Prey (2017) is a great game with an immense amount of depth and thought put into nearly every facet of its design, but sadly it didn’t fully click with me - at least, not until much later. One of the most competent ImSims ever made, with some really cool Metroidvania-style world design, but often tedious to actually play.

8 / 10

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This is a weird one. By all rights, according to my taste and what I value in video games, I should love this game. I should be droning on about how it’s perhaps the most comprehensive AND expansive ImSim-gameplay I’ve ever seen. Not even Deus Ex allows for such a multitude of different options to tackle any given situation, and that one is one of my favourite games of all time. I mean, I’m even currently playing through Nightdive’s 2023 remake of System Shock, a game series very clearly serving as the inspiration for Prey (which btw, if for some reason you don’t know, is not related to the 2009 game of the same name at all) and somehow I’m liking that one more, even though Prey is probably objectively the better game. Lots of people even unofficially dubbed it “System Shock 3”, and it’s easy to see why. It’s gorgeous, with fantastically realised world design, equally competent individual level design, an unbelievably polished physics engine and some of the wildest, most gamebreaking abilities any first person shooter ever dared messing around with.

And yet, despite all of this, it didn’t really click for me. Or rather, it took so long that the game was effectively over by the time I developed a proper grasp on its intentions. Don’t get me wrong, I did get used to some of Prey’s more unconventional design choices, I did make an honest effort in trying to play the game in a way where I would make use of its most fun abilities, and I did finally end up enjoying the game quite a lot, especially towards the end. It’s just that, whenever I see people rank this as “the best” or even among the best Immersive Sim out there, something in me doesn’t really agree about it.

No matter how I splice it, how I think about it, the truth is: I was bored quite a lot when playing Prey. I got fairly close to being kinda done with this game on more than one occasion. It wasn’t until the later sections that the knot finally started to loosen a bit.

If I were trying to be as reductive as possible, I’d say something like “It’s more fun in theory than in praxis.”But I know that isn’t quite what’s happening here. Prey isn’t actually at fault in this instance - well, mostly. I think.

I’m the problem. I simply failed to connect with it the same way I did with other great ImSims like Deus Ex or Cruelty Squad, or even System Shock. Usually, in my other reviews (that you’ve totally read, I know) I would go into excruciating detail in analysing this game’s design and identifying its strengths and flaws. The thing is, I’m not sure if I can do the same here. Instead, this is going to be more of an exploration of why this objectively great game just didn’t resonate with me personally, at least at first.

IMPORTANT - Before we go any further I should mention that I have NOT played the “Mooncrash” DLC. Any points that might get addressed in the DLC do not affect my opinion of Prey.

I’ll begin with the things I enjoyed from the get go, the things that drew me in right at the start. Fittingly enough, let’s begin right there: at the start of the game.

We begin the game as Morgan Yu, a Chinese-American scientist (you can choose between male or female) who’s been recruited by their brother, Alex Yu, to join his company “TranStar” and work aboard the international space station “Talos-1” which is currently orbiting Earth’s moon. We wake up in our luxurious San Francisco apartment and are given time and space to fumble around with the controls, inspect the apartment and marvel at the incredibly detailed graphical assets. As soon as we feel like it, we may leave the apartment, talk a bit to the cleaning lady - who knows our name and everything - and head for the roof, where a helicopter is already waiting to take us to the TranStar HQ. The helicopter ride is beautiful and scenic, and presents us with one of the most iconic title cards in gaming. Alex is waiting for us, tells us how glad he is we joined the program and has us taking a little personality test with Dr. Bellamy. The tests are fairly average, very basic instructions and questions. We begin to wonder why exactly we’re doing this, and why the tests are so incredibly basic. Suddenly, Dr. Bellamy notices that his coffee mug is suddenly completely empty, even though it was filled up just a second ago. That’s because this mug is actually what appears to be some weird, dark and twisted alien life-form disguised as a mug that attacks the professor but before we can do anything we’re getting knocked out by nerve gas.

We wake up in our luxurious San Francisco apartment and are given time and space to fumble around with the controls… hold on. What is happening? Didn’t we leave the apartment already? Something’s… off. The objects are in different spots than they were when we left. We have 6 new mails, all saying “DANGER. LEAVE NOW.” We leave through the door, and see the cleaning lady dead on the floor. The way to the roof is locked. We find a big old wrench next to the lady and arm ourselves with it. Suddenly a voice speaks to us, but not just any voice: OUR voice. It introduces itself as “January” and tells us that what happened yesterday was not a dream, that we need to leave the apartment, and that we’re not safe. We remember that there was a balcony door we couldn’t open before. It’s still locked, but we do have a wrench in our possession. We decide that it’s our best bet to break the window and maybe somehow climb down the side of the building? We take a swing at the window and… it reveals that none of it was real. The apartment, the roof, the TranStar office, even the helicopter ride over there… all of it was literally a facade. A massive LED screen with pretty pictures on it. We realise we’re inside some massive laboratory. But why? What is going on? WTF happened yesterday? After you’ve made your way through the tutorial area, you arrive at a massive lobby which reveals the truth of your situation: We were on Talos-1 all along. Before us, a massive window with a silhouette of earth behind it. But there’s a problem; the entire station has been overrun by a hostile alien species, the Typhon. These aliens were discovered sometime in the 60’s during the space race, and were subsequently kept and experimented on what would eventually become Talos-1. They are quite different from humans in that they seem to exist as a sort of hive mind with psychic abilities, and it’s this discovery that lead scientists to capture and research them to unlock the technology that made the Yu family into the insanely wealthy, powerful people they are today; Neuromods. More on them later.

This is perhaps the strongest opening to any video game I’ve seen in a while. That moment when the wrench hits the glass and reveals the real, cold and dark set behind it feels almost uncanny. Like you’ve just no-clipped out of reality into a horror game. The sheer sense of intrigue that this produces is unparalleled by most other games, or even other forms of media. It immediately hooked me and made me want to find out more about what happened.

It’s very unfortunate then, that this is by far the best and most interesting moment in Prey’s story, and that everything which comes after the intro gradually feels less and less interesting, and becomes more of an excuse for you to traverse the massive space station than an actually interesting plot that drives you forward on its own. We’ll talk more about it down the line.

Something that continues to grow on me the more I think about it and watch other people play the game would be this game’s almost unbelievable amount of emergent gameplay, i.e. “Immersive sim stuff”. While the game “intends” for you to go through most of it in a fairly linear manner, you are given many opportunities to completely break this game in half with the various weapons, tools and abilities at your disposal. Take for example the GLOO Gun. It’s a gun that shoots some sort of wet, organic material that instantly hardens as soon as it makes contact. While its primary purpose is to slow down and immobilise the smaller Typhon enemies like the Mimic so they take more damage, it has multiple other applications as well. Most notably, you can create ledges to grab onto to climb high spaces, or you could create a bridge so you can cross perilous gaps. You can put out fires with it, or stop electrical currents. You can even create roadblocks for smaller enemies, so you can get to safety, and I’m sure there are some other uses as well. While most other weapons obviously don’t have quite the same amount of utility there are a surprising amount of things you can do with them as well. Recycler Charges are another fantastic and multi-faceted tool that can be used in a staggering amount of ways. They are deceptively simple; they break down whatever thing you throw it at into its core components. While this has obvious combat applications, and you can use them to farm those very same components, you can also use them to remove any obstructions or roadblocks that might be too heavy to lift, or otherwise out of reach. The last of the big components here would be the various abilities the player can unlock via the game’s aforementioned, signature technology - Neuromods. Neuromods are devices that are capable of capturing and saving the lived experiences and accumulated skills of a person, allowing for instant transferring of information and abilities from one person to another. If, say, you suck at playing the piano, there’s a Neuromod that lets you become Lev Ornstein himself. These basically function like your level up points within a skill tree / RPG system. The downside of this technology is that, if you were to remove a Neuromod from the user’s brain, you’d delete all of their memories up until the moment that Neuromod was first installed. That means, if you installed a Neuromod that taught you how to play the piano 3 years ago, not only will you lose the ability to play the piano, but you’ll also lose the entire last 3 years of your life. That’s bloody terrifying.

