Video Game Review: Prey

I'm just going to say this right out of the gate. Prey is the spiritual descendant of the Dead Space series.

Prey is a sci-fi, action, horror game that places you in the body of Morgan Yu. You're one of the owners of a company controlling a space station in the orbit of Earth, working on a new type of technology called neuromods. Once used, a neuromod allows you to learn all the information and knowledge to learn a specific skill. Always wanted to play guitar? There's a neuromod for that. Of course, there's a little problem with the neuromods. If they're removed, it resets your brain to the moment before you put it in. So, if you have a neuromod in your head for 5 years, then take it out, not only do you lose the neuromod, you lose every memory of the past 5 years.

So, of course you wake up with a degree of amnesia on a ship where most of the people are missing, equipment is broken, and you stumble across the occasional corpse as you explore your surroundings, putting the pieces together.

Let's not forget the monsters. Black masses of tentacles which can take the form of anything they want. Mimics. Nothing can be trusted, which includes coffee cups, boxes, chairs, and even items you want like ammo and medkits.

This inability to trust anything makes even the brightly lit hallways and offices of the station tense with possible jump-scares around every corner as they reveal themselves and attack. Later on, it's even more tense as you encounter bigger monsters who patrol the rooms in addition to the mimics.

The story is incredible as you fight for your life, fight monsters, piece together what happened on the station, and you even get to make the choice for whether other survivors live or die.

To be honest, that's about all that really sets the game apart. It's first-person, with standard controls, and the environments, while well-done, don't stand out. While the station is set with different areas, and there are noticeable differences between the Arboretum, Lobby, and Crew Quarters, they don't really FEEL different. The lines between textures are very crisp though, if you smash a holographic window, the difference in layers between the window and what's behind it are crisp and look freaking awesome. Seriously, the first time I saw that, I just walked back and forth for a few minutes admiring it, because the view changed exactly as you expect it would depending on the angles you looked at it at.

The sound is excellent. Music cues are very subdued and uncommon, allowing you to focus on the myriad sounds of the station around you, which is very life-like. You can hear fluids rushing through pipes, gases spraying through leaks, fires burning, your own footsteps, and the skittering of little tentacle feet all around you as that box you just walked by hurries to a corner and becomes something else. Definitely wear a good pair of headphones for this game!

Enemy AI isn't bad, but they're not generally going to be outsmarting you. They're made to give you a chance to sneak up on them, but they can figure out how to maneuver through rooms to get to you if you give them a chance. They also do occasionally do some pretty dumb things too. In one instance, I was facing off against the Nightmare pictured above. I hid until he completely lost track of me, then he proceeded to stand directly in front of where burning gas was spewing out of a pipe and burn to death while I watched. Was hilarious, to be honest, but probably needs work when one of the biggest baddies in the game pretty much suicides itself.

There's also an excellent crafting system here, where you can break down literally anything at all you pick up, and then get raw materials that can be made into weapons, ammo, medkits, and whatever else you can find the blueprints for.

I love this game. I'm in the process of completing every side quest just to stretch it out, which, I've now been playing for over 25 hours, so if you want it to last, it's got the ability to be a long game.
It's billed as a sci-fi-action, but there are a lot of horror elements to it. The atmosphere, though mostly brightly lit, is creepy and tense. The crafting system is simple but makes sense and requires you to do some work for it. The enemies are varied, and can get the jump on you at any time. The story is deep, multi-faceted, and gives you real choices to make which can (seemingly, I haven't actually beaten it yet!) affect the ending you get. Seriously, if Dead Space 4 ever comes around, I want their team to take a good, hard look at this game.

While some aspects of this game are fairly generic and standard, the rest more than makes up for it and creates an experience we haven't seen since the first Dead Space came out. Seriously. Get this game. Play this game!

~ Shaun