Spooky! In! SPAAAAAAAAAACE!
So, you know that annoying feeling when you wake up in the morning and find out you're in the year 2032? Right? Absolutely sucks!
So, anyway. Morgan Yu was an average mute man/woman who finds themselves in just the aforementioned situation. Waking up in their apartment on Earth and heading off to their job, all seems well until a relatively normal test goes belly up.
Then Morgan wakes up in their apartment again. On the same morning. With the same set up.
Only that isn't quite what's happening. Someone known only as "January" breaks in to tell Morgan that everything they know is wrong and that someone else is pulling the strings. Finding out their life - at least from the date of March 15th, 2032 - is a lie, Morgan must go through Talos station to hunt down their brother and get some answers.
All the while, there appears to have been a very troublesome situation onboard the station. Few to no people are around onboard and the strange beings called Typhons seemed to inhabit the station. The lowest of them are called "Mimics" and can take the shape of just about anything for a nice jump scare. The highest, well...they're something else.
Prey is brought to us by Arkane Studios, so you probably won't be too surprised that the interface and interaction with the world is very much like Dishonored so far as the interface and forced first-person perspective go. Indeed, with the alternate future spun off from the 1960's, Prey is very much Dishonored by way of Bioshock if that makes any sense.
The Bioshock comparison deepens a bit in the way of Neuromods, which are your upgrades system. You wanna hack, fight, tank, or science better? Get that needle and stick it right in your eye! . . .so, y'know, Prey has a little Dead Space 2 in there as well.
By the way, this Prey has nothing to do with the Prey that was released by Human Head Studios and 2K. Admittedly, I've never played the game itself, but I've been reliably informed that the similarities between the two are cosmetic at best. Rights issues, they're a pain in the ass, aren't they?
Speaking of pains in the ass, you have the crafting system. Prey's crafting system isn't a pain in the ass, but I hadn't really thought of another good way to segue into talking about the crafting system. So, anyway, the crafting system is actually pretty straightforward and there's plenty of good reason to pick up the junk you can find around Talos station. You take the items to one machine and can dissolve them into organic and inorganic components. You take it to another machine and don't even have to play Minecraft-esque Jenga to put them into the correct slots to make whatever you happen to have the blueprints for.
Oh, yeah, you'll need blueprints. Lucky for you, there are plenty of those hanging around Talos station waiting to be picked up...provided you avoid death by Mimic. You can even create weapons, everything from a crossbow and its bolts to the almighty shotgun...which, if you know anything about me, is like giving me a gun that shoots razor blades. I can't really hate this game.
And I can't really hate Prey. It's pretty good. There's a lot of the Metroidvania issue with backtracking and going around looking for items you might have missed (unless you're like me and you go wild with turning over every stone you can), but this can honestly be forgiven and it's not as if the game doesn't very blatantly tell you almost right away that it is what it is. Unlike, say, This Is The Police turning out to be a police station sim instead of an action-adventure game with a police theme or Aliens: Colonial Marines turning out to be a gigantic pile of shit instead of something halfway decent.
In the end, Prey is actually fun. You can very easily get lost in the world, enjoying the bits of cold isolation and quiet before suddenly getting a jump scare in the form of a mimic...that you then blow to kingdom come with a shotgun.
. . .yeah, the only way I like jump scares is if I get to deploy heavy ordnance at the cause of said jump scare immediately after. I hate jump scares.
Prey is good, though. Give it a go if you haven't already!
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