The Neuromod abilities come in 2 main categories, which both have 3 subcategories.

The main categories come in “Human” and “Typhon”. Human abilities are split into “Scientist”, “Engineer” and “Security” categories respectively, while “Typhon” is split into “Energy”, “Morph” and “Telepathy”.

“Scientist” mainly concerns your healing items and PSI - which is basically mana - as well as your hacking abilities. “Engineer” works on things like carrying heavy things (which can be one of the best skills in the game), your repair skills and materials (both target weapon upgrades as well), and “Impact Calibration”, which essentially just upgrades your wrench attacks. Finally for the Human mods, Security. This one obviously revolves mostly around weapon usage, but also your “Conditioning” (i.e. health points, stamina, toughness, mobility), your stealth level and even grants you a bullet-time ability.

Now the Typhon abilities. “Energy” is comprised mostly of psycho-energetic combat abilities, which can be used against the various Typhon or robot enemies (and/or even humans). These come in the form of “kinetic”, “electrostatic” or “thermal” energy blasts, and resistance to those very same elements. Kinetic even features a gravity reversal ability that lets you lift any object into the air - less useful in combat, and more for exploration. The “Morph” neuromods are perhaps the most interesting of the bunch. Perhaps the most underrated ability out of them all; “Mimic”, which like the name suggests lets you imitate any object in the room that isn’t glued to the floor, just like the enemies of the same name. While this can be used for stealth, its real use is more geared towards getting into tight, narrow spaces, maybe slipping underneath a small opening under some rubble, or fit through a tiny hole. It also grants you some minor health recovery abilities.
“Phantom” is a weird one. The main ability is basically a very long dash/dodge that creates a doppelganger in the spot where you stood that can take a couple of hits before it disappears. You can also create doppelgängers by finding human corpses and reanimating them, although I have to admit I have never used this ability once. It also grants resistance to Ether based attacks. “Telepathy” features the “Backlash” tree, which creates an auto-deflect shield for 20 seconds that instantly repels enemy attacks. Next, “Psychoshock” which works similar to the Energy skills, lets you deal psychic damage, can one shot a lot of smaller enemies and completely disable enemies which use psychic abilities themselves. One of my favourite skills in the entire game has to be Mind Jack, which lets you turn enemies into allies that fight for you for 60 seconds, and even free human NPCs that are under Typhon mind control. Finally, there’s “Remote Control”, which lets you pick up and interact with objects up to 10 meters away (more if you upgade it) and also do the same as Mind Jack but for machines. Practically all Typhon abilities use PSI, and starting from a certain number of Typhon neuromods installed, the Talos-1 internal security system will start idenfifying you as Typhon as well, meaning you’ll be dealing with aliens, hacked robots, mind-controlled humans AND the station’s security functioning as intended.

Of course, you don’t have to use any neuromods you don’t want. You could play the game entirely without Typhon abilities, meaning that the station’s security system will never target you - which can be invaluable during later parts of Prey - or you could be playing it without ANY neuromods at all. It’s entirely possible to beat the game without acquiring a single ability.

So you can tell, there is quite a bit of freedom when it comes to how you can tackle any situation, and - theoretically - it’s incredibly fun to figure all of this out. I think my biggest problem with all of this, and why I think this whole concept is more in theory than in praxis lies with the fact that Prey is quite bad at actually explaining or relaying any of this to you. The only instance I can remember in which an ability is presented to you in a way that actually expands your horizon of it is seeing a dead NPC who tried to build a bridge with the GLOO gun. There are more problems with it, but once again, I’ll go into more detail later.

Another thing I wanna explicitly mention as genuinely great design and a fantastic and surprisingly deep game mechanic; the recycle system. Every single object, item and even character in this game consist of a set amount of materials, which are either organic, synthetic, mineral or Typhon based. There are 2 specialised kinds of machines that can be found throughout the station’s many levels. One is a recycling station, which - like the recycler charger - lets you break down any one item or object that can be picked up into its core components. The other, the fabricator, lets you create new objects from those very same components as long as you have the blueprint for it, which includes healing items, weapons, ammunition and even neuromods among others. This is genius, and made for an incredibly compelling gameplay loop, and some of the best crafting I’ve seen in a game. Literally any single object you pick up can potentially help in making you stronger, so no item you pick up is ever entirely worthless. System Shock had a similar system, but in that game you could only do it with very specific items, labelled as “junk”. Those “junk” items could either be vaporised into scrap metal or turned into money directly via a recycling station. You couldn’t recycle any weapons (except broken ones), grenades or other non-“junk” items. Here, in Prey, you can recycle anything.

The one thing where this system perhaps goes a little too far is with the ability to simply fabricate Neuromods yourself. While this is obviously a great tool for people who are trying to get very powerful as early as possible, it kind of takes away from the intrinsic joy of finding them in the wild. By proxy, it also diminishes the joy of exploration as a whole because, outside of very few unique items and weapons, Neuromods are going to be your main reward for exploring the map. You obviously can’t do this right from the start, but you can unlock this early enough that it can potentially trivialise a lot of Prey’s later sections.

Finally, let’s talk about Talos-1, as a video game world as well as a place within the story. There are very few video game maps as complete and authentic as this one. Taking very obvious cues from System Shock’s “Citadel Station”, Prey takes place entirely within (and around) Talos-1, which is made up of multiple different levels that are all stacked vertically on top of each other. Each layer serves a different purpose and its design reflects that. Like System Shock, Talos-1 needs to be traversed via a sort of “Metroidvania-lite” approach, in which you’ll be confronted with many locked doors or blocked paths that you’ll need to either find a key, password or pin code for, find the right ability to circumnavigate it, or open from the other side in one way or another. This is fantastic design, which allows for a fairly nicely structured, linear story line that the player can simply follow without thinking too much about where to go next, while also giving you the opportunity of completely breaking that very same pacing. You can grab items, weapons, abilities and much more well before you’re actually meant to find them if you know what you’re doing. But other than System Shock, Prey also lets you fly around outside of Talos-1, making for an alternate mode of traversal between its respective areas, and giving you even more stuff to find. This area can be quite tricky to navigate though, as enemies are numerous and orientation can be a bit rough.

So, up until now most of this sounds positively fantastic. An incredibly rich and multi-faceted gameplay system that allows for an almost unprecedented amount of freedom when it comes to the second-to-second experience. Deep and thoughtful world building, and a game world that feels entirely complete in-itself, and has diegetic explanations for close to everything that happens in game. Sounds like a dream come true.

