I thought my opinion would be waaaay more controversial but no, it seems like this game is generally well received. Now in short: I, Love, This, Game.

Apparantly people call these kind of games "immersive simulations", which is a term I have never encountered before but sure, seems logical enough.

I have no idea about anything that went on in the story. Everything was just weird in a freaky and exiciting way, like how you have no idea what is going on in Dark Souls until you watch Vaatividya's explanations. But after reading a sumary the story seems actually pretty interresting.

But now the part of the game that makes it one of my personal favourites (and also the reason why I can't shut up about the game). I love the gameplay. I love it when games just have an internal logic that you can use to your advantage. I love it when games leave room for freedom and expression. And finally I love it when there are multiple ways of going about solving a puzzle/clearing a room full of enemies. Prey is the first game of this kind that I have played, where there are just so many possibilities and tools to interact with the environment.

So the gist of Prey is that you are some kind of guy or gal, you wake up, see a guy get eaten by his coffee mug, you wake up again, you smash a window make your way through the first part of the game and eventually end up in the lobby, where you notice, that you are on a space ship and you are trapped with these eldritch horror looking human eating aliens consisting of somekind of weird black shifting matter. From there on out you are mostly free to roam the facility. I still destinctly remember how my first instinct was to return and to use my gloo gun to build makeshift stairs. I reached an area that was dark and really scary and I definetly shit myself when there suddenly appeared a phantom right infront of me. The game didn't tell me to go to that place, but it gave me the tools and I figured it out by myself. And this sums up my experience with Prey quite nicely. Where ever I went I found puzzles in the form of locked rooms or safes. This was the game's way of challenging me to use my brain. And it felt so satisfying everytime when I got into a room through any other way that isn't the front door.

10/10 for the most liberating experience I have ever felt in gaming and also for scaring me to death multiple times in the first hours.

Reviewed on Apr 20, 2024


Comments