Apparently you can exit the station far earlier than intend in the game, but you just get two lines of dialogue and a game over instead of a unique ending.

20 hours, but I still had a small number of sidequests left

In an alternate universe Prey is nothing special. In this universe, System Shock and Metroid Prime paved the way for a wide variety of games that treated worlds as puzzles and gave the player the mission of go there and figure it out. It would be like the heyday of the Doom Clone where you suddenly couldn’t move for FPS games, many of them average but some of them truly great. In this world, Prey can just be itself, it doesn’t need to be special.



There’s many reasons why this game is special, though, but it’s weird to have to articulate them since these are things that shouldn’t really stand out. However, if it were gun to head time, I’d point to 2 things, albeit 2 things that are deeply connected and wouldn’t nearly be as strong without the other: The Space Station (as well as the life on it), and the attitude of the game towards its player. 



The attitude towards the player is basically this: You are not stupid, you can work it out. Let’s say you are trying to enter a room and it has 2 entrances - one is a locked door that requires a keycard, the other is blockaded with heavy objects. Traditionally, your solutions would be as follows:
1. Find Keycard
2. Lift heavy objects with associated skill
3. Find alternative route in (for example, a vent)


Now, lets say that there is no vent and that we are only left with two options, but we do not have the heavy lifting skill and don’t want to apply skill points (in this game, neuromods) to unlocking it. So now we need to find they keycard, right? Not necessarily. Prop an explosive container next to that heavy object, fire and then let physics do the rest. Viola, open sesame. 



That’s pretty cool, but what’s cooler is that the game never shows you that it works, it just works and its up to you to try it. Early on in the game you are given a GLOO cannon. The game text says it can make surfaces you can stand on and jump on and then, if you’re anything like me, you promptly forget that because it seems most useful for foaming fast enemies.



Except, RIGHT NEXT TO where you pick it up theres a ramp made entirely of GLOO, leading up to the roof of the security office. And not only did I walk up that ramp, but I didn’t make the mental connection that could do the EXACT SAME THING almost anywhere. It took me hours to twig it, and I only did so when i saw a similar ramp from further way in a different location and gave myself a mental holy fuck! Now the verticality of the world had taken on an entirely new meaning and I was skipping across areas and foaming my way up unpowered elevator shafts. 



Any other game with that kind of toy would tutorialise that and force you to make a ramp before being able to move on, but not Prey. And it does the same elsewhere, to similar effect. In the Talos Lobby you can sneak into some offices early on and in there you’ll find a crossbow. Except, the initial fuck yeah! gives way to a sinking sensation when you realise it fires foam darts…



Except, that has utility too.



The game establishes rules but never shoves them in your face and one rule is this: If a door requires a keycard or code to enter, it may well have a manual lock button on the inside of the door. This can be used to seal out enemies (useful) but also unlock the door if you happen to find your way in a different way. Press the button and the door unlocks, regardless of keycard. So, sometimes you can see the button through a window, and some windows are fully breakable (negating the need for a keycard) while others have a metal frame preventing entry and some, especially at security offices, have slots for slipping documents through with the rest of the window around the slot being indestructible.    



So, if you could see the button on the inside, but the window is indestructible apart from a small slot in the window…could i perch on a box and shoot a foam dart through the slot to hit the button and open the door from the outside?



Yes, yes you can. And the same works in many other ways, too. Once again, the game never says you can do this - it just lets you figure out that the button unlocks the door and that the foam dart won’t wreck shit. Figure it out.



Another way it treats the player as smart is with quest markers. If the quest is sending you to a place, the marker will lead you there, but if there’s a locked door? The quest marker doesn’t move, there’s no sidekick saying “go to this place to unlock the door”, there’s no lead hero talking to him or herself about finding another way around. You know you have to get through, you know it’s locked, so you just get on with it. 



