Review: Prey (2017)

TL;DR: Prey (2017) is a very pretty Bioshock in Space with some nice twists, and if you liked Bioshock and you like science fiction, you will like Prey. It runs well under Steam-on-Linux.

Prey (2017) was a fine video game, a nice “Bioshock in space!” riff with some interesting mechanics and so forth. Some of the extra elements made it more interesting than it deserved, but overall the experience was only a good one, not a great one.

For those unfamiliar with the storyline, you play Morgan Yu, and you wake up on a space station you and your brother Alex supposedly own, with no idea how you got there or what has happened to all the visibly dead people everywhere. You discover that the space station has been taken over by Mimics, alien creatures about the size of your head that can look like anything at all, and every pail, trash can, coffee cup, and so forth becomes a threatening object that you have to kill or escape.

It is, like most games of this genre, a combination of puzzle solving, resource management, occasional bouts of combat, and story gathering as you slowly piece together the disaster that led to your being in the crisis in which you find yourself.

The user interface is familiar, and the combat is nothing new to write about. Like in the original Bioshock, you quickly learn the “1-2 Punch” of combat for taking down some of the nastier foes (grenade, combat focus, shotgun finisher).

The setting is the Transtar Space Facility in orbit around the moon. It’s built around a Soviet-era core that the US and the Soviets refurbished, and then Transtar refurbished again, so there’s this transition of design styles. But Transtar was very much into the art-deco thing, so there’s lots of gilded wood and faux marble everywhere that’s not science or space-oriented, and except for the Soviet-era bathrooms in the old labs there’s not that big sense of transitions through time one gets when playing, say, Portal 2.

In Bioshock: Infinite there’s a place in the game where a revolution breaks out in/on Columbia, and the art is remapped to show a city under siege and the common people abandoning it. But that game was a bit railsy; you couldn’t go back and see some of the places you’d visited earlier had become. In Prey, you have the ability to leave the station via EVA suit and float around outside, going from airlock to airlock. You can revisit any part of the station you visited earlier. As the alien infestation transits from the initial invasion through two more phases and the station gets evermore dangerous, you can go back through all the areas you visited before, using new skills to gather new resources, and fight new aliens.

If you’re into SF and you liked Bioshock, you’ll really like Prey. The Steam version runs great under Linux.

There’s only one problem…

[Spoilers below]

There’s a scene at the end of the game that, well, I just hated. There’s an after-credits scene, fully interactive, in which you learn another truth about Morgan. Let’s just say that that scene destroyed the tenor of the game for me so completely that, unlike any of the Bioshock games, I have no desire to play Prey a second time.