brother Alex, the director of Talos I, and get some explanation as to how this all happened.
Welcome to the arboretum! Who says space stations need to be metallic and boring?
The environments of this game are a beautiful art deco style, reminiscent of the utopian future sci-fi seen in Star Trek. There is a lot of diversity in them as well, working in everything from cavernous hallways to GUTS, the zero gravity tunnels that run through the station. There are water features, upside down ventilation shafts, offices, bedrooms, swimming pools… you name it. The world is done in the same art style as Dishonored. Think of this as the sci-fi counterpart to it. I’ll also mention that Mick Gordon, of DOOM 2016 fame, is the composer for this game. So yeah, the music slaps. And Everything is decidedly NOT going to be okay.
Weapons are sooooo cool. There’s your standard shotguns and flamethrowers and pistols… whatever. There’s a cool laser beam gun called the Q Beam and a few other standouts, like the recycler grenade, which I’ll get to later. The shooting feels good, but those aren’t what you came for. You’re here for the GLOO gun, and you will not be disappointed. The GLOO gun is the first weapon you get in the game, and its utility cannot be overstated. This hand cannon shoots out globs of a sticky substance called GLOO, which goes from a liquid adhesive to a solid rock-like substance the moment it makes contact with the air. Your first question is probably “why?” Coating enemies with GLOO will temporarily freeze them into statues, giving you a second to breathe or run away. Or perhaps you freeze a Typhon into a solid GLOO statue and shatter it with your wrench. You can also use the GLOO gun on the walls to create platforms, and use these platforms to access hidden areas and get to the high ground. The GLOO gun will help you traverse each area in the way you want to, not restricting you to what the game designers planned for.
So, on to resources. Remember, this is a survival horror game too, so we’ve got to do some crafting. You’ll find Recycle Machines scattered about Talos I, accompanied by Fabrication Machines. Dump your items you’ve been collecting, everything from antibiotics to Tyhpon parts to mugs, into the recycler machine to break them into one of 4 basic parts — organic material, exotic material, synthetic material, and minerals. Those are the only 4 things you build from, so it’s easy to remember. The fab machine will turn those parts into ammo, guns, health kits, neuromods, and even new items if you find a schematic. You WILL run out of ammo in this game. You will be in a very inopportune place when it happens. You will need to crawl on your hands and knees to a fab machine to create more GLOO canisters as the Nightmare stalks around the storage facility looking for you. It adds exactly the right amount of panic while not being too cumbersome. Crafting is shoehorned into a lot of games nowadays, but Prey was built around it.
You also have a brilliant little device called a recycler grenade. You can toss it and everything, yes I mean EVERYTHING, in a 10 foot radius will be sucked into it and reduced to its composite parts. Running low on organic material again, huh? Well there’s a bunch of corpses right over there… and no one’s using them…
Prey forces you to be resourceful in everything you do. I remember the exact moment early in the game I realized this was a masterpiece. I was trapped in the power plant on a catwalk a hundred feet above two Voltaic Phantoms, and I had no exit. I had run out of ammo. I had nothing in my inventory. I was about to jump in and die valiantly wacking things with my wrench when I saw the recycler grenade. The inspiration that struck me in that moment was so powerful, I’ve never felt anything like it. I waited for the two Phantoms to walk near each other and tossed the recylcler grenade at them. And they were recycled alive in front of me, screeches echoing around the room, into exotic material. I could not believe how smart and resourceful I felt in that moment. Reduce, reuse, recycle. These are the core concepts of surviving in Prey.
Alongside your guns, you’ll utilize Typhon powers, which are magic spells written off as telekinesis to match the sci-fi aesthetic. You obtain these powers with neuromods, which function the way runes do in Dishonored. Inject them into your eye to gain abilities like flight, fire, electricity, mind control, and more! You trade in X of them for something on a massive skill tree, which has both enhanced physical abilities and Typhon powers. You have mana as well, called Psi, that you need to keep an eye on. Psi refills are scarce, so you can just go wrecking everything with magic powers. Hot tip: as soon as possible, take the perk that allows you to refill Psi by drinking water. It will be a lifeline in your darkest moments. And keep an eye on how much Typhon blood you inject into your body. The more powers you gain, the more Typhon you become, and there are real repercussions for that. Will you choose to sacrifice your humanity for absolute power?
Phantoms were the scariest enemy for me to cope with.
Finally, we’ve made it to the monsters. These designs are incredible. I wish there was a bit more diversity, but the dozen or so enemies have 3–4 variations each that keep things relatively fresh. Remember that many of the Typhon are intelligent, sentient beings. And many of them are VERY SCARY. You all know the mimics from the trailer — they’re small, spider-like monsters that can transform into literally anything in the game. Wait, I think you may have misheard me. You may have heard me say “they can turn into a lot of things in the game.” No. What I said was “they can turn into LITERALLY ANYTHING.” That door over there? Could be a mimic. That pillow? Mimic. I once found a fucking health pack that was a mimic, who promptly killed me. Everything you see anywhere in the ship could be a mimic waiting to kill you. A lot of it isn’t, but the constant threat keeps you on your toes, even when an area looks completely cleared out.
The Phantoms are, in my opinion, much scarier. The reason being that when they kill humans, they consume them. And when they consume a human, they will continue to repeat the last words of that person in slow, broken, scratchy English as they stalk around a room looking for more prey. Hiding under a desk and hearing a monster that’s looking for you say “Please… my children… they can’t lose their father” in a broken guttural tongue will make you shit your pants. Similarly, the operators (robots) are infected with a Typhon virus, turning them against you. Hearing the dead silence of a maintenance tunnel interrupted by an echoing robot voice screaming “SOMETHING’S BROKEN” is the real shit I came for. This is slow burning, earned horror. These scares are not cheap. This is constant, chronic fear. The other enemies like telepaths and weavers are scary too, but I want to leave some surprises for you.
The story of the game focuses on you finding the remaining survivors on the ship, and either saving or slaughtering them. That’s right, you can side with the Typhon if you want. There are 3 very distinct endings (one of them is the true ending). If you side with the humans you’ll find lots of side quests and story bits that will make your heart soar and sink. I personally loved the true ending and got it on the first try, but I won’t spoil it for you here. The story is well written and responds to your actions appropriately. Will you save the earth, save yourself, or save humanity?
So just a paragraph about the DLC, Mooncrash. It is, without contest, the best DLC I have played in my entire life. It’s a first person shooter rogue-like with a procedurally generated moon base you must escape from over and over with 5 different characters trapped in a Majora’s Mask-esque time loop. Every run you take will affect your future runs, and no two runs are the same. The goal is to learn how the world works and then get ready to get fucked, because it’ll just change everything around on you on the next run. This DLC is the ultimate test of your improvisational skills and your resourcefulness. It is like the base game on speed. Get it.
Prey manages to take pieces of almost every action game ever and do them all better, fitting them together with unbelievable seamlessness. Stealth, shooting, magic combat, platforming, death lasers, completely destructible environments, crafting, resource management, skill trees… the game absolutely shouldn’t work as well as it does. And yet the core gameplay loop is 100% effective. Collect resources, save lives, build new items, and fight the alien invasion… or join it. The monsters are terrifying, the music from the impeccable Mick Gordon is an A+, the open world is gorgeous, and your resourcefulness will be tested to its absolute limit. The theme of holding onto your humanity is prevalent during the entire game and never gets lost. Would you sacrifice your own humanity to save all of humankind?