

The station reacts to your abilities, keeping your growing power in check. Once you’ve found a stray shotgun or absorbed a few alien telekinetic abilities, you’ll go from acting cautious to becoming overconfident.

Like Rapture, Talos-1 is the real star of the show.

The inter-connected world - open, but gated off by story checks and abilities - is a stunning work of reflexive level design that would be rightly compared to Dark Souls, if it wasn’t marred by annoying loading screens between every bulkhead. Like other immersive sims, the world of Talos-1 is the real star of the show: An Art Deco utopia built on the bones of a joint Soviet-American space station, its extremely detailed features convey the depth and history that compel you to scrutinize its every nook and cranny. Yet, despite the constant tension, Prey wills you forward. After a couple of “surprises,” you learn to stalk the halls of Talos-1 with your wrench readied above your head –a paranoid, defensive posture well-merited by the extent to which this space station wants to vent you into the cold vacuum of space like a parasite. One of the first and most common foes you encounter aboard Talos-1 is the Mimic - a skittering, four-legged shadow that can take the form of any nearby inanimate object. The game bolsters that confusion through fear: Any enemy encounter can be deadly, and pop off at any time. Exploring Talos-1, teasing out the mystery of what happened in fits and starts, along with the logic of the game’s systems, is intense and intoxicating. Right from the get-go, you are imbued with the fear and urgency of a person in imminent danger. While all of this information is dispensed quickly, it is surrounded by a thick haze of confusion. Before too long, it becomes clear that something horrible has happened - the station has been trashed, there are corpses on the ground and inky alien creatures running around. Without giving it all away, you control Morgan Yu, a scientist who winds up aboard Talos-1, a privatized space station near Earth. This spell is at its most powerful in the game’s opening hours. Through the Looking-Glass, and what Morgan found there Which is to say, a first-person shooter sprinkled with character progression, inventory management, and a healthy dollop of scanning other people’s’ emails for lore (and passwords), that somehow tricks us into believing in another world. Prey is Arkane’s confident riff on the Immersive Simulation - a system-rich “play your way” RPG designed to empower players to shape their own narratives.

Though the name comes by way of ID Software’s 2006 first-person shooter, the game shares no DNA with that game’s long-dormant sequel. On it’s face, Prey is a narrative-driven first-person action-horror game, but the game is, perhaps, easier to understand through its lineage: Prey’s developer Arkane Studios was founded by co-creative directors Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith, who had formative roles in creating Deus Ex, Half-Life 2, and the Dishonored franchise. Fitbit Versa 3Īfter a couple of “surprises,” you learn to walk with your wrench readied above your head.
