If I had to choose the most underrated game ever this would prob be the game I picked like I remember renting this on Redbox cus my momma was able to get a game for free for like 3 days and i chos this one cus like at Walgreens while she was talking too a friend i was reading a random game magazine and I saw the cover and was like this looks like the thing and when I read that the dude writing the review said you can turn into a mug and jump around I was like oh yeah this the game and lemme tell you my autistic ass had the best three days of my life like as soon as i returned the gane i was like ik def getting this game and like after two weeks I got this game beyond two souls and like heavy rain as my first PS4 games and obviously I enjoyed and played this game alot more than those 2 💀 I genuinely love this game with all my heart top 10 for me like i wish everygame had this level of freedom man truely a one of a kind game imma just say all this shit happened cus lee Harvey Oswald like missed or sum is crazy 10/10 game wish arkane remained this goated but they whole ass gone now so 😿

I've played other immersive sims like Dishonored 1 & 2, and some of the Deus Ex games, but Prey is what made me finally understand what the immersive sim is. The systems, abilities, and items offered to the player allow for truly open-ended exploration and problem solving through the small-but-deep game world. It is likely that no two players of the game will have the exact same journey through Talos I because of the freedom the game offers, with clever uses of powers and abilities allowing many different ways to access various rooms, items, and sections in the facility.

The game's story is also quite good, partially because it allows the player to piece it together themselves via NPCs, emails, notes, audio logs, etc. It really pulled me in, acting as a pseudo-detective and learning about the inhabitants of the space station in order to complete objectives and find codes. At the start of the game I did not think I would feel much of anything for the characters, but by the end I cared quite a bit for some of them.

As mentioned before Prey's gameplay is extremely open-ended and allows for great player expression. That being said, the game can feel too easy, and I even played on the second highest difficulty with things like weapon degredation. In-spite of being somewhat of a survival horror game, resources are very abundant to the point that my inventory was always full of ammo, health items, and other supplies. After the first couple of hours the enemies were little more than nuisances to dispatch or ignore.

Overall, Prey may be my favorite immersive sim so far and I deeply regret not getting it sooner. This makes the shutdown of Arkane Austin all the more awful.

Vejo muitas pessoas falando que é um Bioshock futurista, concordo, mas também acho que se encaixa num tipo de Half-Life "espacial" só que mais caótico e dramático, com elementos RPG.

Jogo underrated, se mostrou bem consistente por ser muito imersivo, gameplay com boa fluidez, além da ambientação boa com mapa bonito e interessante.
Gostei do crafting e sistema de receitas e reciclagem. Armas e granadas são bem legais.

Enredo muito bom e impactante, te prende na trama.
Achei divertido poder flutuar com a microgravidade no exterior da nave, interagir no espaço, bem único.
Você tem certa liberdade para completar as missões, o jogo possui várias escolhas quem te levam para um dos três finais possíveis.

Podia ter uma opção para selecionar quantidades no crafting, é chato craftar 1 por 1.
Alguns bugs visuais, nada grave.

Tempo de jogo: ≈15h

We may never get another gaming year like 2017. Looking back, the sheer amount of absolute banger titles released that year just seems unfathomable to me. Among others, some of my personal favorites released in 2017 were NieR Automata, Persona 5, Dragon Quest XI, Divinity Original Sin 2, Breath of the Wild, and so so many more. With that many top tier games released in such a relatively short time, it is only natural that some titles didn't get the recognition they undoubtedly deserved. I feel like that was the case with Prey, the second to last game developed by Arkane Austin, a studio known for its strong focus on immersive sim games. I remember following the overall gaming discourse back in 2017 quite rigorously and while I do remember some outlets speaking about Prey and praising its qualities in terms of worldbuilding, storytelling and freedom of choice, I do feel like this game flew under the radar a bit. That’s probably why I wasn’t super hyped to play this game when it released. Like with so many other games, I just put Prey on my wishlist, let it rest there for a while and finally decided to buy it on sale years later. And still, I wouldn’t play it. For years and years, this game was sitting in my library, becoming one of those titles, I would surely pick up at some point in the future. That’s a shame because, having finished it now, I think I was sleeping on one of the, if not the, best immersive sim games ever created. The push to finally give this game a try came upon reading the news that Microsoft had decided to close down Arkane Austin for good. I remembered that, before the (Red)fall of this company, they had worked on games I was interested in but never found the time to play. So, the time had finally come. I sat down and started playing Prey.