One such example saw me reach a long locked door that I had given up passing without a code or card. There was another room nearby but there was no power and it was pitch black and i hadn’t seen any way through. But, i checked it out one last time on a whim and, to my surprise, saw a door to another area. Now, I could tell from the direction that this door wouldn’t take me directly where I wanted to go, but it would take me somewhere. The only problem was that no power in this area meant no door access. So i searched and eventually found a maintenance hatch which led me to a power control panel which, when switched on, brought the area back online. Except there were cables loose which electrified the floor, so I used my GLOO cannon to create a patch and went to the door I had found previously.



That door took me to an office, in which I found a vent, which then took me to a lab and a walkway above it. I got up there and saw the office the quest marker had tried to point me to…except it was locked. I got on top by GLOO-ing my way to the ventilation pipes above and walking along them but there was no way in. And then I noticed a large window, created a surface to walk along to get to the window (using GLOO) and smashed my way in. 



I could have gone down into the lab and found the guy the office belonged to and gotten the keycard - that would have worked too. And that signifies a lot - it’s not so much about player “choice” since Vent vs Lift vs Hack vs Key isn’t really a lot of freedom when every situation is solved in the same way which is the case in many other games of this ilk. Prey often gives you 2 choices - the obvious one which will require some busywork, or another way which requires observation and experimentation. 



Another time a quest marker sent me to a room which was accessible without hassle, except now I had to find an object in the room, an object that had been hidden. In any other game nowadays, you’d have detective vision which would show you some scratches on the floor where a heavy object had been moved to conceal something, or there’d be a piece of furniture conspicuously ajar. But here, nothing. I looked and couldn’t see it. I checked the quest marker which just stayed at the entrance to the room. Had I missed something? And then I twigged it - what happens when people search for objects in movies and TV shows? I started removing every towel from every rack, I removed clothes and shoes and books and looked under and over everything and eventually I found it. It’s weird to say I felt “smart” after that, but it’s testament to how much handholding there is in games that something like looking for an object without explicit clues felt fresh.



That’s not to shit on those games - hell, Witcher 3 is in my top 10 and that has “detective vision” out of the wazoo. It’s just that this game feels so different just because it refuses to help you in any other way that establishing rules and letting you follow them.



One more example. I came to a door that I wanted to get through - there was another way but it looked super dangerous. The problem was all the vertical bars in the door, as there was no way I could fit through. So, I smashed the glass, turned myself into a cup, and bounced through the bars, then reformed on the other side. Once again, the game never says you can do this and up until this point I had felt that the whole morphing aspect of the game was relatively pointless. 



And then there’s the world and specifically the people in it. Many of them dead, sure, but they seemed to have existed before the incident and their lives are believable. They’re ALL named and given stories, they’ve all sent emails and have secrets and lives. Early on you might find a Dungeons and Dragons character sheet in the security office in the Lobby, along with an email talking about their game to someone else, then hours later you’ll find who they were talking to and their character sheets to. You’ll go to the place where they were supposed to meet and find the other players. 



You’ll learn of cross-office NERF wars and find foam darts on random desks. You’ll learn of how people came to the station to find their father who was effectively bought from a Russian Gulag. You’ll learn of in-office bickering over who had the idea for a cool piece of tech and see the passive aggressive emails they send each other. And you’ll learn of yourself and how people see you, and genuinely worry about how your actions will be interpreted by those who survived. 



Prey is not perfect. There’s too many loading screens, too many bugs, and the less said about the options to end the game the better. But it is so worth playing as long as you don’t try and treat it like Bioshock where you can survive toe-to-toe well enough, or like Dishonored where vertical traversal is quick and simple, in order to aid speed of travelling from A to B, or like the Arkham games (or The Witcher) where solving a mystery involves holding down the detective vision button and following the clues, or like Deus Ex where solutions become available through point investment.



This is a game that’s fresh because it feels like some great games that were unfairly left behind more than a decade ago. It’s pure Looking Glass, pure Metroid Prime and I’m so glad it exists. Brilliant.

especially their aggressiveness at times

Gunsmith + Combat Focus + Firearms + Shotgun = Sleep tight, motherfuckers.