 Alright, so I've been working on a few videos including one very long video and a couple of smaller ones But I had to interrupt that programming first to shine a light on destiny to use terrible heroic strikes and now to shower praise on a game I listed amongst my best games of 2017. Arcane Studios Prey is actually the game that first got me thinking about starting a YouTube channel I wanted to do a video talking about how I never played a game so good that starts so bad I obviously never got around to making that video, but now I get a chance to devote some time to the game anyway Arcane's immersive Deus Shock X like horror sim Prey remains criminally underplayed and underappreciated There are a variety of reasons for that. First off Bethesda's Unforgivable, anti-consumer, and ultimately ludicrously self-defeating policy of not giving out early copies of games to reviewers This policy means less reviews are written and the ones that are written were done by people who haven't played the whole game Because getting a review up fast is the difference between making money or getting almost no page views Reviewers are under tremendous pressure to get their copy out as quickly as possible Sometimes this works in the game's favor like when reviewers inexplicably gave destiny to excellent reviews probably because the game's fatal flaws don't become Glaringly obvious until you reach the end game But on the other hand this can sometimes work against the game as it did for Prey Prey was a game confusingly named for a once beloved title it has nothing to do with and it's made by a studio best known for a niche stealth franchise the game had a Terrible beta that was plagued by an input lag issue that made combat almost unplayable and on top of all that the game starts Extremely slowly packing its shittiest six hours right up front and just taking hours upon hours to finally really get a grip on What the game does so well Prey is an interactive sim combat is Optional and until you start upgrading abilities and weapons. It's often quite frustrating It's not until you've unlocked the entire space station and fully gotten used to the joy of navigating dense Expertly crafted levels that the beauty and freedom of Prey are fully realized I'm not sure if that's the result of the game being quite different than anything else currently on the market Or if the developers failed in pacing the game properly But either way if you played only six to ten hours of Prey you would have a completely different opinion than someone who played 50 hours I have never played a game that went from being bitterly Disappointing too amazing over the course of a few hours in the middle So today we're gonna take a look at Prey's new DLC moon crash which completely changes almost everything about the game's structure And amazingly seem to have completely perfected everything good about the game. Oh And by the way, I will not spoil anything about the narrative or the experience beyond just explaining how the game works As always if you like what I have to say or how I sound saying it do us both a solid and like share subscribe, etc Let's start by explaining exactly what you get for your 1999 and Prey moon crash Where the base game was a sprawling map that the player spent dozens and dozens of hours backtracking through while uncovering a decent But not great story moon crash is a game that hypothetically is played in an hour or two bursts I say hypothetically because I spent like seven hours playing when I first booted it up because I kept trying just one more run One more run you say? Yes moon crash is a roguelike mode for Prey when I first heard that I kind of recoiled Everything I loved about Prey was the very slow very deliberate tension-filled pace and exploration Prey's best parts were when you ended up spending hours fully immersed slowly working your way through the station By making it into small discreet runs wouldn't that rip out everything? I loved about the game and end up focused more on combat well No somehow not only does this switch in modes with much less focus on overarching narrative not ruin Prey It perfects it perfects it so well that a sequel and precisely this format might even be preferable to a simply a Prey too In order to give you all a good idea of whether this is for you We're gonna have to go over exactly how moon crash works What's the basic gameplay loop is how the difficulty is balanced then we'll briefly discuss the level design art direction And just how cool and gutsy this release actually is before we finally give it a score So here we go narrative versus mechanics The Prey base game is an immersive sim in the vein of Deus Ex or System Shock and like those games narrative is very much a focus Its story was the driving force behind much of the gameplay and exploration and while moon crash is not a story-based DLC per se That doesn't mean it's completely lacking a narrative a great deal of Prey's overall narrative is conveyed through top-notch Environmental storytelling the lore of the universe was fleshed out through very compelling audio logs and email terminals now Lots of games do this but Prey did it as well as any other and in that respect moon crash picks up where the base game left off With an entirely new map to explore and loads of text and audio logs discover moon crash tells the story of a subsidiary Operation of transdar that's nominally doing helium 3 extraction on the moon But also secretly doing volunteer Typhon research as well many of the same shenanigans that were occurring on Talos one have been occurring here on the moon the text and audio logs are Well-written and acted and they convincingly capture the banality of evil while creating a diverse set of believable people all of them Dead now of course who inhabited the moon base at the time of typhon infestation The station is littered with interesting characters and their stories and finding out about their heartbreaking ends keeps the audio logs Interesting the base game