And what a journey it was.

I’m gonna keep this review short. For me, this is one of those games, people should experience with as little prior knowledge as possible. That’s how I approached the game and I’m happy I did. Prey is an immersive sim in all the best ways. This genre, if it can be called that, is all about player freedom. A good immersive sim presents an intriguing premise for the story and world of the game, puts the player into a semi open world, and lets them approach a number of objectives in multiple ways. It’s a formula that was first established by the Ultima and Thief games and has since then been revised and advanced by games like Deus Ex and Dishonored. Having played Prey now, I think this formula has come to a sort of perfect conclusion with this game.

From the first seconds of the game, Prey knows exactly what it’s doing. As you’ve probably guessed by looking at screenshots or trailers for the game, Prey is a Sci-Fi story that plays with you as much as you play it. There’s an all-encompassing feeling of “wrongness” in everything you see, like something just doesn’t really add up. Playing Prey feels like playing a mind game. The first couple of minutes make it very clear that this is intended by the developers. You’re supposed to question what you see. And so, you’ll end up asking yourself if what you see is real or just an illusion, a mimic of reality. But Prey is more than that. It deals with questions of humanity, identity, technological progress and morality. Only on its front is it a Sci-Fi story with a cosmic horror twist. Prey is a deeply human story that is not afraid to question the cost of technological advancement, touching on topics like the value of human life in a world dictated by corporate greed and the never-ending hunt for profit, no matter the cost. That’s a premise that immediately hooked me. I wanted to know more about this version of our world, where John F. Kennedy survived his assassination attempt, launching the world into a new era of space exploration. I had so many questions in my head that needed answering. What’s the point of Talos I? What’s a Neuromod? What happened on this station and who are we anyway? Step by step, the game will have answers for you, some of which will be hard and unforgiving truths whereas other will pose even more questions. And sometimes, there’s no right and wrong and it’s up to you to decide how to interpret the “truth”.

Freedom and choice, that’s what it’s all about in an immersive sim. Not only is that reflected in Prey’s narrative, it’s also a significant aspect of its gameplay. Every challenge the game offers can be approached in different ways. Again, I’m not going to go into detail what options you have at your disposal to deal with challenging situations as I want everyone interested in this game to find their own solutions. Let me just tell you that to me, Prey felt like a playground (or a Preyground….sorry^^) that managed to tickle my sense of creativity. Sometimes, I would just go crazy with the most outrageous strategies to deal with enemies and it just…worked. And if it didn’t, I at least had a laugh and learned something for my next fight. But it’s not just about the combat. Player choice is at the forefront of everything you do in this game. How do you get into that room? How will you deal with that environmental trap? How can you get to that precious piece of equipment that seems out of reach from this point? It’s all up to you and each time you come up with a solution, it feels right. The game doesn’t punish you for finding creative solutions to problems, it encourages you. In every moment of the game, I felt like I was truly in control of deciding how to play my character. The choices I made were truly mine. Prey let me choose who I wanted to be in this world. I could be a reckless killer, not minding any questions of morality and just going around like an absolute mad man. It also gave me the option to be empathetic, to be kind and honest and to go out of my way to help others. In this regard, it reminded me of Deus Ex and Bioshock in the best ways possible.