So why, I ask myself, did it take so long for me to “get it”? Why did it take me close to 20 hours before I finally started to grasp how the game actually wanted me to play it when it took me roughly 25 to beat? Why did so many parts of the game feel so frustrating for me? Why did I get bored so often? Why did I have to stop the game to do something else multiple times? Why can’t I seem to recognise this game for the 10/10 that so many people say it is?

Right from the bat, you’re probably thinking “Well, that’s on you buddy.” And it likely is, for the most part. I’m definitely at fault for trying to play the game like it’s Cruelty Squad for the first couple of hours.

Let’s start with something that’s perhaps a bit subjective, but then again, so are most of my criticisms. The player character’s movement feels unbearably slow. Seriously. I unironically think that around half my problems with this game can be boiled down to how tedious it is to get around the place. This extends to all forms of movement, be it a simple walk from point A to point B, during combat or platforming; you always feel like gravity is twice as strong for you as it is for everything else. Even floating around outside the station feels unwieldy and impractical, even though can admittedly fly quite fast. There is a sprint button, but stamina is hilariously low at the start and requires multiple investments until you start to notice a change at all. I’m not expecting to to be able to dart around the map like it’s DOOM instantly, but considering that just about every other ImSim gave me ability to move a lot faster eventually, the complete lack of any real mobility upgrades just felt really off for me. Even System Shock gives you a speed upgrade a bit later in the game. Again, I know that this is very subjective and that a lot of people are likely going to disagree with me, but I really did not enjoy how much the game restricts your movement.

Now, I think I understand why the player character is so low. Prey is ultimately a bit of a space horror game - or at least, it presents itself like one. I know that Arkane Studios don’t really consider it a horror title, and in all honesty it’s not very scary. But there is an undeniable focus on some horror elements when it comes to engaging enemies. What I mean with that is; typically video game protagonists tends to be very slow in horror games, which makes sense as you want to make the player feel disempowered and like they’re in over their head. In this case, it’ll be the threat of most enemies in this game being able to catch up with you effortlessly. So, that means we have to square up and fight, then? Well… the problem with that is that almost all enemies are absurdly strong at the start of the game. As established, they are all quite fast, they all have more health than you’d think and starting with the Phantoms, they are able to delete you almost instantly. Even the mimics can be a real problem if you encounter more than one at a time. So, what exactly are we to do? Should we just avoid combat entirely? At least for the early game, that seems to be the idea. While you can absolutely play this game with only a few weapons you can obtain relatively early on, playing it like that is really hard and tedious. Combat is definitely a core component of this game, but it only starts to become interesting as soon as you’ve actually acquired a decent amount of Neuromods. For the first couple of hours, I was constantly save scumming just to get past minor enemy set ups. The obvious answer to this would be “just use stealth” but I sadly found stealth to be the most underdeveloped mechanic in the whole game. To this day, I do not fully understand what exactly enemies even can or can’t notice.

Once again, I understand that this isn’t necessarily objective truth. I know that there are plenty of ways to circumnavigate enemies without the use of advanced weapons or skills, and I understand that me being stubborn was more often the problem than not, I do feel like the game communicates what you are even capable of very poorly at times. At least I can confidently say that it does get better, you do get much more ways to engage with enemies outside of just shooting at them. The other problem here is that combat feels woefully unbalanced. Some options are just always stronger than others.

For example, the shotgun is just always the best option of doing damage. There is nothing that this thing cannot chew through. Doesn’t matter if they’re aliens, robots or humans, the shotgun will take them down. You don’t even necessarily need to upgrade it, it’s just always the best option. There are other guns that work better at range or have other perks, but considering that 90% of the game takes place in rather cramped environments with small corridors and relatively low ceilings, there is almost never any reason to switch to anything else. I basically only used the standard pistol (I did switch this one for the golden version, which is just the same but better in every way) and the shotgun, and made use of the Typhon skills for combat purposes for the whole game. I tried other weapons, but they all felt very impractical to use, ammo was way too rare (or expensive to craft) or they slowed your already quite sluggish character down to a snail’s pace. Very occasionally I would also use the stun gun on robots, but as soon as I unlocked the ability to electrify enemies with mind powers, I don’t think I ever used that gun again. Generally speaking, Typhon powers are also unbelievably strong. The devs tried to balance it by making PSI regen items rather rare, but it turns out that you can do a side quest in which the entire water supply of Talos-1 becomes enriched with PSI, so you basically have infinite and free PSI at every single sink in the game. This of course means that using guns that use finite ammunition (you can theoretically run out of crafting materials, believe it or not) that deal less damage than mind powers, which can be potentially used infinitely as long as you have a sink in the vicinity, feels almost comically useless.

There are of course also various grenades, but they don’t really add that much to the feeling of combat. The recycler charges are a really neat concept though, it’s just that I found them much too valuable to be using in combat, rather than simply using them to clear road blocks.

So much for the feel of combat on the player’s end. Overall, I’d say it’s perfectly fine as soon as you understand how you’re actually meant to play this game. The closest thing I can compare this to is the feeling you get when playing a Souls game for the first time, particularly the older ones where, once you get it, it’s some of the best stuff in gaming but the game is just not good at telling you how you’re meant to play it. Now let’s talk about the various enemies.

In general, a game having an unbalanced and slightly flawed combat system doesn’t have to be necessarily bad if the enemies are interesting and varied enough. Sadly, I can’t say I found Prey’s enemies to be all that interesting, or engaging for the most part. They don’t really do it for me in terms of horror either, unless I’m really going out of my way to unpack the meta narrative of it all, and how the story presents an interesting Lovecraftian idea about opening a Pandora’s box of knowledge.

As far as the Typhon go, I don’t find their visual design particularly compelling. I think they look rather dull for the most part. Like they went out of their way to make their design as nondescript as possible. They are all variations on the same bunch of black goo that takes different forms and shapes. The general variety of enemies is also rather low. There are only 7 unique Typhon types: Mimics, Phantoms, Poltergeists, Techno- and Telepaths (which function almost the same way), Cystoids, Weavers and Nightmares. I’m not counting the Apex, since that one isn’t really an “enemy” per se.

Let’s start with the Mimic; fitting, since it’s the first enemy we see. Which is itself strange, because they are probably the most creative and interesting enemy in the entire game. Mimics can turn into any single object in the room, from random coffee mugs to chairs to actual items the player might want to loot like health pick ups, ammunition and even weapons. They are rather small, but they are vicious and fast. They are almost indistinguishable from normal items, meaning you’ll get a surprise ambush if you’re not double checking everything. While you could just shoot or attack every object in the room, it’s a lot easier to watch for a specific sign; they randomly twitch every few seconds, like they’re glitching out. Theoretically, this is probably the strongest horror element in here, at least on a gameplay level. It makes for some genuine paranoia whenever you walk into a dimly lit room with a lot of objects, never knowing which one of them might come to life. Their one problem isn’t even related to their design, but rather to Prey seriously pushing what is even possible on a PS4 - the many, many visual glitches. I lost count of how many times I lost track of what is a Mimic and what isn’t due to objects just randomly twitching by themselves, or lights flickering because the engine can’t keep up. I’ll get a bit more into this a bit later, but for now not much else can be said about Mimics. They are small and fast, but can be killed relatively easily, even at the start. (There are also “Greater Mimics” which are slightly larger and stronger but otherwise identical.)

