The monster design is awesome, especially the mimics which add a constant feeling of uneasiness and anxiety to the game. Every object might be an enemy in disguise and even though the mimics are the least dangerous enemy in terms of level of threat, the underlying tension they add to the game cannot be overstated. Reminded me of John Carpenter's 1982 masterpiece The Thing in how you are trapped in a location that is totally isolated from the rest of civilization with monsters that hide in plain sight. This setup gives rise to feelings of loneliness and paranoia which create an oppressive tone to the game. I had to stop and laugh when my wife was watching me play for a little while without any context of the game and said I looked like a crazy person running around hitting inanimate objects with a wrench.

Level design is really creative with a level of verticality you wouldn't expect from an immersive sim like this and has well designed nooks and crannies all over the place usually hiding secret loot to reward the spatially aware explorers among us. There are plenty of side missions that reward you with backstory and upgrades and bring you to places of the ship you might not otherwise explore fully. There are tons of locked doors standing between you and juicy loot and this is where Prey truly shines. The number of ways that exist for you to get into these locked rooms is simply amazing. You can search around like a bloodhound for keycards or passcodes, you can sometimes get in via hidden ventilation ducts, sometimes you can open the door by finding an angle in which you can shoot a projectile through an opening at the unlock button on the other side of the door, if you have developed your hacking ability enough you can sometimes bypass the keycard completely, sometimes rooms are blocked by heavy objects that can only be moved if you have invested enough points into leverage which is essentially the ability to lift heavy objects. Sometimes there is only one specific way to open a door and sometimes there are multiple, it really creates this feeling of freedom and makes how you choose to spend those valuable neuromods that much more important.

The story is quite interesting and has a plot that will constantly keep you guessing as to who you can trust and who is lying to you. There are multiple ways to complete the majority of the main missions and these usually have long term ramifications on the outcome of the story. The ending was a little hit and miss to me. On the one hand, i enjoyed learning what was actually going on and thought it to be quite subversive. On the other hand however, it sort of invalidates a lot of what you did in the game and makes your actions feel slightly less impactful. It is pretty neat though, how the ending ties together nicely with the opening of the game to put a nice thematic bow on everything. In summary, this is one of the best immersive sims available right up there with the greats like Deus Ex and Bioshock.

Reviewed on Nov 15, 2023


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