Prey is a masterpiece. It’s absolutely unthinkable to me how the people, who worked on a game like this, are out of a job now. As immersive sims go, this is as good as it gets. Prey takes clear inspiration from games like System Shock when it comes to story, presentation, and gameplay. It revises and improves the core ideas found in those games and offers and experience that is just next level. There’s a clear line of continuous improvement that Arkane went trough coming from games like Arx Fatalis and Dishonored and it’s an absolute shame that we will never know what their next immersive sim game would have looked like. There’s still hope that Arkane Lyon and Wolfeye Studios will continue to scratch that itch that these games leave. In any case, please play this game if you are at all interested in games like these. Prey is certainly not perfect. There are sections that include heavy backtracking, some enemy respawns felt unnecessary and the ending came rather abrupt. Still, Prey is the culmination of decades of perfecting the immersive sim formula and should be experienced by any fan of the genre.

Well, mathematically speaking, it's just as good as McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure.

I didn't give Prey a fair shot back when it released. 2017 feels much further away than it actually is, so I can't explain exactly what had me so distracted that I couldn't invest myself in "the best immersive sim of all time," but those opening few hours didn't hold me. I found myself meandering around and bounced off right around the point where you do your first spacewalk.

But here's the thing, if you're friends with Larry Davis, you can't just be like "oh I didn't enjoy Prey." That doesn't fly. You'll start getting texts while you're out that are just pictures taken from inside your apartment, some of which show you sleeping. He lives halfway across the country, how did he get in there? When was he there? The only way to stop the threats is to acquiesce to his demands. Play Prey or else. I always negotiate with terrorists, I'm a huge coward.

And I'm glad I did, because Larry's right, this is (probably) the best immersive sim ever made. I do, however, have to dock points for not having any Art Bell, something Human Head's Prey has over Arkane's. I'm aware that these games are not related at all outside of a very ill-advised, corporate decision to cash in on Prey's red hot brand name, but the least they could've done is throw in a few Midnight in the Deserts as audio logs. Not a problem, I just played a few in the background while making my way through the wreckage of Talos 1, bashing Typhons with a gnarly looking wrench while listening to Art's guest drone on about collecting and selling Big Foot scat.

Art: When I was in high school I ate erasers. No erasers on my pencils. I guess you could call that a strange addiction. When I went to erase something, I'd just scratch through the paper. Mmm... Erasers. That flavor has faded as an adult.

Ah, the true Prey experience.

That omission aside, Prey checks all the right boxes for me. Talos 1 is a great setting populated by interesting characters and engaging side quests that command your attention from the mission at hand not because they supply you with a list of things to do, but because Arkane has crafted a world so interesting and so fun to occupy that you want to delve into every nook and cranny. I see a locked door and I find myself compelled to know what's inside, even though the last three rooms I busted into had like, a corpse with a single discarded lemon peel in their pocket. Why did they have that? Every body tells a story...

Some of those side quests are going to stick with me for a while, which is both a sign of solid character writing and good mission structure. The fake chef booby-trapping fabrication machines and entry ways after you let him go adds a fun twist to revisiting old locations and makes your revenge that much sweeter when you finally catch up to him, and it's hard to imagine what shape the end game would take if you ejected Professor Igwe from his derelict storage container and skipped his multi-part quest. Which, you know, I initially did because I wasn't patient enough to hear him out. It's fine, I had an autosave, Igwe is totally okay!

That's just the way I play these games, with a dozen backup saves so I can test the boundaries of every moral crisis my character finds themselves in. I'm the kind of dude who will release a Typhon halfway into an inmate's cell just to see what kind of reaction I can get while turning over the long-term consequences of pushing the big red button. Not enough mirror neurons in my head, that's my problem.

Early in the game, you're presented with a personality test, an ink blot, and several variations of the Trolley Problem. An excellent way to establish what Prey hopes to accomplish with the player long-term, as so much of the game is affected by the choices you make both on a macro and micro level. The ending you get is clearly delineated between one of two set paths, but how those play out on a more precise level is affected by the small choices you made along the way. Take that chef, for example. You did get your revenge, but what of his other victims? Did you help them? Did you even try to find them? And what of your brother, Alex? So much of what happens aboard Talos 1 is his fault, but does your love for him win out in the end? Can you condemn him to his fate, or will you spend 30 minutes trying to wrangle his limp body in zero-gravity because the game won't trip one of the god damn objectives, which are clearly bugged-- oh wait, shit... I put him in a grav lift and it snapped his neck. Problem solved.