The same cannot be said about Phantoms. They are quite a bit stronger, faster and tankier than Mimics, and especially the elemental ones will tear you a new one in the early game. They attack you with the same powers you will get later down the line, and they are quite tanky for first encountering them literally in the tutorial area. They come in all sorts of flavours, from the “normal” ones with kinetic powers, to Etheric (psychic), Voltaic (electric) and Thermal (heat). The etheric one is perhaps the most interesting since it can clone itself, but other than that they behave pretty much identically.

Poltergeists could have been interesting, but they are woefully underused and not really all that threatening. Their gimmick is that they can turn invisible and create gravity reversal vortexes beneath your feet, which can deal a lot of damage if you don’t realise what’s happening. They are not really all that threatening though, as they are almost always alone and in rather small spaces, so finding them is never a huge challenge.

Tele- and Technopaths are, for all intents and purposes, the same enemy. Both of them work by controlling other units, either humans or robots. Kill them, and their slaves are free - at least that’s true for the Telepath. Unlike the other Typhon enemies, I think their design is genuinely a bit creepy, the way you can’t really tell where front and back is on this thing. Generally, these guys can provide you some of the more interesting combat challenges since the Telepath holds human characters hostage that you can free and later meet in a different section - meaning that there is a very strong incentive of trying to NOT get the humans killed - and the Technopaths will often hinder your path by blocking doors or elevators. They also often control turrets, which can be hacked after the death of the Technopath, so you can secure the area afterwards.

Cystoids are basically sentient mines that hover towards the player and explode. Less of an enemy and more like a stage hazard. They are produced and stored in Cystoid Nests, which stop producing them if you destroy the nests. Since they explode when you kill them, you can also just shoot them into each other for maximum damage. Pretty fun when it happens.

Finally, we have the Weavers, which are the strongest regular Typhon enemies. Visually, they resemble mimics but are much larger, with far more appendages and they possess the ability to construct Coral, an orange-glowing spiderweb-like substance that seems to facilitate the spread of Typhon creatures across the station. This stuff is everywhere in the station and it keeps spreading. The weavers don’t really attack by themselves, instead they’ll create a bunch of cystoid to keep you distracted while they run away. In the lore of the game, they are also responsible for creating other Typhon, such as Mimics, Phantoms and Techno/Telepaths.

While these were all regular enemies, there is one more special enemy we’ll occasionally run into; the Nightmares. They are gigantic Phantom-like Typhon that stalk the player throughout the station, and will randomly appear to hunt us down. When we first encounter them they are basically unkillable, unless you’re extraordinarily skilled at the game. They are extremely fast, have short- and long ranged attacks, are capable of one-shotting you and are seldom alone. Upon appearing, they trigger a mini-sidequest in which you need to either evade it for 3 minutes, or kill it. Like I said, at first you’ll most likely just run away. And, if you make the mistake of trying to kill one in the early game like I did, you’ll probably keep on doing that for a while. And, in all honesty, running away is almost always the better option. Doing this will make it so the Nightmare won’t appear for 20 minutes, while killing it extends this to 30, and you also get a bit of Typhon crafting material. That is SO not worth it. Like, that’s almost ridiculous. It is by far the hardest enemy to fight in the game, and it nets you the same amount of Typhon material you’d get by clearing a room of weak mobs.

Let’s quickly move on to the more robotic enemies on the station, although there is not much to say here.

There are basically only 2 types of machines; turrets and operators.

Turrets function exactly like you’d think. They are autonomous guns that shoot at enemies. If you play the game without using any Typhon Neuromods, these things will never even consider you enemies unless they’ve been taken over by a Technopath. If you DO have enough Typhon material in you, they’ll start detecting you as a threat after a while. You can however hack them to make them friendly to you in either case. They can be very useful in certain situations, since they do have a surprising amount of firepower.

Operators are a bit more complicated. There are 3 types of operators; Medical, Science and Engineering. All three of them also come in friendly varieties. The friendly versions essentially provide infinite healing, PSI-regen and suit-integrity repair services respectively. They can be produced via a dispenser that typically needs to be repaired or hacked to be accessed and made usable.

As enemies, they’re surprisingly persistent and annoying. They basically only take damage from kinetic and electric attacks, and especially the Medical and Science bots’ shock attack deals a lot of damage. While you cannot restore them normally, you can use the hacking ability to turn them into friendlies one at a time.

The game introduces one more operator type towards the end, the Military Operator. These things are tough. They can fire lasers at you from very far away and eat through your healthbar like it’s nothing. I have some problems with them, but more related to the game’s story, and less their status as enemies. But they are pretty annoying to deal with as well, especially since the game will mercilessly dump them on your head literally every step of the way. The one saving grace is that, if you manage to hack them, these things can take out entire Typhon squads for you without blinking.

So, that’s it for the enemies in this game. Not much else to say about any of them. I will say that the game does a fine job of keeping things fresh with new enemies until roughly 30% through, after which you’ll see the same enemies appear over and over again. It’s kind of wild to me that the original System Shock did a better job at this 30 years ago. Especially towards the end, you’ll be slicing through the same enemies you fought at the start like a 1000°C knife through butter.

With the enemies out of the way, let’s talk about the world design a bit more. In theory, it’s great. In praxis, it’s still good but severely impacted by the fact that physically getting around is just so tedious. It never really feels like you’re gaining ground against the fact that you’ll have to backtrack through areas over and over again, without really finding anything that might make subsequent trips a little easier or at least take less long. Yes, you do unlock some locked doors between areas, you will unlock a big elevator that goes between some areas and the GLOO gun can create shortcuts were there were none. There is also the GUTS system and going outside of Talos-1. The GUTS system is a neat experience for the first time, but repeated traversal through it feels unnecessarily punishing. It’s also not particularly fast. The same goes for flying outside the station. While, yes, you can theoretically go from any area to any other by doing this, in reality most doors are jammed shut from the other side and you’re equally slow outside the station as you are inside. There is potentially some cool stuff to find out here, but most of it is locked by either a number code or by the lack of some specific ability. While it is cool in theory that it exists, once again, in praxis flying all the way out to some random piece of debris a mile away from the station only to be met with a door you cannot physically get to open is just disappointing. I don’t think I went back to any one of these, simply because getting there was such a hassle, and more importantly; I knew it was just going to be Neuromods anyway.

Neuromods are, in theory, a great reward for exploration, since they facilitate the feedback loop of finding items to unlock abilities to find more items. The problem comes from the fact that you can create them yourself very early. This problem’s nature is twofold, once in the sense that being able to unlock some of the game’s most broken abilities relatively early to the start of the game can of course utterly break the balance of the experience. That may be intended however, and I don’t necessarily see this as a huge issue. The bigger problem comes from the fact that exploration very rarely rewards you with anything better or more valuable than Neuromods anyway, meaning that what little incentive there was to go back to a random shuttle outside of Talos-1 is now utterly gone, since you know you won’t be getting any unique rewards. What makes this whole problem even more severe is that - sometimes - there IS unique and cool stuff to find, like interactions with NPCs, cool environmental storytelling moments, and maybe even a unique weapon or something. These moments are few and far between though.

This has all been fairly critical and negative, so let’s come back to something positive again.

