Prey (2017) is a first-person immersive sim, and is wholly unrelated to Prey (2006), a first-person shooter. Neo-Prey is the creation of Arkane Studios, the same team behind the excellent Dishonored series and the recent time-looping action game Deathloop.
The game sees you take control of Morgan Wu (you can choose their gender), a scientist whose older brother and parents own and run the company that developed the neuromods. Because neuromod experiments cause partial amnesia, you start the game in a state of some confusion about what's going on. When it becomes clear that the Typhons have escaped and overrun the station, you appoint yourself the facility's fixer-in-chief and are soon pinballing around the station solving puzzles, repairing systems, sealing hull breaches and locating survivors of the outbreak.
Using an RPG-like progression system based around the acquisition of neuromods, which give you more impressive abilities, you can also grow in your capability of fending off the Typhon in combat, as well as employing stealth to try to avoid confrontations. Unlike Dishonored, you can't "ghost" through the game and sometimes combat is unavoidable. Fortunately, you can upgrade weapons to dramatically improve your abilities and neuromods give you abilities such as slowing down time to allow you to reach faster to events. You start the game as if you're made of glass and only wielding a wrench, and by the end of it you're a walking tank of armour and firepower.
Prey is something of a minimalist game: friendly characters are few and far between, and for large chunks of it you are making your way alone through unfriendly parts of the station, fending off Typhon and environmental hazards alike. In these parts of the game it becomes a survival sim, with you picking up everything that isn't nailed down to be recycled into raw materials, which can then be used to fabricate everything from medpacks to shotguns to tools. The station is, pleasingly, a nonlinear environment. As you explore it further, you open up new routes linking back to the central lobby, and over the course of a playthrough turn when starts off as a level-based, linear game into an open-world one, packed with shortcuts and new ways of getting around. If video games are based around the options they give the player, then Prey starts off tight and focused and then sprawls impressively.
The game is heavily inspired by earlier titles. System Shock 2 is the most obvious direct predecessor, which also saw the player dealing with hostile forces on a space station with tremendous freedom in how they went about tackling problems. BioShock and its sequels borrowed some of the same ideas, albeit in a much more linear manner. Alien Isolation is also a key reference point, with its terrorised space station and the player having to make their way back and forth solving problems whilst at the mercy of a hostile alien presence. Prey even borrows Isolation's xenomorph concept, with a powerful Typhon known as "the Nightmare" eventually stalking your every move across the station (although fortunately the Nightmare is easier to detect, avoid or even kill than Isolation's immortal xenomorph). Whilst acknowledging its influences, Prey is also careful not to be too derivative of them, with a spooky atmosphere, unreliable narration and occasional black humour that is more of its own thing.
The game does have flaws, mostly stemming from its ambitious design. Sometimes mission objectives and the reasons for you doing what you're doing are a little vague. The game also gives you tremendous tools but then limits how you can use them. Early on you can exit the station and, in a marvellous piece of design, the entire game is contained within that space, giving you another way of moving around (the game's zero-gee sections with you using your spacesuit to fly around with proper Newtonian physics are brilliant, it has to be said). However, the game has all the airlocks sealed, so there's no real benefit to doing that. Later on, once you've unlocked everything, you can zip around the outside of the station to get from place to place, but this is never faster than just walking around internally, so it ends up feeling a bit pointless.
Similarly the game does not do a good job of letting you know how to get the best out of your tools. Early game combat is chancy and frequently lethal, so discovering the one-two punch combo of the shotgun for close-up action and the Q-beam for long-range battle is essential to make progress fun and not frustrating. However, unlocking the potential of the Q-beam means knowing where to get the plans for its ammo (so you can make more of it yourself) and learning the skill to scavenge more loot from destroyed robots (otherwise Q-beam ammo is almost impossible to find by itself). I'd have saved a lot of time and frustrating reloads if that information had been a bit more clear up-front. Also, the Typhon are a fascinating enemy in concept, but also not the most visually interesting in practice. The basic "Mimic" model is a bit boring to fight (think of Half-Life's headcrabs, only almost impossible to see) and the larger creatures are mostly variations on "black slimy thing."
These problems are minor and soon subsumed by the game's absolutely brilliant design. The Talos I space station is every bit as impressive and towering an achievement in level and graphic design as BioShock's Rapture, Half-Life 2's City 17 or Alien Isolation's Sevastopol, and sometimes just wandering around and grooving on its chunky Syd Mead vibe is fun in itself. Combat starts off tense but by the end of the game has become thoroughly enjoyable, with you having a wide variety of tools on how to tackle the different problems ahead of you. The writing is restrained, minimalist but effective, and the finale is impressively epic. The spooky soundtrack is wonderfully understated as well.
Prey (****½) is a slow-burn and maybe a bit too obtuse in its opening minutes, but once it kicks into gear and once you get into its headspace, it becomes a classic of the immersive sim genre. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
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