One area where I deviated from my typical immersive sim habits was combat. I often build my characters around stealth and avoid direct confrontation, but the Typhon abilities you're given work so well in concert with your weapons that turning Morgan into a violent powerhouse felt much more satisfying. There are also a few "survival" modifiers you can toggle at the start of the game, and I went with allowing injuries and suit damage, but not weapon degradation, because weapon degradation always sucks and is not as fun as getting concussed and needing to take "brained pills."

These modifiers add an extra layer of tension to resource management, something you'll be doing a lot of as you lug around literal garbage in the hopes that you might be able to squeeze a few extra shotgun shells out of whatever hard drives and bananas you have on your person. Fabricators are far between in the early parts of the game, often requiring you to loop back to your office for resupplies, which is a smart way of teaching the player the ins-and-outs of the game's resource economy while drilling in how Talos 1 is interconnected.

Is Prey the best immersive sim ever? Look, it takes a very boring man to admit when he's wrong, but it may very well be. Everything from the setting and story, to combat and the larger ways in which the game questions the player's morality is fantastic. My only complaint outside of some technical issues like the aforementioned problem with tripping objectives and a few crashes/freezes on the Xbox version is that there's no Art Bell. A whole .5 off the top of the score, I'm afraid. What's that? Art Bell was dead at the time? Nonsense. If Arkane only opened up a time-traveler's line, they could've booked him. Not an excuse.

Was initially turned off, by the "Oh it's not Prey 2" shit when this was announced, but quickly got over it. Once they started showing off gameplay I said oh damn looks cool. Then I went on to never getting around to playing it until now and sadly it's of course after recent unfortunate events with Arkane Austin thanks to Microsoft. Real damn shame cause what they delivered here, is the Alien game I wish Alien Isolation was.

Immersive Sim's aren't really a genre I touch much with my only real experience with them being the Bioshock games. And if you know me I like 1 and 2 and was unable to finish Infinite cause it bored the shit out of me. Luckily Prey is more like Bioshock 1 and 2 or its more actual direct inspiration, System Shock. While I haven't played it there's enough I know about System Shock to see that yeah, the devs were huge fans and it's all transferred very well into Prey. Love all the different ways you can take control of a situation whether that means being stealthy or loud. I myself am a violent caveman so of course I specd combat until I was in full on FPS mode and it worked so damn well and felt so good. Incredible shotty. As always, the gun any self respecting shooter should be judged by.

Anyways ends up being the Alien game I wish Isolation was cause it basically does all the same beats that an Alien game should do but it doesn't piss me off and the guns aren't worthless so it's automatically better there. Just wish there was more variety to the Typhon enemy designs, but I guess you can only really do so much with black corporeal slime.

Final twist for this is nuts too. Post credits had me grinning like a dumb idiot and it's a shame we won't ever get a follow up. Slept on banger, I know now.

Mimics are one of my top favorite monsters, and I had no idea that Prey was a game that took this monster's concept and just ran with it.
10/10 would empty clips at conspicuously rolling garbage bins again.

I was also impressed that Prey didn't hesitate to take bold design decisions, bringing monsters that will hunt you down later in the game. It is great when a game counters players getting comfy in a horror game by throwing a new mechanic to keep them on their toes. Unfortunately that's not quiiite enough as by the end it is easy to be pretty overpowered with psychic upgrades, but the fantastic level design, explorations and side quests where survival of NPCs is absolutely not guaranteed kept me on the edge of my seat till the end. It lasted just the right amount of time and would just have liked maybe a bit more monster variety or a couple more meaningful boss fights.

