Prey

Although Prey is technically a reboot of an older title from 2006 it really has little to do with this game since Arkane Studios began designing this before Bethesda approached them to take on the license. In fact many have actually called this a spiritual successor to the System Shock games, but I’ve never played any of those yet so I can’t speak to that. I have however played (and enjoyed) Arkane’s Dishonored games and had heard that they approached the design for Prey with the same “play your way” approach with a variety of gameplay styles, branching objectives, and alternate endings; and for the most part that’s true here.

In this game you wake up as an amnesiac on a space station invested by hostile alien life forms, you soon learn that you’re a scientist who’s been working with your brother on projects related to harvesting the alien life forms and injecting their abilities into humans, however you receive a message from the former “you” saying that you must destroy the space station and all of your life’s work. The overall narrative is decent; I like the moral choices at play and the very horror inspired premises. The cast is fairly weak in terms of personality although I did like Alex Yu (your brother), the dialog is similarly dry and emotionless a lot of the time which is problematic considering the dyer and horrifying situation that every survivor is faced with on this damned space station.

I love the game’s visuals; I think they do a great job at making this station feel lived in and realistic. Even though the game isn’t always vying for a horror aesthetic (because it’s not a proper horror game) when this game wants to look and sound freighting it succeeds. The alien designs are great, mimics will “mimic” the appearance of objects nearby making you paranoid of everything in sight, phantoms have a very intimidating presence, the levitating telepaths are creepy looking and emit skin crawling noises, and the invisible poltergeists make for really tense encounters. The sound design in general is great, right down to the hums of the station’s fried machinery to the gasping breaths of being in your space suit floating around in zero G.

The station itself is kind of open world but many sections are cut off with really lengthy loading screens, something I wish Arkane could improve on is making fluid and continuous game worlds. The level design is adimittingly less expansive than what Arkane’s done in the past but that’s not entirely their fault since this is a space station we’re talking about, they do fairly well at trying to make the best of it by adding secret air ducts and passages that allow you to bypass certain obstacles or occasionally an alternate way of clearing an objective if the current method isn’t working for you. That said, sometimes the game will make enemy engagement mandatory in order to progress, and the station’s clusterphobic design can make stealth very difficult, especially when the game sometimes forcefully exposes you to enemies.

Crafting is a crucial component of Prey since weapon ammo is sparse, aliens are hella strong, and the upgrade currency (neuralmods that you inject into your eye) are few and far between. You need to find fabrication plans in order to craft specific things, and often you’ll find yourself collecting junk around the station in order to recycle their base elements and reuse them to craft ammo, health, or neuralmods. The game has a fairly steep difficulty curve so if you do not intimately understand crafting and recycling you’re gonna struggle on your first playthrough (like I did…). The glue gun is a fairly notable inclusion here as you can not only use it to incapacitate enemies but also use it to create platforms to reach alternative paths, I looooove that concept… However, I found the actual platforming with the gluey blobs to be buggy and frustrating.

There are two categories of ability trees you can upgrade here making multiple playthroughs a must if you want experience everything this game has to offer in terms of game-play styles. There’s human abilities like hacking, mechanical repairing, weapon crafting, health boosting, and lifting strength. These are options for those who don’t want to inject themselves with alien abilities, since doing so progressively makes you less human and thus the station’s robotic security systems will target you viciously. Injecting yourself with alien abilities will let you create kinetic blasts, mimic inanimate objects, use mind control, summon ally phantoms out from dead corpses, and use telepathy to move objects and control machines. Like always Arkane nails abilities and upgrades here and it’s one of my favourite aspects of Prey.

I liked Prey overall. The narrative is fine but it has some notable weaknesses. The level design is solid and thoughtful but isn’t quite as flexible or dynamic as that of Dishonored. And there are some frustrating elements like enemies having way too much health, buggy platforming, or so much of the game’s progression being locked behind the very convoluted upgrade systems. But over all I think this game is creative, the presentation and atmosphere are terrific, the game does a great job at making decisions meaningful and influential for the game’s ending, and that; along with the variety of abilities to try out lend this game some re-playability. Keep it up Arkane.