It helps that you can revisit old areas at will, a touch of Metroid design that makes areas feel even more expansive. Even 20 hours into Prey I still found myself impressed by its level design, wandering into a room and then realizing there were four or five equally viable means of entry that I hadn’t even noticed before. Prey has about as many ways to open a room as it has actual rooms, and that’s important when gaining entrance to a room is the main obstacle. Or using your not-a-Nerf gun to shoot a dart through a window, hitting the button to open the door. Or holes too small for a human but large enough for you to take advantage of the much-touted Mimic power, turning yourself into a coffee cup and slipping between the bars in a window. Instead it’s stuff like the elevator anecdote above. Rooms always seem to have two or three different ways to gain entrance, but not in the contrived “let’s just put a vent there because we need a vent” way. A “large” area in Prey is the equivalent of a single building in Dishonored 2, and as with Dishonored 2’s brilliant mansion-bound levels Prey feels more like a self-guided tour than a game shuttling you down various paths. Prey’s more restrained design avoids that trap though.
Reviewing Dishonored 2, I compared its more extravagant levels to “Swiss Cheese,” where a seemingly straightforward collection of rooms and hallways is actually pocked with vents to clamber through and ledges to climb on and all manner of secrets to be found. Like Dishonored, and like BioShock and System Shock and that laundry list of games I mentioned, Prey is about discovering a space. Combat is more palatable in Talos I than in Dishonored, at least insofar as the game won’t give you the “bad ending” for killing off inky aliens, but this is still not a game about killing aliens. In Prey that task is most often “Entering a room.” Talos I is enormous, and by the time credits roll you’ll have explored it from toe to tip, from the drab warehouses of the Cargo Bay up to the Bridge and Arboretum with their art deco flare and enormous arched windows.Īliens, black shadow-beings known as the Typhon, are an omnipresent threat throughout the station, but this is like System Shock-not Dead Space or even Doom.
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