The DLC turning the game into a roguelike is also pretty fun! Very different from the maingame and comes up with a good meta explanation of why the game would now be a run based roguelike!

PREY (2017) IS FAR FROM A MIMIC OF ITS PREDECESSORS

(HEBI CERTIFIED 10 OUT OF 5)

The fuckwits at Microsoft (fuck you Microsoft) recently shut down Arkane Austin. So in honor of them, I decided to pay another visit to one of my very favorite games.

Immersive Sims are a genre that is largely dead at this point, which is a real shame because I absolutely adore them. I personally was tutelage-d by the writer of the original Deus Ex, and we talked once about the special ways in which this genre is the ideal environment for telling stories in ways that can only be experienced in a video game. They prioritize characterizations and world building through environments in the...well...most IMMERSIVE ways possible.

When we think of other games in the genre, we think of System Shock 2. Bioshock. Dishonored. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. etc. But what if I told you...that Prey is the best one? The very MOST immersive? The quite literally PUREST sim?

From top to bottom, Prey (2017) is a passion project and it shows. There are so many things I could gush about--so I will.

Let's start with the start: Prey (2017) has one of my favorite video game intros of all time. I mean, yes, the introduction as a whole including the mind-game twist. But truly the helicopter sequence. Flying over San Francisco to Mick Gordon's synthwave masterpiece, "Everything Is Going To Be Okay", while the titles appear diagetically around the city...mwah.

I also think it's pretty neat you can choose Morgan Yu's gender. Totally unnecessary, but a really nice touch.

Talos I, the haunted, Typhon infested space station in which the game takes place, is designed with unbelievable attention to detail. And I don't just mean the fantastic retro-futurist aesthetics. See, the entire station exists. What do I mean by that? Well, when you go outside of the station for space traversal and look at Talos I from the outside, it is a 1:1 to scale of the interior. The station areas are separated only by loading screens and it's just such an unnecessary but loving touch.

When the game tells you near the beginning that you can "play how you want", they mean it. Prey (2017) rewards careful planning and creative thinking. Especially when playing on the (recommended) Nightmare difficulty with all of the difficulty modifiers turned on. Take the first level, when you first get your GLOO gun (a wonderful and iconic implement). If you have a brain blast like I did, you can actually use it to climb to an area that you couldn't otherwise, unless you had a stat in engineering (which many will not this early in the game). And there are many points in the game like this, where I went, "Hm, I wonder if I can..." And I could. Hacking. Fixing broken electronics. Having points in strength. A black hole grenade. Turning into a can of jellied eels. A NERF GUN. There are so many ways to approach any given situation that Prey feels like one of the very few games that genuinely let's you play your way.

The robustness of enemy types is not the most inspired, BUT...the Mimics are brilliant. Turning prop hunt into a sci-fi horror game is nothing short of inspired. Every little mundane item becomes a threat. Even health kits and the like. Plus, they're honestly so cute. I love watching those little critters scurry over to a corner of the room and poof into a trash can like I didn't just watch it happen with my own two eyes. It feels like being a parent playing hide-and-seek with their dumbass kid who just ran and hid behind an office chair in the same room. "Hmmm, I wonder where that Mimic could be...wrench-ed" Adorable.

Prey (2017) also has one of the best crafting systems out there. Not because it's particularly novel, but because of the machines you use to do it. It's one of the only games I can think of right now, where all of those dumb little pieces of trinket trash you pick up in the game is actually useful. Because you can toss all of it into a RECYCLER and atomically pulverize it all into "material cubes". You then insert these little cubes into the perfectly sized IKEA-esque shelves of a fabricator machine (usually right next to the recycler) and watch as it morphs all of those crummy used cigars and fried hard drives you picked up into GUN BULLETS. I just really like how immersive the whole experience of crafting is, without being any amount of cumbersome or clunky. Quoth the Todd: "It just works".