The art direction in this game, especially in terms of environmental designs, is incredible. I genuinely think that this is one of the best looking PS4 games out there. In fact, I kinda wish it wasn’t tied to this console in particular, as the games fantastic looking environments and set designs clearly put a lot of strain on the game’s overall performance. This game would benefit from a PS5 remaster to an unbelievable degree, just so we could get a stable 60fps out of this. I’m not usually as adamant about increasing frame rates for a game that works fine, and I’m typically also ok with a stable 30 - if it IS stable, which in this case, it sadly isn’t. Graphically, it wouldn’t even need one as it looks genuinely great. The visual variety in between the zones is amazing too. From the very 80’s corporate-style Lobby, with lots of cozy, wooden browns and reds and greens, to the dark, blue and red Reactor level, the amazing looking, lush and green Arboretum, the scary and mechanical Neuromods Division and Psychotronics.. etc. Where the designers seemed to have conserved energy with the enemy variety, they seem to have gone all out with the areas. Ultimately, not a bad choice, as this game clearly plays much more around interacting with the world than the enemies. This is also where we need to address the similarities to System Shock, its biggest and most obvious inspiration when it comes to the overall design of Prey. In terms of locations, Prey does a much better job of making it all feel more natural and less video-gamey. While I love System Shock, and I ultimately prefer it a bit to Prey, the latter really makes Talos-1 feel like a real place that exists as a space station first and foremost, and a video game level second. System Shock’s Citadel Station feels also very immersive and authentic for the time, but these days the video-gamey structure is far more obvious.

Where I thought that the overall story was a bit lacklustre overall, the various side quests are great and often do a much better job of really pulling you right into the experience than the main plot. My favourite (and I reckon I’m not alone with this) would be the side quest about the imposter cook, in which you will have to deal with a terrifyingly fiendish foe, who is easily more threatening than any alien or machine on board. What’s worse is that, by the end, it’s hard to fault him for really wanting to see you dead. He’s a great villain and a real trickster. He will put really well hidden recycler charge traps everywhere, being able to kill you outright. I won’t go into too much detail because I don’t feel like describing his entire, very lengthy quest, but I really enjoyed it from start to finish.

In general, it’s quite impressive just how much of the side quests’ story contents end up flowing back into the main plot, depending on what you do - or don’t do. Characters will give different dialogues, engage differently with the story or maybe even not be there at all, depending on whether or not they’ve died. Or take the previously mentioned side quest about putting PSI in the general water supply, making the entire game play totally differently. I’ve already praised the game for its extensive immersive sim mechanics in terms of second-to-second gameplay, but what I find even more impressive is just how many different angles they considered for how the story might play out. It’s almost a shame how thinly the plot is constructed in terms of making the player progress from one area to another, because the lore and implications of the story are great.

Seeing how often I addressed it by now, we should probably talk about the actual plot. We already explored the opening of this game at the start of the review, now let’s get back to where we left off.

Morgan finds themselves on Talos-1, without any idea of how they got here or why. We just escaped the Neuromod Division, which held the little fish bowl laboratory in which we were seemingly observed and studied, but why? The AI with our voice, January, says it might have some answers, but that we need to go to our office and watch a video to understand it all. We have an office? What exactly is going on here? Turns out, not only are we on this station already, but we are actually the vice president of TranStar, and thus the co-owner of this station. By watching a video/hologram on a 3D screen by the company Looking Glass (a not very subtle hint to Looking Glass Studios, creators of System Shock and it’s sequel) that Morgan recorded for themselves sometime in the past, we learn that we are suffering from permanent memory loss due to our experimentation with Typhon-based Neuromods. As we learned, removing a Neuromod also removes all memories and experiences that were gained since it got installed. Video-Morgan also explains to current Morgan that they created January for this exact scenario, and that we can and should trust it to have our best interest at mind. Before we can finish watching the whole video, it gets interrupted by a certain someone.

Morgan’s brother, Alex Yu, explains that he can’t have us watching the rest of this video, out of fear that we might understand everything horribly wrong, and that he personally needs to explain the situation to us. January, however, implies that we shouldn’t trust Alex, and that we need to get to the Hardware Labs to get Looking Glass back online. After fighting our way through the labs and doing just that, we go back to the office to watch the rest of the video, in which past-Morgan states that - in the event of a Typhon outbreak - we need to destroy everything. The station, the research and most importantly, the Typhon. This of course, sadly, includes ourselves. Past-Morgan also warns us that Alex will certainly try and stop us. January introduces itself in “person” (it inhabits an operator) and sends us to fix the station’s main lift. To do that, we first need to go to Psychotronics. This is where the Typhon first broke out of their confinement.

Some quick lore context: In this universe, JFK survived his assassination attempt, and the USA - for some reason - got really invested in the space race, much more than in our timeline. Not sure what JFK surviving would have to do with that, but whatever. Some time during the 1960’s, the US discovers a strange alien species which they name Typhon. The USSR joins the US in a scientific effort to study the species, and begin to construct a station which would later become Talos-1. Later, when the USSR collapses sometime in the 80’s (earlier than in our timeline) and the US practically own the whole station, the Typhon break containment for the first time and kill a bunch of scientists, leading the US to abandon the project. Much later, during the 2020’s, TranStar acquires the station and restarts the research project on the Typhon. They massively increase the station’s size and build around the original station like a big church built around a small chapel. This original station is what would later become Psychotronics, and you can tell that this place is much older than the rest of Talos-1.

Moving on. After entering Psychotronics, we get contacted by yet another AI with our voice, this one’s called December. This one was also created by Morgan, but even before January. It informs us that, other than blowing up the whole station alongside ourselves, we could also just dip, using Alex’s escape pod. We’d just need to find his keycard, which we won’t find for a little while. This becomes an alternate ending to the game you can absolutely go for. As soon as you find that keycard, you’re basically free to go and end the game right then and there - if you’re ok with being this selfish. If we’re not going for this specific ending, our ultimate goal in any case is to find our Arming Key, a keycard that holds the self-destruct code of the nuclear reactor which powers this station. (Another very obvious nod to System Shock)

And starting from here, this is where we get into the section of the story I was talking about before, the part where the actual plot kind of devolves into sending you around the whole place to solve some fairly ad-hoc problems every time. The station security captain asks you to bail them out, go to this area. Oh now, something doesn’t work again, gotta go to this other area and fix it. Now something else happened, and you gotta go somewhere else yet again. Now you need to systematically gather different voice logs of a certain employee to unlock a door that leads to another area, making you run around the entire station to find the pieces. It feels weirdly unfocussed for a game that had such an eventful beginning with so many plot-strains introduced right at the start. That is not to say that there aren’t genuinely cool story moments afterwards, because there are.

Unravelling the dynamic between Morgan and Alex is very interesting, and I find it cool how often your perspective of Alex can change in a single playthrough. Depending on your viewpoint, Alex is either a ridiculously cruel and callous person, a straight up evil capitalist who will sacrifice anything and anyone just to further his own, immediate gains, or a very reasonable albeit thick-headed savant, a genius in his field of research with a very single minded but ultimately somewhat noble goal, to allow humanity a massive leap forward. The many interactions and conversations you have with him make for a multitude of possible interpretations of his character, and I think that’s great. He is very well written.

The next bit that’s actually interesting story wise, is when Alex locks us in Deep Storage, on our way to retrieve the schematic for our Arming Key. He locks us in here, to keep us (relatively) safe for one, but also obviously so we can’t progress with our quest to blow up the station. Chief archivist Danielle Sho, seemingly surprised we’re still alive, tells us of a way out, by jettisoning a storage unit out into deep space, which knocks us unconscious. When we come to, we’re a couple hundred meters away from Talos-1, letting us explore the outside of the station for the first time. After a short while, Security Chief Elazar tells us that she can let us back in through the Cargo Bay. On the way there, we receive a distress signal by one Dr. Dayo Igwe, who locked himself in a cargo container to escape the Typhon, just like we did to escape from Deep Storage. While you can choose to either leave him to his doom or kill him, saving him is almost inarguably the best choice, as he will provide you with a lot of dialogue and story context but also some side quests, and his presence can pretty drastically change the outcome of the game’s ending.

