Revisiting One of My Favorite Environments--Prey (**Spoilers**)

Despite the fact that there has been a lot of buzz about Cyberpunk 2077 dropping patch 1.5 (which offers up a significant overhaul to the game and next-gen upgrades for some consoles), I've been spending my time re-playing Prey, the fabulous Arkane game that I feel isn't given enough credit.  I just wrapped up another playthrough and wanted to reflect on my enjoyment and try to convince others to give it a try.  (**Please be aware that I will be writing about major spoilers for Prey--there's a pretty big twist at the end of the game that I will ruin...so don't read ahead unless you've finished the entire thing!)

What's great about Prey:

1.) I would rank Talos I, the massive space station that serves as the setting for the game, as one of my favorite environments in gaming.  The BioShock series will always be my absolute favorite, but Talos I manages to capture many of the same feelings--there's this sense of wonder at being in a huge, beautiful space station, but it's masterfully undercut by the dread of being trapped in space with a bunch of aliens whose number one goal is to kill all humans.

My favorite part of the game is exploring the station and slowly piecing together the story of the tragedy that has befallen this magical place.  The game also does a great job of injecting personality and backstory into the crewmembers (dead and alive) who you come across.  There are petty workplace dramas and larger, more serious stories weaved in among the chaos.

2.) Players get to make many choices about who they want Morgan Yu to be.  The entire premise of the story is built upon the fact that Morgan has had their memory reset so many times that the choices you make decide who they really are.  Do you try to save the crew or do you leave them to their own devices (or, even worse, do you kill them?)?  Part of the story hinges on multiple versions of operators that Morgan has created to help them preserve part of who they were before the experiment started--do you try to make Morgan into who they were before it all started?

For me, one major decision that I find it difficult to ignore involves the head engineer Mikhaila Ilyushin.  As Morgan is exploring the station, they stumble across Mikhaila, who is injured and has managed to hide out in an office.  If you snoop around on computers and pay attention, you have previously learned that Mikhaila suffers from paraplexis, a disabling and progressive nerve condition that should've resulted in her termination from TransStar, but for some reason, Morgan decided to keep Mikhaila's condition secret.  There's a strong indication that Morgan and Mikhaila had some sort of relationship, but the memory resetting effects of the experiments have caused Morgan to forget.  Mikhaila asks Morgan to find and retrieve her medication (something that involves a space walk since there was a hull breach near Mikhaila's office)--without it, she will slowly lose the ability to breathe and move... a painful, horrible death.

If you rescue Mikhaila, she recovers and heads to Morgan's office.  It's there that she asks Morgan a big favor--she has learned that her father was one of the "volunteers" brought to Talos I and wants Morgan to try to find out what happened to him.  Finding out the truth about her father involves an adventure into Deep Storage and coming to grips with reality--Mikhaila's father was part of an early experiment with mimics and it was Morgan who gave the order that killed him...and, they were very cold about it, with more interest in the data than the fact that they just watched someone be killed.  Players get a choice about what to do with the audio files--you can transfer them to Morgan's computer so that Mikhaila can listen to them, or you can delete them and lie to Mikhaila about what happened to her father.  Probably the worst part about all of this is that Mikhaila wants to wait for Morgan so that they can listen to the recording together...yikes!  It's a painful moment and Mikhaila is very upset, but the entire scenario paints a picture of who Morgan was prior to the experiments--someone willing to watch another person die in the name of scientific advancement.

3.) Arkane's signature "multiple" ways to navigate every challenge.  Morgan's not exactly gifted in the art of combat (especially early in the game) and taking on every enemy head-on isn't always the best method.  I enjoy the fact that you can find hidden paths and try to avoid enemies or that you can choose to face them head-on.  (Although, I think there is some potential to impact the ending if you opt not to kill many of the Typhon you encounter).

4.) Hidden side missions that are quite challenging.  At one point in the game you learn about a group of people who played a space version of D&D.  Exploring the Crew Quarters reveals the fact that the leader of the group devised a puzzle for the members by giving each of them a map that would lead them to a specific location aboard the ship (which is not easily puzzled out by simply looking at the map).  Finding the location reveals a single digit in a four digit code (also something that must be puzzled out).  I will admit that the firs time I played through it, I looked up a guide, but this time I decided I would try to do it naturally...and I only was able to find one number.

There are also hidden caches around the base that are part of a smuggling ring--I think I only managed to find 2 or 3 this time.

Who is Morgan Yu?

5.) A post-credits epilogue that is quite a cliffhanger (and confusing).  It's revealed that Morgan isn't actually Morgan at all...and is, in fact, a Typhon who has been subjected to simulations to see what it would do if it were in the shoes of the actual Morgan.  This is seemingly all being done as a way of trying to decide how humans and Typhon can co-exist--it's revealed in the cutscene that Earth has been overtaken by the Typhon and is now covered in an alarming layer of Typhon "coral."  Apparently, Alex is trying to see if the Typhon can develop empathy and is trying to infuse them with human traits.  Depending on the choices you made as Morgan (saving or killing the crew), the main crew leaders (who are operators) weigh in on whether the Typhon can be trusted.  You're given the choice to spare Alex or kill him.  This twist adds another layer to the base game...and, it's kind of fun.

6.) Creepy vibes.  I wore headphones this time around and found the music much more intense and anxiety inducing--it has some real horror movie vibes at times and really gives you that skin crawly feeling that something bad is about to happen.  There are also some solid jump scares that I forgot about (they got me!).

The Small, Annoying Things

Even though I would heartily recommend Prey, there are parts of the game that I found myself slightly irritated about this time around.

1.) Loading screens.  There are times where you will be staying in one area to explore for quite awhile, but later in the game you are frequently moving between areas...and there's a loading screen between every one.  Prey would be even better with fewer loading screens.

2.) The Nightmare.  I get that it's a tool to keep players on their toes--you can't just sit back and feel content that you've cleared out an area and that the enemy threat has been mostly eliminated, but why does it need to have a three minute timer (and, a timer that doesn't always end when it should).  Evading the Nightmare isn't exactly overly challenging--just find a room with a door that manually locks or a crawlspace and hunker down until it leaves.  The more irritating part occurs when the Nightmare decides not to leave at the end of the timer and you have to re-load (I'm still not 100% sure why this happens).

Prey is a underrated game in one of gaming's best environments.  I thoroughly enjoyed my re-play and would recommend grabbing it (during sales you can get it very cheaply--possibly for under $10).