Prey

good game

An Immersive Sim with little equal. Prey revitalizes an old lineage of games that go all the way back to the 1990's System Shock 2. While falling victim to some of the overburdening that is present in the old titles, the progression of this game feels powerful. At first you will feel under-powered compared to the enemies and the environment. A single tier two enemy patrolling a room can feel like an encounter you will want to avoid at the beginning while as you continue getting passive buffs and skill tree progress the tables turn and the Typhon become the hunted entities. Every locked door and environmental obstacle has multiple ways of overcoming it, allowing you to avoid upgrading your character all together due to weapons you pick up allowing you to progress past a skill challenge. Along with that comes the fully open and traversable game area, with great area and station map designs, which encourages revisiting cleared rooms that are now filled with new, tougher enemies to open a safe you couldn't previously because you either found a code in an email on a particular staff member's computer or upgraded your hacking skill. Only issue to be found here is the overwhelming length and quantity of loading screens. With the quality and scale of the game it seems unavoidable in some aspects but still a consistent problem. Prey feels open and flushed with player agency. Moral choices are baked into the game system, allowing you to find ways to either kill the hijacked inhabitants of the station, which will harm you if you don't deal with them, or use abilities you gained through the skill trees to save them while also removing them as a threat. The story itself, along with the living social system of the crew and employees that you are thrust into, is bold and boasts great immersion. There are two sets of passive buff items; weapons that need upgrading; equipment that needs to be repaired with parts you need to repair items around the map; a tile based inventory management interface; a fully stacked skill tree with 6 branches; martial, physical, science, and psionic abilities; and a whole recycling and crafting system. Some of these features can be turned off at player will at the start of the game, repairing weapons being one of them, but most of these systems are all in play at once and can feel overwhelming. Coming back to the roots of the Shock series, the cradle of ImSim, means that Arkane avoids the simplification that was seen between System Shock 2 and Bioshock. Meaning the game can feel bloated with systems that the player has to manage simultaneously, but to the developers credit, it feels better meshed than in the 90's predecessors. Arkane uses many of the plot mechanisms that you see its predecessors in the Shock series use; making the game full of twists, moral quandaries, and second playthroughs to catch all the pieces. Merging some of the best aspects of System Shock 2, Dead Space, and Dishonored; Prey is a landmark game for anyone appreciative of a genre with great power for narrative and immersive video game storytelling. As someone who sees the narrative and technical sides of video game art; who likes to understand the systems at play, their lineage and development, along with the ability for games to make you feel an emotional narrative, Prey is a must play.