After this, the marathon continues. We need to go back to the main station, but - oh no - Typhon are camping behind the only door connecting both parts. Now we need to go back and retrieve a whole bunch of turrets to guard the door. Do you see what I mean with my statement before, about how this game’s plot doesn’t really ever move beyond giving you very immediate problems that you’ll need to address now to move on to the next area. It feels strangely video gamey for a game that is otherwise very careful to NOT do that.

Next, we need to go to Life Support. There, Dr. Mikhaila Ilyushin informs us that we need to reboot the entire system fo Talos-1 to override the lockdown that Alex enforced. She’s dying from the symptoms of an illness she needs constant medicine for, locking her in place. We can choose to retrieve the medicine and save her, despite her wishes to the contrary. So we make our way to the reactor to reboot the station, only to find that we need to replace a broken piece of equipment that we have to go somewhere else for to find it. At this point the constant detours the game makes you go on feel honestly start to feel rather contrived and gratuitous. At least, it doesn’t take too long this time before we reboot the station. Doing this unlocks quite a few places, but also locks others off because they’ve been overrun by this point. Alex finally invites us to his office up in the Arboretum to talk face to face.

Yeah, right. Did you seriously think this game wouldn’t throw another red herring your way? When you arrive there, Alex is obviously not in his office, and instead makes you watch a Looking Glass video of him and Morgan from quite a bit back. This Morgan is wildly different than the Morgan you listened to in the first video. They are seemingly fully aware and in acceptance that experimenting with Neuromods might drastically change their personality, and that they are willingly doing all of this to go all the way to the end with Typhon-based research. This Morgan staunchly believes that Neuromod research will lead to the benefit of all humankind and believes that any and all sacrifices are necessary to keep it going.

This is, in my opinion, a very interesting moment that questions your motives as a player, as well as Morgan, the character. We have different versions of the same person, separated only by a few months who utterly disagree on what to do in this situation. Old Morgan is willing to go all the way, saying that them losing their memory is an acceptable outcome to them, and that it’s imperative that current Morgan keeps getting reminded of that. The newer, still not quite current, post-Neuromod-removal Morgan instead feels quite differently, they are willing to put their own life on the line to stop it all. The question is; which one is the real Morgan? Surely it’s the one before the removals. But, on the other hand, wouldn’t the real Morgan be the one that doesn’t have any preconceived notions about what to gain from this? The more important question: Does it really matter? What is important to the current Morgan? This is perhaps the closest the game gets to actually getting really freaking profound with its story. It’s such an interesting question being posed here.

To come back to the actual plot at hand, Morgan learns that they made plans for a so-called Nullwave device, which would be able to completely kill all Typhon within a very large radius, more than enough to envelop the entire station. These Nullwaves can also be used as regular weaponry, both in form of a gun and grenades. If I understand this correctly, they effectively act like phase-shifted brainwaves that cancel out the psionic brainwaves (and thus the psychic powers) of the Typhon, kinda like how noise-suppression technology cancels out incoming sound by producing an exactly phase-shifted version of that very same sound. This realisation basically opens up a third possible ending, in which you try and kill all the Typhon instead of abandoning the station or blowing it up, instead trying to salvage the research.

Our next quest is to scan certain Coral clusters outside of the station, to gather enough data to be able to actually construct the Nullwave device. Regardless of whether we want to do this or not, Alex promises to just give us his Arming Key, effectively forcing us to do it. In either case, we have to go back outside. I feel like making this an actual player choice might have added a little more freedom to the end of the game, but I can take it or leave it. Outside, January contacts us again to make the point that past-Morgan doesn’t necessarily speak for current-Morgan, and that we should really think about what WE want. Not too much later, Alex contacts us to tell us that our parents - the owners of TranStar and main benefactors and sponsors of Talos-1 - have somehow caught wind of the outbreak and decide to try and nip this little problem in the bud.

During an attempt to upload the data, literally as if on cue (because it is), suddenly the system shots down and our parents’ contingency plan is set into motion. The so-called “Recovery team” has arrived at the station, and its chief, Walter Dahl, is out to smoke our asses. Turns out, their parents don’t give two shits about Morgan and Alex. In praxis, this recovery team is basically just this mercenary and a whole bunch of Military Operators (I told you we’d talk more about them) that now occupy literally EVERY. SINGLE. LEVEL. of this entire station. His orders are to kill everyone, destroy the entire station, and then pretend it just blew up for some reason. Apart from this being annoying to deal with in general, I was just rolling my eyes at Prey going “OH NO something went wrong at the very last second AGAIN!?? WOW! OH NO! How could this happen?? What an unlikely occurrence!!”

This is where the plot and even the pacing of the game sadly kind of falls apart for me. Let’s start with the fact that having to deal with these fuckers is the most annoying shit in this entire game. They will literally gank you every single step of the way from that point on all the way until the end, with only very occasional breaks. They are very tanky, deal absurd amounts of damage, can fly, and are constantly being produced by all the Operator Dispenser machines throughout the entirety of Talos-1, because Dahl hacked them. The only way to stop them is to kill them or hack them. Killing them truly is easier said than done, as these things will shred through ANYTHING, even the Nightmare Typhon is no match for even 2 of those things. Even IF you manage to kill them, the nearest operator will just keep on churning out more of them, so you’ll have at least 3 to deal with at any time. Hacking them requires the highest level hacking skill there is in this game - Hacking IV. As if hacking them wasn’t difficult enough (you have to stand next to them without them seeing you), you actually have to hack all 3 hostile Military Operators in ANY area for them to stop constantly spawning. The only other way to stop them from spawning on top of your ass is to simply finish the next part of the story, essentially meaning that the only effective way to deal with this is to run past everything and beeline it to the end. That also means that you better explored every nook and cranny of this station before this point, because… good luck trying to explore during this shit.

The part that really irks me is how haphazardly this all is implemented in the story. These things are literally being produced by the station’s own operator dispensers. They all run through a centralised system, with all data shared between them. How on earth did Talos-1 and its entire crew get fucked up this bad when THESE THINGS exist? As explained before, these things can shred through entire armies of Typhon, including the really big, scary ones like the Nightmare. With this technology readily available, there should be absolutely no way the Typhon could spread as much as they did, seeing how Dahl eradicates most of them in a couple of hours. Some people might argue that Dahl probably first introduced them to Talos-1, and that they didn’t exist before. The problem is that, in an optional log file you can learn the fact that these things were literally designed ON Talos-1, and that Dahl’s operator, Kaspar, is basically just forcing the dispensers to endlessly produce Military Operators with schematics that already existed on board. Unless I am missing some crucial pieces of info, this is a pretty glaring plot hole that could’ve been easily solved by writing a few lines of extra dialogue. This probably wouldn’t bother me if a.) this wasn’t an extremely important plot detail that could literally delete the entire core conflict of this story and b.) it wasn’t quite indicative of a general lack of care and polish that went into the end game.

