Welcome to our Game In Progress review of Arkane Studios’ Prey, a new sci-fi horror game from the developer that produced Dishonored. This second entry covers everything from Morgan Yu’s arrival in Deep Storage to your first attempt to upload the Coral research. Players can choose for their Morgan to be either male or female. Matt is playing as a guy and, for simplicity’s sake, will be referring to the character as such.
When last we talked about Prey, I was struggling to get through it. Even with a growing arsenal, I just couldn’t make a dent in the Typhon, those inky alien bastards that had overwhelmed the space station Talos 1. But as I slunk through the Crew Quarters and looked over my options for taking down a Telepath, one of the game’s bulkier enemies, I did something I told myself I wouldn’t; I gave in to the temptation of transhumanism. In that moment of great need, I crossed a line, imbuing myself with psychic powers stolen from the very force I’d been fighting against and leaving Morgan’s humanity behind, all in an attempt to find some kind of foothold against my foes. Saying it worked out for the better would be an understatement. I’ve been tearing through Typhon ever since and injecting myself with more and more psionic abilities as this miserable mission goes on, but that moment of inner conflict, where it forced me to stop and consider whether I really wanted to let go of my humanity, was the first sign of what has eventually emerged as the game’s strongest, most thoroughly explored question: How inhuman are you willing to become?
In the pantheon of sci-fi musings, it’s not exactly a fresh angle, but Prey deserves credit for exploring it in ways that tie directly into how you play the game. At its most simplistic, there’s the literal measure and quantification of Morgan Yu’s humanity. The game is very careful to warn you that taking on alien powers will make Talos 1’s defenses turn against you, as they can detect the alien matter that’s building up inside you and will no longer recognize you as human. But it takes more than one psionic ability to put you over the human-Typhon threshold. The game wants you to get a taste of the aliens’ powers. It dangles them in front of you as a reprieve from the relative struggle to survive and lets you dabble in them without consequence, to a point. Beating the game without these abilities is far from impossible—better players than I are already singing the praises of the “no-psionics run”—but in my experience, they make the game a hell of a lot more manageable and fun.
In the grand scheme of things, the obvious consequences for deviating too far into alienhood aren’t all that disastrous. Turrets, the only automated threat to your inhumanity, become increasingly rare as the game goes on and are easily dispatched or hacked to support you. But Prey jabs at your decision in more subtle ways. Morgan’s ambiguously aligned big brother, Alex, explains that one of the conclusions researchers have been able to draw about the Typhon is their distinct inability to feel empathy, one of the reasons they’re so quick to murder you at first sight. As the game goes on (and you’re theoretically becoming more and more Typhon filled), you’ll be thrust into situations where your own empathy is put to the test. Is it really worth going out of your way to save the survivors on the station even if it means putting yourself in danger and derailing your mission? And in at least one specific case, acquiescing to the crew’s demands would bring turrets into the picture, putting their survival directly at odds with your own, if you’ve been Typhoning yourself.