The way that you interact with screens is also unique. I know I've seen it in game since (like Cyberpunk 2077), but Prey (2017) was I think the first game to make interactable screens...just that. You don't go into a separate screen to read dead people's emails or download some schematics. It's all done right there in front of you. Hovering your mouse over a computer screen fluidly becomes the mouse of said screen as you interact with it. This just adds another layer of immersion in a way that was totally unnecessary, but very appreciated.

And finally, the very very very very best thing about Prey (2017)...the storytelling. It feels like it's been a while, but there was a time us gamers used to shit talk the use of audio logs and diary entries. To an extent, I do think this sentiment is warranted when its implementation is lazy or misused. However, in Prey (2017) all of these methods of flavor text are handled brilliantly. Of course, someone having a recording of a casual conversation they were having with their co-worker next to their corpse is a bit silly. BUT I find it so compelling in Prey (2017) because, of the 268 TranStar employees on Talos I, a great deal of them actually have some sort of personal story that you can piece together. It almost becomes a game in itself to decipher who these people were, what their relationships with their co-workers were, if they had interesting motives and self-contained plots, etc. And there are many ways in which they are able to pull off this amazing feat of environmental storytelling.

Sure, there are the basics like audio logs, emails, and sticky notes. But there are also white boards. Intentional placement of bodies and items. TTRPG character sheets. Environmental flourishes (I'll never forget the room where sticky notes were placed on nearly every item only to find out that a scientist who locked themselves away was using this as a method to identify any items that weren't secretly Mimics). And more. Not to mention the depth of the stories being told through these implied methods. Sometimes they were hilarious, like, "You big dummy, did you really think that was going to work?" Many times they are tragic. There were times finding the body of a person who I had somewhat grown attached to, or at the very least thought was interesting, got me a bit emotional. In Bioshock, a body is a body, for the most part. Human corpses are a means to get loot. In Prey, a body was a real person. A person who you do get a fabrication blueprint of the Nerf Gun from. But knowing that said person created the blueprint so they could have some silly fun with their other friends in the engineering department...well, it adds so much depth to the world-building in a way that is still unmatched.

SPOILERS FOR ONE SECTION OF THE GAME:
One of my favorite video game moments is the first time you meet an alive crewmate, Danielle Sho (a reference to SHODAN from System Shock 2). Up until this point of the game, you have come to know a great deal about her vicariously. She doesn't like you or your brother and the way you previously conducted your cold, corporate shenanigans and your annoyingly invasive requests for her. You also learn that she had a group of friends she regularly played a TTRPG with. You discover that Danielle joined this group because she and the GM, Abigail Foy, were entering a sweet, albeit complicated relationship.

I was heartbroken as I continued to find the bodies of her gaming buddies. Especially because one of them died due to a safety measure Danielle herself placed on the door to her department of the ship. "That could have been me and my friends", I thought. And worst of all...you find her lover's body in a deep freeze in the crew quarters kitchen which an escaped psychopath had commandeered, clearly implying that he not only murdered her, but that he intended to use her as food. When you access Abigail's computer, you can see Danielle messaging her over and over, trying to find her and warn her about what was happening. The urgency and desperation in her messages carries an affective dramatic irony--knowing that she didn't get to her in time. The last message is a final plea: "Find me at the Rec Center window. Knock three times".

Up until this point in the game, everyone Morgan Yu (you!) comes across had perished. So I tapped the window she referred to with my wrench three times in vain (so I thought). I was stunned when I saw Danielle float over to me in her space suit, beautifully underscored by Mick Gordon's "Human Elements". It got me REAL choked up. And this isn't even considering the layers of depth happening in the implied narrative: Here is Danielle Sho, hoping to God that she's going to see her best friend and lover, only to be met with one of the people she despised most on the station (and rightfully so). But given the horrors happening all around us, she is stripped down to her most basic human nature. She needs help. She wants revenge on the man who slaughtered Abigail. And as much as the player is potentially desperate for human interaction, the two of you are separated by fortified glass. You can't even see her face. All the player can do is try to fulfill her dying wish. But will Yu?
END OF SPOILER