So, we have to deal with Dahl and his horde of robots. To shut them down, we have to get to the Shuttle Bay and stop Kaspar, his main operator. We can either kill or hack it, it makes no difference gameplay wise. Important: Before we come here, we can talk to Dr. Igwe and Dr. Ilyushin back at Morgan’s office. We can actually talk to them a whole bunch of times throughout the game, and both will give you side quests. I particularly liked Mikhaila’s quest and the moral conundrum it presents you with, and it’s one of the best pieces of characterisation that Morgan gets in this whole game - weird how it’s completely optional and highly missable. The important bit would be Dr. Igwe’s suggestion of not killing Dahl, and instead simply incapacitating him, removing his Neuromods and telling him that his order was to rescue us. Depending on how you play this game, and what ending you value most, this can get you what is arguably this game’s best endings, but I’ll get to that in just a bit.

After we’ve stopped Kaspar, the final stretch of the game begins. We also learn that Kaspar was manually stopping the Coral-data upload from happening, presumably to make sure there was absolutely NO evidence left of what happened here. That makes me think of something. I just realised that I haven’t really explained why exactly one would want to delete what happened on this station from history.

Well, turns out that the primary test subjects for most experimentation with Neuromods were.. prisoners. Russian death row prisoners, no less. These prisoners apparently all got offered a deal at some point during their wait on death row, where they could gain “””freedom””” in exchange for participating in science experiments in space. These science experiments were some of the most gruesome stuff imaginable. From slowly injecting subjects with minor amounts of Typhon to letting putting a person and a mimic into an enclosed space and just… see what happens. We also learn that basically all Phantoms on the station were previously those very same prisoners. No wonder they’re so hellbent on killing you.
All of this of course means that Morgan Yu, regardless of what they choose to do past their Neuromod removal, is a criminal, piece of shit scumbag of the highest margin. When I learned this, I felt like blowing up the station not because it was the right thing to do, but because I hated Morgan so much and found that they deserved it.

But before we get to that, let’s finish this up. We receive a distress call from Alex, saying that Dahl is about to break into his safe room. When we reach the Arboretum again, we have to make a choice of how to deal with Dahl. Remember, if we don’t kill him here, Dr. Igwe can make him forget what his actual reason for coming here was. This would have been the preferred outcome for me, but sadly my game glitched and Dahl somehow died, even though I knocked him out with the stun gun and he was at around half health. The next time I checked, he was suddenly dead with no explanation of what might have happened. I still have no idea how this happened, and I’m still kinda salty. But that’s just the level of quality to expect from a Bethesda-published game at this point.

Regardless of what we do, the final confrontation with Alex is here. You can of course, just kill him and grab the key, but that would be needlessly barbaric at this point in the story. The least we can do is hear him out, seeing how Morgan truly is no angel themselves either. Alex does give us the key, as promised, but he also makes us listen to his monologue about how he knows, deep down inside, that we also want what Alex wants. In terms of what the true, actual Morgan with all their memories and experience before the removal intact would think, I think Alex is quite right. Morgan seems like an incorrigible megalomaniac, just like their brother. What’s more important is that Alex made a discovery… the Coral talks. It emits a signal somewhere into deep space, and also connects all Typhon to each other. Through this discovery, he was able to create a Nullwave device that can hijack this Coral network and send a massive NW pulse directly through it, meaning it would kill every single organism hooked into this network.

In this very second, the destination of the mysterious Coral signal becomes clear. Out of nowhere, literally materialising into the vacuum of space, swallowing the entire station in a single gulp like a black hole, appears the Apex Typhon. A gargantuan, unfathomably large Typhon organism that makes the Nightmare look like an ant in comparison. This is perhaps the strongest story moment since the very beginning of the game, since it throws you for a loop just as heavily as that first one. Panic sets in. The entire ship begins to crack and crumble. Turns out, the coral, and all of the smaller Typhon had only one single purpose: to survey and create the way for the Apex to arrive. To feed. To consume the entirety of Talos-1, and it won’t stop there. It has realised that there are more humans to feed on, and it’s already dangerously close to Earth. Things got really fucking serious really quickly. Next to this, Alex is floating around unconscious. We have to grab the key from him and get out of there, but we can also decide to save Alex by dragging his unconscious body into his safe room. If we don’t, we’re leaving him here to die.

Now, with both arming keys AND the Nullwave device in hand, we have to make a choice. And this choice is actually quite multifaceted, depending on how you’ve played the game. Should you decide to destroy the station, you must make your way down to the reactor again and start the self-destruct sequence with January waiting there. If you’ve saved Alex, he’ll show up here and destroy January, pleading with you not to do it. However, he won’t physically stop you from doing it, which feels kinda strange. At this point in time, I fully expected Alex to be ready to both kill and die for his project, but he destroys January before your eyes and yet won’t get in your way further than that. This really should’ve ended with you having to decide between your brother and everyone else.

If you decide to blow it up without having spared Dahl, you alone get the choice to either blow yourself up with the rest or make your way to to Alex’s escape pod and piss off. Everyone else will have to die regardless. IF you’ve saved Dahl, he’ll actually gather the precious few survivors of this station, including you and Alex, and leave for Earth. Like I said, initially I was going for the ending of getting the survivors out of here and blowing the station up with Morgan still in it, but since Dahl glitched himself to death on my save, I felt like blowing up the station without giving the others a chance to escape felt more like punishing them for Morgan’s crimes.

So I went for the other ending, in which you’ll have to trigger the updated Nullwave device to kill the Typhon. To do this, you’ll have to get all the way back to Psychotronics, almost at the start of the game. Remember how this is where the Typhon first broke out? This is where the heart of the Coral lies, the thickest, reddest, densest webbing on the entire station, and it just so happens to surround the very old Soviet satellite “Vorona-1”. This is where it all started. Shortly after it first got launched into space in 1958, Vorona-1 sent very strange readings back to the Soviet scientists, leading them to investigate. Predictably, all astronauts who were sent on that mission were lost and never seen again, and the existence of the Typhon kept a state secret. Only a few years later, President Kennedy and General Secretary Khrushchev would join forces to create the space program and station that would later become Talos-1. This very same satellite is still the core of the infection today, over 60 years later.

We place the Nullwave device on the satellite and make our way back to the bridge, where we would otherwise trigger the explosion. This time, however, if Alex survived before, it’ll be January knocking him out and pleading with you to blow the station up instead. It argues that there is no way to know for sure that all Typhon will 100% die, and that even IF that were the case, there were plenty of good reasons to destroy everything here. Should we decide to go through with it, January makes us kill it before we can launch the device. If we activate it, all the Typhon die and the station, along with all research, is saved. This feels almost a bit too good to be true, and that’s because it is.

Regardless of which choice we made, after each respective “””ending””” a very strange cutscene begins to play.

Without warning, a set of VR goggles lifts from your head. You are in a chair. In front of you, Alex Yu and 4 operators representing Drs. Igwe, Ilyushin, Elazar and Sho. Turns out, none of what you experienced for the last 20-30 hours or so was real. It was all a simulation. You are, in fact, a hybrid being, a mixture of human and Typhon genes. If you look down on your hands, you can even see black, Typhon-y fingers. What you experienced was in fact “a simulation based on the real Morgan’s memories”. So, to me this implies that everything on Talos-1 still happened, it’s just not YOU it happened to, at least not first. This whole thing has been an evaluation. A test to see whether or not you, unlike regular Typhon, are capable of a little human emotion called “empathy”. They are trying to see whether or not you, the human-typhon hybrid creature, are capable of bridging the gap between both species.

