2025-04-26 01:04:42

Prey is a masterpiece of immersive sims, and it instantly rockets into the top ten of my favorite games of all time.

I'm absolutely thrilled with the gameplay, the lore, the characters, how events unfold in the game, and how it looks and sounds. I especially love that it's a very welcoming immersive sim — it offers great action choices, yet it's not easy by any means. There are tons of options, allowing you to carve your own path and be rewarded for it. It's wonderful.

Overall, it was an incredibly engaging adventure — and I'm fully satisfied with how everything wrapped up. It's a shame there will never be a Prey 2. Just like 20 years ago, with the other Prey...

Arkane’s Magnum Opus.
10/10

2025-04-23 08:47:21

Pros: Great game. Great story overall. Good game play.
Cons: Very annoying game play at the end of the story, ending is extremely abrupt and feels rushed.

GET IT WHILE ITS STILL $3!!!! (though I'd say its worth its baseline price)

2025-04-21 09:28:25

[At a friend's request, I'm currently giving Prey another shot. Obviously whatever problems I had before either aren't there or aren't enough to stop me from having fun now, but I want to hold off on rewriting this until I've seen more. I will say now though that the game takes A WHILE to actually get going and let you see something interesting, and if it wasn't for the insistence of people whose opinions I trust I'd have never figured that out.]

Whatever's going on with this game, I just can't make myself like it. And it's not that I don't like immersive sims (VTMB and Deus Ex [1] are incredible, Mankind Divided was pretty good and Human Revolution... exists and is okay... the Thief series is really good, so on and so forth,) it's not that I don't like games with weird takes on first-person shooting (Rainbow six mostly, plus SWAT 4,) games that can be arduously slow (Chaos Theory, Thief once again, you get it) or Arkane's own offerings (Dishonored, specifically Daud's DLCs to this day remains my GOAT)

But... Prey just seems to me like it's taking the *worst* pieces of those puzzles and putting out an end result that just doesn't feel like a game where anything works together.

Sure, the premise is interesting. I get faked out and realize I'm completely alone and have no real idea what's going on, excited to uncover what's up... until i'm reading my thirtieth email down this corridor, no closer to answering any interesting questions but now with several uninteresting ones polluting the narrative.

The cold, empty, desolate atmosphere communicates the grim fate of a desperate and dying population thrown into chaos and paranoia... until I'm revisiting the same scenes hours later with absolutely nothing new to glean from it in between trips to various rooms all wrecked in nearly-identical ways.

Not being able to trust that your surroundings are free from enemies fills you with the same paranoia and unease that must've plagued the previous inhabitants... until you're wrench-checking every prop in the room to clear out a nuisance that will nonetheless take half your health bar if you don't do this.

Coming across unfamiliar enemies, or familiar enemies in unfamiliar settings, puts you in the position of not only needing to come up with a creative plan, but a creative backup too... until you reload the fight ten times because you haven't settled on *the* correct way to counter this enemy type, before treating every situation like the job's to set up the same circumstances that you know will solve the problem. Or, heaven forbid, you realize the problem's actually just a contrivance of scripting, and this is in fact a set piece you're supposed to play "like a video game".

Everything, *everything* I do in this game, I come out of it feeling relieved. Not because I just had a brush with death that I'm glad I got away from, but because there's now less of the game standing between me and playing the rest of the game.

The gloo gun is really, really cool, and I love the ability to traverse in interesting ways with it. And that's about it.

I'm sure Prey is a perfectly fine game and a perfectly fine immersive sim at that. For the life of me, I can't seem to be anything but bored and annoyed actually trying to get through it.

2025-04-20 07:08:28

They could've finished the story better in some ways, but Prey is probably the best Arkane game by quality wise, but I can't really decide gameplay wise because I still didn't use typhon powers, maybe I'll decide in the future when I play it a second time.

2025-04-18 04:25:23

Made me shit myself multiple times, do not play after nightfall. Otherwise very good, very beautiful story.

2025-04-15 23:41:23

Never played an "immersive simulator" before, but this was a really enjoyable game! Just the right amount of horror, and only very occasional jankiness from quests triggers not going off that caused some frustration.

2025-04-12 08:55:16

Despite System Shock 3, or perhaps "Psychoshock", being a better name for the game that ended up being called Prey, Arkane's im-sim prowess is once again at full force. The level of freedom and enjoyment felt from the gameplay, exploration, and world is unfortunately marred somewhat by lackluster story beats and the absence of a much needed second coat of polish on the game's systems. Nevertheless, I think this title is criminally underrated and deserves much more attention that it was given by Bethesda themselves. Stick around until the end for a truly unique experience.

2025-04-06 15:45:35

Has been a long time since I played a game that respected my intelligence like this. No hand holding, no stupid limitations. Highly recommended.

2025-04-06 12:35:30

Last good Arcane game until they got mutilated and killed off by Bethesda. 9.5/10

2025-04-04 06:01:22

I really tried to like this game but I just can’t. The first hours are really rough, and the gameplay never really clicks. Backtracking is tedious, enemies respawn constantly and take forever to kill, and the gravity-based exploration is s'ucks. On top of that, the story is mostly told through audio logs and calls, which are easy to miss because they often play during combat.

5/10