Prey (2017): The Immersive Sim's Best Argument in Years

Bethesda published Prey on 5 May 2017 and gave it the worst name available. It has nothing to do with 2006’s Prey, the Human Head game about a Cherokee mechanic and a gravity-flipping alien ship. Bethesda had cancelled Human Head’s actual Prey 2 in 2014, still owned the trademark, and stapled it onto an unrelated Arkane Austin project about a space station. The result was a game that sounded like a sequel nobody wanted, released in the wrong month, and sold accordingly.

Six years on it’s the strongest case the immersive sim has made in my lifetime, and the case rests on a gun that fires glue.

The GLOO cannon is a level editor

The GLOO Cannon shoots blobs of expanding foam that harden on contact. Its stated uses are practical: freeze a Phantom in place, plug a burning gas leak, cap a sparking electrical arc. Its actual use is that the foam sticks to walls, and it stacks, and you can climb it.

Which means you can build a staircase. Anywhere. Up the side of the atrium, over a locked door, into a vent you have no business reaching, to a ledge the designer put a keycard on with a specific route in mind. The cannon is available almost immediately, it costs almost nothing to use, and Arkane put it in a game with a hundred-odd sealed rooms.

Think about what that decision commits a design team to. Every locked door in Talos I now has a shadow question attached: can the player just climb over the wall next to it? The honest answer, most of the time, is yes. Arkane knew, and shipped it, and built the station so that arriving somewhere by the wrong route is a legitimate solution rather than an exploit that skips a trigger. This is the genre’s central bargain — letting the player cheat — honoured more completely than almost anyone else has managed. Deus Ex let you stack crates. Prey gives you the crate dispenser.

The Mimic Matter power is the same thought in the other direction. You scan an object and become it: a chair, a toolbox, a coffee mug. As a combat power it’s marginal. As a traversal power it’s absurd — turn into something small enough to roll under a security gate, then turn back on the other side. Two abilities, both cheap, both routinely making the level designer’s front door irrelevant.

The station is one place

Talos I is a single continuous space and the game is quietly emphatic about it. The Talos I Lobby, Neuromod Division, Hardware Labs, Crew Quarters, Arboretum, Cargo Bay and the rest connect physically, through doors and lifts you walk, and the map is a cross-section of a real object with real volumes. Better still, you can go outside. Airlocks put you in vacuum on the station’s hull, where you can fly the exterior and re-enter through a different section entirely — which is how you learn that the building you’ve been inside has an outside, and that the outside is a shortcut network.

Almost nothing else does this. A modern shooter’s “space station” is a string of corridors with a skybox. Talos I is a place with a floor plan, and once you have the floor plan in your head the game becomes a navigation problem rather than a sequence. That’s the direct inheritance from System Shock 2 and its Von Braun: a ship you learn until you can move through it without the map, populated by audio logs from people whose route through the disaster you can reconstruct from where their bodies are.

Prey does the log thing better than its ancestor, incidentally, because it puts the emails on terminals with names attached and lets you track a single argument between two colleagues across four decks and three weeks. The station’s fiction is filing.

Neuromods and the only real tradeoff in the genre

The upgrade system has two halves. Human neuromods — engineering, security, science — are unremarkable RPG progression. Typhon neuromods are alien powers: Mimic Matter, Kinetic Blast, Machine Mind, Psychoshock.

Install Typhon mods and the station’s automated turrets start shooting at you, because their threat detection reads you as a Typhon. The Nightmare — the roaming apex predator that hunts you on a timer — comes more often, and comes for you specifically. Alex Yu’s opinion of you shifts. The game never lectures about this. It just makes the good powers carry a bill.

This is the rarest thing in RPG design: a progression choice with a genuine cost expressed in systems rather than in a stat penalty. Most games’ “dark powers” are a skin. Prey’s are a change in your relationship with the building’s immune system, and the building has been your only ally for twenty hours.

The junk economy underneath it is the other quiet triumph. Every object on the station is grabbable, and the Recyclers turn a rucksack of banana peels and broken screens into material cubes, which the Fabricators turn into neuromods and shotgun shells and medkits. It makes hoarding sensible, which makes exploration pay, which makes the GLOO staircase to the ledge with two chairs on it worth building. Loops that feed each other rather than sitting adjacent are rare, and this one is exemplary.

Where it falls over

The last act is a chore. Once the station is fully open and the plot needs its pieces assembled, Prey resolves into fetch quests across decks you’ve already cleared, with the Nightmare’s timer nagging at you and Phantoms respawning into cleared spaces. A game whose whole strength is discovery spends its final hours asking you to go back.

The combat is imprecise throughout. Phantoms are damage sponges with unclear hit feedback, the wrench is a joke that stops being funny at hour ten, and the enemy roster is thin — you fight essentially five things, dressed differently. Mimics are genuinely brilliant for about three hours, at which point you learn the trick of hurling a wrench at any room’s furniture on entry and the paranoia becomes a chore tax.

And the framing has a real cost. Dishonored 2, from the Lyon studio the year before, has better levels, better movement and a sharper hand — Arkane Austin’s strength is the whole rather than any single room. There’s no Clockwork Mansion here. There’s a station, which is the point, and a station is harder to excerpt.

Where to play it

PC is the version to have — it runs on modest hardware, it’s frequently discounted to nothing, and CryEngine has aged well enough that the atrium’s foliage against Earth still looks like money. Console versions exist and run fine on current hardware.

Play the base game first and then Mooncrash, the 2018 DLC, which reassembles the systems into a roguelike on a lunar base with five characters and a rising difficulty clock. It’s the better-designed thing on a per-hour basis and it only works because you already know what a GLOO staircase is for.

Spoilers below

You aren’t Morgan Yu.

The station, the Typhon, the three weeks of neuromod amnesia — all of it is a simulation, and the thing running through it is a Typhon with human neuromods grafted in. Earth has already fallen. Alex Yu and a handful of Operators are the survivors, and they’re testing whether the alien organism that ate the human race can be made to develop empathy by living a human’s life inside a recording of the disaster.

The reveal recontextualises the neuromod tradeoff into the actual test question. Every Typhon power you installed was you choosing to be more of what you already are. Every human choice — the survivors you evacuated, the ones you left in the sealed cabin with the Weaver, the escape pod — is a data point in an experiment about whether your species can be talked out of itself. The turrets shooting you for installing Typhon mods stops being a balance mechanism and becomes the simulation flinching.

Then the last shot. Alex offers his hand. Depending on what you did across twenty hours, the Operators either take your hand or execute you where you sit, and January — the Operator you built out of your own recorded personality, which spent the game arguing you should destroy the station — is standing there having been right the whole time.

People argue the twist cheapens the station, and I understand the objection: a simulation reveal is the oldest cheat in the sci-fi drawer. It survives because Prey’s simulation is load-bearing rather than decorative. The game’s central mechanic is a creature that imitates an object well enough to pass. Then it tells you that you are one, and that you’ve been passing for twenty hours, and that somebody was watching to see if it took.