Less than the sum of its parts

Prey is a great free-roam action-RPG, in the vein of Deus Ex. It's a great story-driven adventure, a'la BioShock. And it's a great pulse-pounding survival-action game, like Resident Evil 4. I loved it, and will never forget my experience on Talos I. But how those aspects sometimes conflict with one another wasn't so great.

The game's atmosphere is incredibly tense and foreboding: enemies look and behave legitimately frightening; the disaster-struck level design looks thoroughly unsafe; and the music, man, the music is anxiety incarnate. Speaking as someone who doesn't care for horror games, I can still appreciate and respect how evocative Prey is in this way. But...

As I crawled slowly down corridors and hid from Phantoms, avoiding traps and trying to conserve my ammo -- my desires to explore, and to progress the story, felt slowed down by this anxiety. In the early and mid-game, the tense atmosphere (and high enemy difficulty) suffocated both the sense of freedom and the storytelling. ... And then, later on - when I revisited the same areas, with way more health and combat upgrades - that sense of tension all but disappeared. As excellent as the "tense" parts of the game were, I feel like Prey would have been better served by using them less often.

The jump-scaring "mimics" are an excellent example of a great mechanic that felt detrimental to the overall game. Aside from a handful of scripted moments, they were legitimately and expertly hidden among a room's objects, and being surprised by one meant - in addition to jumping up in my chair - taking a big chunk of damage.

So of course, I equipped the Psychoscope upgrade that allowed me to see disguised mimics, and kept my 'scope on ... all the time. That solved my scared-and-dead problem, but sacrified some audio clarity and visual quality, like Batman's Detective Mode or Witcher Vision. I was pretty disappointed that there was never a passive upgrade for detecting mimics.

Maybe I'm just a scaredy-cat; but that wasn't the only way that I felt Prey was conflicted. Another big one was narrative choice, and my "fear of missing out."

The quality of Prey's narrative content was consistently excellent, not just in the main story and side missions, but even in the text and audio logs that filled in background details and characterization. This story wasn't great in the same way as The Witcher's -- but more like Metroid Prime, in that I was collecting clues and hints to gradually uncover the plot's mystery. And that's where Prey's strength as a story-driven adventure ran headlong into its strength as an RPG.

Occasionally, the game would present me with a choice - like saving or killing a person, using a key item or destroying it - that just deprived me of some amount of that backstory. And what was worse was when I wasn't "presented" with a choice at all; Prey has a few instances of surprise choice. Following one mission might prevent another one from showing up. Upgrading your Typhon powers will - surprise! - make the anti-Typhon defenses start to target you. Even something as simple as walking into a room at a certain time might set story-changing events into motion.

This kind of stuff made me really paranoid about missing story content, and being unable to solve the game's central mysteries. Hell -- one optional mission, starting near the beginning of the game, can lead to an early, alternate ending, that spoils the "real" ending. Like some kind of narrative trap, ruining the story if you happened to choose wrong.

Tangentially, I avoided many of these traps by searching online. (I also searched for the locations of some key items, like the fabrication plan for medkits, because that seemed important.) And I wouldn't necessarily recommend that; online resources for Prey are very spoilery.

Another, simpler design conflict in Prey was how painful backtracking tended to be. As a non-linear Metroidvania-style game, and as an RPG with plenty of optional missions and pickups, Prey involved a lot of return visits to areas I'd explored before. And as an action-adventure game, Prey felt the need to continually re-populate (most of) the enemies in those areas. With no fast travel, every trip from A to B and back again included some repetitive encounters, and felt like a waste of my precious ammo.

This made some of Prey's Deus Ex-ey obstacles more frustrating than fun. As I explored more of Prey's map, I'd find a door blocked by items too heavy for me to lift; a computer with too high a security level to hack; a broken machine that I wasn't skilled enough to repair. And though I was later able to get upgrades for unlocking these, the backtracking I would have to do to find them again didn't feel worthwhile -- especially for things that weren't related to a mission, and therefore weren't trackable on the map.

What's disappointing, and fascinating, about Prey is that these irritations aren't born of small missteps or mistakes; in fact, they only stand out because each individual aspect of the game is so incredibly well-executed. This makes Prey ultimately feel like less than the sum of its parts.

Nevertheless, I fell in love with those parts. The character- and equipment-upgrading loop, the tight action gameplay, the excellently-realized sci-fi setting, the mysteries uncovered by snooping in computers and audio logs, and the intriguing storyline (with an even more intriguing ending!); all of these aspects of Prey kept me riveted, and drove me to drop hour after hour into it.

As much as I wish it was better, Prey is impressively great already. My criticisms don't change the fact that it's a masterful blast of a game.

Better than: BioShock Infinite, Dishonored, Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition
Not as good as: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the non-story aspects of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
But: an emphatic no, thank you to the rogue-like Mooncrash DLC.