Why is this important?

It turns out that whatever the real Morgan was up to up there did nothing to stop the Typhon from utterly invading and dominating earth. Alex spins your chair around to reveal that the entire planet has been covered in Coral, with density many times that of even the thickest webbing on Talos-1. Earth is utterly, irrevocably lost. But there was one discovery that Alex made during the Talos incident that could somehow change everything; Typhon cannot feel empathy. They are incapable of it. So the team in front of you seemingly set out to create a simulation of reality that put the Typhon into the shoes of humanity, most likely with the idea to cultivate empathy through lived experience; the same way we do it as humans. All of those choices, whether to kill or spare people, to free prisoners, to provide medicine or to kill someone in cold blood; all of these choices will be addressed here in this final cutscene. All of it was part of the evaluation.

To me it sadly isn’t clear what exactly the ultimate end goal was here. Was it to create an ambassador for humanity? To create a new species with the strengths of both and weaknesses of neither? To negotiate peace? I’m honestly not sure, and no lore video on the subject has really been able to answer my question in a way that feels satisfying.

Ultimately, you are confronted with one final choice: Alex offers you his hand and asks you whether or not you want to work together. If you accept, you’ll take his hand, yours turns into a human hand and everything ends in that moment. If you decline, you instead kill Alex and presumably doom humanity for good.

To this day I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think of all of this. My initial gut reaction was extremely dismissive, and felt almost like a slap in the face. Were they really going for a “it was all a dream” explanation literally the last possible second? Surely they knew how cliché that might come across?

To the writers' credit, this does not come entirely out of nowhere. There is something that passed me by throughout my whole playthrough, and I didn’t quite realise its purpose until way after the fact. Very occasionally, when doing certain things, Morgan will experience something of a vision. They only last very short amounts of time, and we only see glimpses of some massive Coral network. The important bit is about what we hear. We hear Morgan’s voice, saying phrases like “Don’t let them do this to you”, “You’re not who they say you are”, “They’re lying to you”, “Kill them”, etc. At first, I thought these were kind of random and didn’t think too much about them. Then, when they got more frequent I assumed that they were talking about how “they” are either the Typhon or the corporate higher ups who intend on leaving you here. But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. The thing that really made me get it was realising when exactly these visions are occurring. The first happens when you install your first Typhon-based Neuromod. The next happens when you make direct contact with Coral. The next happens when you get knocked out during the Deep Storage ejection and the final one plays when you place the Nullwave device on the Coral heart.

All of this is to say that they are definitely foreshadowing this ending, and that means that it’s essential to the story. This story was never about Morgan Yu defeating the Typhon, it was always about people trying to teach an alien how to be human. And I think that’s perfectly fine, and makes for a nice little extra shock at the end. It also calls back to the beginning of the game, where you break the glass to reveal the true world behind it. Ultimately, if I’m allowed to take this analysis on a bit of a meta-layer, Prey is a game about games, about choices and about how they have consequences, and this is reflected everywhere in the game. If you ask me, choosing not to kill Alex at the end almost feels like it’s doing a disservice to the story’s themes. Here we have a cautionary tale of two siblings who just couldn’t keep Pandora’s box closed, and no matter how hard they tried to control whatever was in there, it just got worse and worse with each attempt. They attempted to uncover the eldritch truth and expected not to get swallowed by the void.

The only thing I think might have really added to all of this was if they gave you the opportunity of actually breaking out of the simulation. Maybe getting all Typhon-neuromods could unlock the ability to simply reject or break it? Or maybe you could somehow merge with the Apex towards the end? Maybe it could happen automatically if you play like a bloodthirsty monster? Perhaps, doing something that the creators of this immersive simulation did not anticipate? An emergent situation, as it were? Of course you’d have to be extremely careful as to not spoil the ending, should a player discover it by accident. You could do what other games do, and only make this possible on NG+. 
I don’t know, I just really feel like breaking out of the simulation should be an option.

Those were my thoughts on the game’s overall plot. Before I end this absurdly long review of a game I can’t make up my mind about, here are some loose thoughts that didn’t really fit into the rest of the text.

I thought the game did a very good job at the facial animations and motion capture. The characters move very naturally, although they do occasionally exhibit certain Bethesda-isms. I also liked that all of the characters look really unique and distinct from one another. The same can be said for the voice acting, it’s very, very solid at the least. There were no stand-out performances or anything, but the overall level of quality was very good. My favourite is probably Alex, since he manages to convey a pretty sincere tone that feels more like “actual” acting rather than video game acting.

I wasn’t as much a fan when it came to how the game handles dialogue. While I understand that having Morgan talk throughout the whole game may have been a bit too much to ask, given how both of Morgan’s VA’s each voice January, December AND all Looking Glass videos, voice logs, and so on, that all feature Morgan. But I can’t help but feel that it’s pretty weird how no one ever questions why you’re not saying a single word throughout the whole thing. Not even Alex, your brother, notices that you’re weirdly quiet. Everyone just talks AT you for the whole game, and no one ever bothers to ask why you’re refusing to make a single sound. Then again, this was likely a deliberate choice with the intention of making you understand that Morgan is effectively a blank slate after their Neuromod removal, and that you’re supposed to imagine what Morgan is saying? I don’t know, I feel like there may have been a more elegant solution out there.

The soundtrack is pretty cool too. Nothing too extraordinary or out there, but a very solid mood-setter made by the one and only Mick Gordon. I will say that there is, surprisingly, not a whole lot of it. The official OST only features 30 minutes of music, and while I feel like there is probably more of it in the actual game, maybe it’s not even that much more. What is there is pretty memorable though. I obviously love the opening theme that feels really grand and epic and like you’re going on a big and cool adventure, only for the game to pull the rug from under you immediately afterwards. But I’m also quite partial to Alex’s, as well as January & December’s theme. They all have a cool, laid back Post Rock-ish vibe to them. Not as much a fan of the vocal tracks though.

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So yeah, those were pretty much my thoughts. If you read through all of this - first of all, thank you a whole lot! - you might have noticed that I kinda convinced myself while writing that I really should play through this game again some time soon. Really sitting down and writing my thoughts down like this made me realise that this really is a great game, but I also think I also showed that not quite everything I criticised here was JUST my lack of understanding. There are some genuine flaws here, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a great game.

Arkane Studios, man. Something just doesn’t really click between their games and me. I tried Dishonored (but I should try that one again), I tried Deathloop, I tried Arx Fatalis, and yet Prey is the only one I managed to finish, and even that wasn’t without problems. It is so strange because I truly don’t have the same issue with other developers in the genre. I wonder what the deal is here. I love immersive sims. I love Deus Ex to death. I S-ranked every mission in Cruelty Squad. I even enjoyed System Shock a lot, even though it also has lots of flaws. What is it with Arkane’s games that make them feel so… boring to me? Are they really so complex and incomprehensible that I legitimately don’t understand them? I don’t feel like that’s the case. It’s just something about my preferences that doesn’t really align with their game design philosophy. But I will keep trying. If you take anything away from this, let it be that I think that this is a great game, a fantastic game even, but it just didn’t resonate the same with me as it did with a lot of other people, and while that makes me a bit sad, I can always try and play it again to see if I get it on the next attempt.

8 / 10