Arkane Studios' Prey is an (inter)stellar game, depicting an unsettling alternate-reality future where humans make more of a life in space and come in contact with a parasitic alien lifeform. It presents a lot of situations to you that immerse you in the game's world.
Arkane is renowned for creating fantastic immersive-sim worlds, and they do just that with Prey, pulling heavily from a 60s aesthetics and twisting it to create a world both familiar and different at once. All the characters living in the station, every one of them, is named and has a part to play in the narrative, with Morgan Yu being the thread weaving through the station keeping everything connected when it's all gone to hell.
10 The Cook's Request
Upon arriving in the Crew Quarters, amidst a swath of mind-controlled humans with no survival instincts, a voice shouts over the loudspeaker requesting you come to the kitchen. Living humans are in pretty short supply on Talos 1, so it's only logical you investigate the voice.
Arriving 🌌at the kitchen, you find the cook behind locked doors. He promises you entry if you retrieve an award from his room. You do so, but something seems off. But you return in, and access to the kitchen you are granted. But of course, the water is broken and you need to enter the freezer to fix it. Well, turns out the cook is an impostor and locks you in, himself attempting to run to freedom.
9 ܫ Cargo Ba🅷y Defenses
Throughout your journey in Prey, you can find rumblings that survivors are holed up in the Cargo Bay led by Security Chief Sarah Elazar. Of course, when you arrive, Sarah doesn't feel keen on opening the Cargo Bay B door and putting everyone at risk and tasks you with setting up defenses before she opens the door.
It functions like a last-stand scenario and lets the game show off how much you can play around. You can repair the turrets around, build your own, place them wherever you want, and lay waste to whatever Typhon come through using all your abilities and weapons. It's exhilarating fun, especially fighting alongside fellow humans.
8 ꧋ Showing Initiative
Something of a theme in Prey is that▨ of humanity and how far one might go to protect themselves, be it putting others at risk or even becoming less human to giv𒀰e yourself the power of a Typhon. Much of this can feel subtextual to a degree, just metaphorical. Until Walther Dahl is called in to "clean up" in Talos 1.
Now, the average player may likely have played nice and tried to help as many other humans as they could. But if you actually killed more instead, Dahl strikes a deal with you: Kill off the remaining crewmates, and he'll grant you passage back to Earth. If you're at the point of even being offered the quest, of course you'd oblige. Though it's a trap, you probably enjoyed the killing anyway.
7 🍸 Do No Harm
At the beginning of the game, Morgan takes a personality test designed by the station counselor, Mathias Kohl. To say Kohl is 🎶a poor counselor is something of an understatement. His sessions truly revolved around extracting info from his patients to report it to Alex for experiments.
Later, you can find the body of Hendric DeVries, which in turn eventually leads you to the room of Dr. Kohl, and the specific choices of Morgan's personality tests in the past. Entering this into Kohl's computer reveals Morgan's psych eval through a transcribe, and how Kohl knew about the Typhon and what was being done to Morgan and simply allowed it to continue, even facilitating it.
6 Treasure Hunt🎐 𝓀
On a slightly more light-hearted note from the rest of Prey's oppressive and overall hopeless atmosphere is the Treasure Hunt mission. Abigail Foy has something of a not-quite-but-obviously-DnD group going on and made a treasure hunt across the actual station for her members to engage in. It's a nice way of showing the actual characters having a life outside work.
Throughout the game, you'll uncover the map fragments of each of the members, with each map holding a hint of an actual number the player must search for. Should you find every map fragment and put in the code, you get a great chipset. But if you cheat without finding all the fragments, the game instead gives you a poor chipset for ruining the spirit of the hunt.
5 ꧂ With This Ring...
One of Prey's crowning achievements is its sense of presence. Talos 1 has a genuine feeling of scale, and since every character, be they living or dead, has a name and is trackable, the station feels lived in. This manifests in small ways at times, you track someone's bracelet and find their corpse, maybe.
For others, there are little quests. If you track the bracelet of Nicole Hague, it will lead you to a phantom that she turned into, her wedding ring trapped inside. Should you put her out of her misery and return the ring to her husband, he'll be happy to have it back, but obviously heartbroken about his wife. It's a small story, but one that makes the station feel more real.
4 ꦏ Escape Attempt
Throughout the game, Morgan can find communications between Frank Jones and Emmanuela DeSilva. Or more aptly, Jones' incessant advances against DeSilva that she repeatedly turns down and even reports to HR. So infatuated is Jones, he actually gets them both to the safety of an escape pod during the Typhon Outbreak.
Of course, the pod was dysfunctional. Now, Morgan can break them free and let the escape pod go freely. Or, Morgan can choose to let the pod 𝓀try launch and watch it detonate. However, you are actually ♐allowed to abort this launch, meaning their deaths are squarely on your hands, De Silva pleading you to cancel the launch.
3 Who Is December? 🙈
Early on, you're introduced to January, an operator with Morgan's voice that claims it's helping you remember yourself and the secrets of the station. However, you also encounter December a bit after who is immediately killed by January, claiming that January is the only one you should listen to. Suspect, so of course, you loot December's chassis for a code.
Though it takes time, you eventually find a use for the code in Alex's office, an escape pod keycard. See, December is of the opinion that you should just escape the station, and leave everything else behind. Ultimately if you climb your way up to the escape pod by Alex's office and use it, you escape the station and get an ending to the game, though how true it is is for you to decide.
2 Tꦏhe Psychotronics Prisoner
The Talos 1 space station has a rather barbaric system in place. Criminals on Earth are given the ไoption to be used as experiments 𓃲aboard Talos 1 and have their criminal records cleared when they return. Of course, they would never return, and most would die during tests anyway.
Here's where the Psychotronics Prisoner comes in. Morgan finds him trapped in a chamber, pleading for his freedom and offering the code to the armory if you release him. Or, you can perform the test, letting mimics into the chamber to devour him.
1 Danielle Sh🐼o
Following on from The Cook's request, you can find the body of Abigail Foy, the girlfriend of Danielle Sho, in the freezer, with a transcribe leading you to find Danielle herself space-walking outside. The news obviously hurts her, but it seems she half-expected it. That said, she provides you with the rest of the voice sample you need for the main quest.
Later, Sho emails you to let you track down the impostor. He's planted recycler charges all across the station, turning it into a massive booby trap. Eventually, you track him down in an escape pod, where he's set a final recycler to finish you both off, though you can easily deny him the pleasure, with him dying knowing all his antics were for nothing.
