Prey is a science-fiction game by Arkane Studios that, despite its name, makes no attempt to continue the earlier title of the same name and instead builds on the legacy of classic games about a lone person trapped on a closed-off space station. The player wakes aboard the orbital station Talos I as Morgan Yu and very quickly learns that the crew is dead and the station has been taken over by alien beings called the Typhon. The best known of them, the so-called mimics, can transform into any object, so an ordinary mug or chair can turn into an attacker at any moment.
The station is an interconnected whole that can be traversed in many ways, and the game almost never offers just one solution. A locked door can be bypassed through a maintenance shaft, opened with a code found elsewhere, shot open, or avoided entirely via a trip through open space outside the hull. A key tool is the GLOO cannon, whose substance hardens to create passable platforms as well as obstacles, and so-called neuromods, with which the player upgrades abilities, including alien ones, though at a cost. Materials are recycled and reprinted, so resource management is a constant part of play.
On PlayStation 4 the game stood out above all through its art direction, blending retro-futurism with Art Nouveau elements to give the station an unmistakable identity. The music, with its uneasy electronic textures, and sound design that lets players gauge approaching danger both support a persistent sense of threat. Contemporary reception was very good, though commercially the game did not achieve big numbers, and its slow start put off some players. Looking back, Prey is considered one of the best-designed immersive sims and a title that deserves far more attention than it originally received. The Mooncrash expansion later reshaped the same setting into repeatable runs with variable enemy and item placement, offering an entirely different rhythm of play. The base campaign, however, rests above all on the freedom with which every single situation can be solved.
Game 88 of 278 for Sony PlayStation 4