Prey (2017) offers many opportunities to go out of your way--sometimes quite a bit out of your way, to help others. There are a plethora of ways the game silently runs numbers in the background based off your actions. Some, like others' personal quests, are a bit obvious. But there are actual gameplay elements it quietly judges you for as well. And all of these actions are measured up at the end of the game and dictate what flavor of ending you get. And it's really not just that. It's giving you a reflection of who you are as well (at the very least, how you play video games). I know a small portion of players resent the epilogue for...reasons...but I think it's beautiful. And it is one of the very few games that made me feel like my actions mattered--at least in my first playthrough before learning how this system worked.

Prey (2017) is not just a video game. It's not just an Immersive Sim. It's an empathy simulator. It portrays cruelty and exploitation. But it highlights compassion and understanding.

And none of this is even to mention the fantastic standalone Mooncrash DLC!

Of course, Prey (2017) has it's flaws. The fact that a certain character cannot be saved despite there being every reason for you to be able to do so is probably one of the game's greatest sins. The final act of the game is quite poorly paced and completely disregards its fundamental gameplay design. Not to mention the "before credits" ending flies by at breakneck speed without any further contextual divulgence. The extreme audio compression on of the NPC's voices is jarring. And there were, sadly, some "not ideal" immersion breaking bugs sprinkled in small, albeit bad enough, doses. There was a particular bad freeze I experienced during Mooncrash that forced me to restart my computer.

But aside from that, Prey (2017) is nothing short of a triumph. It greatly succeeds as an Immersive Sim. It is incredibly effective as a survival horror game, being up there with some of the other greats. It delivers on its promise of allowing you to play your own way as well as making your decisions matter. Its artistic design is novel and integrates with the narrative in ways that create some of the coolest visual set-pieces I STILL have yet to see in another game (especially because of their interactivity). And the stories of both Morgan Yu and the people aboard Talos I are told and executed masterfully.

I truly mourn the loss of Arkane Austin as a studio. And not only because I personally know the entire audio department. Prey being but their first game was such a show of promise, of passion, and talent. I know from inside sources that the failures of Redfall were due in very large part to Bethesda/ZeniMax's failure to provide useful oversight to the team while demanding them to make a complex, live service looter-shooter that they didn't want to make in the first place. It's so upsetting that the developers paid the price for mismanagement by Bethesda/ZeniMax and greed by Microsoft. I have confidence, however, that the workers at Arkane Austin are able to rebound to other studios because they are truly some of the best of the best.

There really just isn't anything quite like Prey (2017). Especially because there is an entire room containing corpses named after characters from Check it Out: With Dr. Steve Brule (the fact that Pablo Myers' body had loot-able cans of food made me laugh really hard).

TLDR: Fuck this game. I am NOT coming back.

If you're like me and picked up this game expecting a fun space alien shooter with cool powers and spooky enemy designs, do NOT get this.

Prey is my first time with the genre “immersive sims” which I’ve seen defined as: “games that allow the player multiple options to engage with combat and puzzles, and multiple paths to progress past a roadblock.”

When I found out that Prey wasn’t some sort of “Doom clone” I was a little bummed. But I wanted to give it a fair shot before I went to write off the game altogether. And after watching a Youtube video or two about Prey and immersive sims, I decided to go in as blind as possible.

Before I get too negative, there are a few things I liked about Prey. I really liked how the first hour of the game tries to emulate a sort of "Truman-Show" vibe. Leading you to find out everything you know is fake, and slowly uncovering your place in the grander story was pretty sick. There's also a few horror sequences that get executed pretty well, and music's good too.

But on a surface level, the game wasn't very interesting to me. You don’t get any cool powers early on, and most of the combat isn’t very engaging. If anything you just walk back and forth between dull rooms in silence.

While there are a few good things that Prey has going for it, they’re completely murdered by the game's LACK OF COMMUNICATION and GLACIAL PACING.

