My favorite moment in Prey occurred while floating in space. I drifted, the space station Telos I turning over behind me, through nothingness, using my booster pack to navigate toward an objective in orbit around the station. A character asked who I was. They probed, for a moment, about my character's identity, wondering how it would be defined, what purpose I would assign myself. It was a quiet moment, and I rested in it, tracing the shape of the stars in the distance and thinking.
That instance, though, was all too brief, mostly because Prey doesn't know if it wants to be the kind of quiet, thoughtful game that lets you meditate in space. It doesn't seem to know what kind of game it wants to be at all. It encourages you to quietly poke around while being aware that monsters might lurk around any corner. Should you be exploring? Fighting? In Prey, it's hard to tell.
What you do know is that you are Morgan Yu, a scientist on board the Telos I. Early on, you learn that the space station has become infested with an amorphous alien race known as the Typhon. You also learn that Morgan (who you can play as a man or a woman) is seemingly both responsible for the infestation and unable to remember any of it, due to experiments she insisted on running on herself that erased much of her memory. In a very traditional videogame fashion, your goals are mostly about surviving and gathering information. Find out who Morgan is, find out the truth about Telos I, and try to stay alive while doing it.
But those prime directives, learning and survival, live in an odd tension in Prey. It encourages you to be curious and pay close attention to everything, and it allows you to overcome any barrier, locked door, or environmental impediment to do so. In the process, though, it also forces Morgan into punishing, unfair combat with the Typhon, never managing to capture the thrill of an action game or the moody unease of a horror game. Instead, it occupies an awkward middle ground, oscillating between engrossing and infuriating like two ends of a broken fuel gauge.
If you're not particularly conversant in the history of videogames, there are things in Prey that might not immediately make sense. Through reference in its design and plot, Arkane Studios is attempting to evoke games like System Shock, Ultima Underworld, and the Thief series, along with successors like Deus Ex. Those titles, which fans tend to call "immersive sims," introduced a new style of game designed for player expression. They create spaces with consistent rules and objectives and then allow the player to complete them in any way they see fit. An immersive sim ideally won't tell you whether to fight your way through an enemy stronghold, run along the rafters to avoid the baddies altogether, or drop a bomb through the skylight. It'll let you decide and adapt accordingly.
Immersive sims tend to take place in broad but confined spaces: the lavish mansions of Thief; the elaborate space stations of System Shock; the underwater city of Rapture in BioShock. Inside these spaces, details are layered on thick, alternate passageways and hidden details everywhere. Players are encouraged to fight against the will of the designers, to imagine solutions that the developers couldn't have thought of and see how the world reacts.
Prey is desperate to be an immersive sim in this vein, capturing the greatness and creativity of *Deus Ex'*s mad cyberpunk hellworld and *System Shock'*s haunted deep space exploration. And to its credit, it is probably the most expansive and technically accomplished iteration of the immersive sim that anyone's ever made. All the pieces are certainly in place: a confined space, a wide ecosystem of enemies, a highly detailed and consistent world that adapts to player intervention well. There's also a growing set of player abilities—neurological enhancements allowing you to access superhuman powers and alien ones—that can be combined in creative ways. Everything's there, but none of it coheres.
For a game obsessed with identity—Morgan's, the player's, the identity of the station itself—Prey doesn't have one of its own. You can't find it in its aesthetics, which blend flashy future sci-fi tech with a 1960s neo-futurist vibe that's one of the most clichéd settings in all of videogames. You can't find it in its story, which is largely absent, defined mostly by a list of busy work and the emails and audio logs you find scattered amongst the Telos I's various corpses. You can't find it in its characters, because there really aren't any, save for a few side players who are barely more than cardboard cutouts with grocery lists to give you. Nor will you find it in its gameplay, which is an amalgam of every immersive sim it so lovingly imitates, all blended together into a mostly tasteless slurry.
*Prey'*s mood—that endless movement between curiosity and inane frustration—is all the game has to define itself. And in the moments where that balance moves in the right direction, it can be a sublime experience, all its derivative parts working together in the way they were meant to, perfectly forgettable but engaging in the here and now. But just as often, the enemies are too dense to sneak through and too tough to fight. You might find that your clever tricks don't work out, and the turret you placed wasn't angled quite right, or the clumsy aiming mechanics sent a grenade you needed tumbling down a staircase. In these moments, I often found myself bereft of resources, stuck, trying any idea I could come up with just to get back to the parts of the game that weren't so tedious.
Prey doesn't understand itself, and it obliviously gets in its own way. It's ultimately too broad and too undefined to achieve its own grand ambitions. Instead of proudly stating its own identity, Prey feels adrift, the way I was during that one sublime moment in space. Unmoored of itself, it asks questions that are worth pondering but doesn't have any answers. Absent of those rejoinders, it loses its own shape, getting stuck in patterns it can't break out of, drifting further and further away from land until the credits roll.