Strike one for me was one of the game’s “gloo gun puzzles”. So early on, the game tells you two things.

One, that puzzles and routes to rooms have multiple solutions, (with multiple npcs and remarking about this to really drive this point home).
And two, that you can make stuff with the gloo gun. (With the gun being able to be used as a weapon, and with environmental hazards).

While it is true that both of these things are said in the beginning, they aren’t said in tandem. What I mean is that the game provides you with the puzzle pieces, but it doesn't really give you any direction on how to put them together.

So in the beginning of the game, I found myself getting stuck after failing to open a door. So the first thing I did was look for a vent to crawl through, or a keycard that I could use. Since both of these solutions have been successful for me. But in this instance neither worked. I wasn’t able to find a keycard, and there was no vent to crawl into. So I ended up just wandering around aimlessly and frustrated.

Eventually I found a corpse next to a lil gloo ladder. Now I assume the intention of the developers was to show the players that you could build a ladder to get up to the place where I was stuck. But despite this, my “lightbulb” didn’t go off. The npc was already dead, meaning I didn’t even understand that the “gloo ladder” was climbable, and missed out seeing a visual cue of a npc using it in action. So in reality I saw this weird npc, looked at him for like 5 seconds, and then walked away.

Ironically enough, it wasn’t until I watched a video about immersive sim’s in general, that I stumbled onto the puzzle’s solution. Sure yes, technically the game provides you with two separate thoughts, one relating to the gloo gun, and another relating to “multiple solutions” But it poorly alludes to the possibility of a ladder even being possible.

I totally understand the idea of a game offering multiple options to progress, but when you’re new to immersive sims, sure you can have just as many options as a veteran player on paper. But if you’re completely unaware of them and if the game doesn’t really tell you/point you in the right direction, they might as well not be there.

I’m aware that I’m 100% missing stuff, and not understanding what the game wants, due to my own stupidity. But I do think the game could help me better grasp what it’s trying to ask of me.

BOTW and TOTK have moments similar to this, but those games do “ah-hah” moments much better. While Prey demands experimentation to progress, Zelda provides experimentation as a bonus. Zelda makes me feel smart when I cheat through a shrine because I chose to do it on my own. But I never felt smart playing Prey. Especially when small things like story objectives are left very vague.

Despite all this shit, the final straw was Dr. Calvino's lab.

By trying to “go in as blind as possible” I’ve been mindlessly wandering around, growing more and more impatient and frustrated. I must've wasted at least 2hrs just looking around for the next thing to do.

This wasn’t at all helped by Prey’s fucking awful map. I genuinely don’t understand why the devs provide any sort of live mini-map for this game. Especially with the level of backtracking you do in this game.
Pausing and opening a menu to figure out where i was supposed to go, just to open that same shit again like 10 seconds later when I realized I went the wrong way, got HELLA OLD HELLA FAST.

At the end, I genuinely felt like someone was watching my gameplay and was actively trying to find the best way to waste my time.

Like, oh cool I found a door that needs to be opened. Every door that’s needed a keycard so far has only needed one.

Wander around for an hour and then finally get the ability to go out into space. Go outside, find a dead body with a keycard. Yay I did it. Now go all the way back to the door I was trying to open.

Oh wait what’s this, “keycard not accepted”? But why? I got it??

Google the puzzle online, apparently there’s two cards????

OHH MY BADD

IM SO FUCKING SORRY

I’m such a fucking mongrel idiot how could I not have seen that coming??? It’s not like every single fucking door in this stupid game only used ONE KEY CARD.

Backtrack allllll the way back into space, and then FINALLY GET THE CARD.

And then, I just quit.

Prey is one of the only games I’ve ever played where even after playing 3-5hrs, you still feel like you’ve done nothing. It’s painfully obvious that the devs did this shit to just pad out the runtime.

I'm not gonna rate the whole game, since I didn't beat it, but if I could rate the first couple hours, I'd give it a fucking 3/10.