as well as a DLC lean heavy into their corrupt and heartless corporation But that thing you've always worked well for me because well this for instance or This or This or this I guess if you're a CEO of Monsanto you might feel differently And in that case you probably have a yacht and are not watching this so fuck you Hugh Grant, huh? Fuck you Hugh Grant Fuck off Hugh Grant Either way, it works for me. That's all I'm saying Like the first game your mission is to simply escape from a station ravaged by typhons that have escaped and killed almost everyone It is the same basic story But while the base game had you spending hours piecing everything together to figure out the hows and whys of the disaster Moon crash does away with all of that in favor of some interesting characters But very little in the way of grand overarching story beats So while there is quite a bit of story to uncover and I want to make that clear There's quite a bit of story to uncover during the gameplay narrative this time around is not a central focus Moon crash is a roguelike game items enemies Obstacles and environmental hazards will be randomly generated throughout the map making each run different with arcane's famous player freedom a Great amount of items and tools to use and perfectly balanced survival elements thrown in there There is a staggering amount of gameplay depth on offer more than I can possibly explain although I am going to give it a shot anyway gameplay loop You will start the game with a single character before unlocking four more that you control successively in each run The ultimate goal of the game is to get all five characters off of the moon in one run while also completing their story objectives To make things difficult there are of course only five ways to get off the moon So the game revolves around using each characters unique skills and abilities to flee in a way that leaves the other characters ways that they can Also escape this is quite a bit more difficult than it sounds a certain escape routes require you to perform multiple actions with different characters For instance, there's one escape route that requires hacking a terminal But the character you might need to escape through that route doesn't have hacking is a skill or you might end up with a character Perfectly set up to take the shuttle out except they can't fly the shuttle Unlocking each character requires specific actions from the player and each character has a story arc that requires even more specific actions Each time you unlock one of these the game gets more complex and difficult Getting one character off the moon from any of those five methods is easy getting two is a bit harder Getting three is quite complex and so on when you unlock a character They are completely stock factory models that require you to upgrade them with neuro mods Which thankfully carry over from run to run meaning that like all the best roguelikes even failed runs produced tangible progression The moment-to-moment gameplay here is heavily focused on careful exploration and scavenging with a healthy dose of crafting tossed in Taking a page from loot based RPGs arcane has added item quality and durability to its loot system Weapons and suit upgrade chips come in common form all the way up to elite with the standard gray to green to blue to orange color scheme The better items have significant gameplay advantages that make seeing the orange glow behind an item a rush of joy But you will never be totally overpowered until the very end of the game because guns degrade fairly quickly with use and can be broken Or stolen by enemies a system that serves to not only keep the player power and check but also to give duplicate items a purpose And incentivize more exploration and because you will be playing all five characters in chronological order in a run Picking up everything you see isn't an optimal strategy items do not respond after the initial map population So if you take that second sweet ass elite shotgun because the one you have equipped is down 22 percent and you escape in the pod Well, that shotgun is now gone and useless for the next person who needs to escape One character is able to repair weapons, but others will need to continually scavenge to stay armed The system is perfectly balanced to make scavenging and looting essential And when combined with the survival elements that we'll get into in a little bit It helps create a perfect risk reward exploration gameplay loop I mentioned that neuro mod upgrades carry over between runs Over time you'll have to upgrade each character's skills to make it possible for them to use certain escape methods Or simply to make it easier for them to survive or escape more quickly But the carry over progression isn't just between runs But within each run itself as the game features a score system that allows you to buy items for each character Before their escape attempt begins There are a huge amount of items to unlock and all of them have a concrete and important gameplay purpose Every successful action within the game will reward you with sim points The currency they can be used before each character starts their attempt at the start of the game You'll only have access to a silence pistol and ammo But in each run you will find blueprints And each of those blueprints allows for that item to be purchased at the start of runs This mechanic means that the more you explore and fight the more currency you earn for the next member in your run This might seem like an overpowered system But it is perfectly balanced by the final gameplay mechanic on offer and one that I generally hate in games But it works really well here prey moon crash has a timer as you play and time passes something called Corruption builds up in gameplay terms. It's basically like a boss enrage timer There are five corruption levels and each time one is hit all of the previously cleared enemies will respawn in more powerful Varieties and new enemy spawns will be much more dangerous It perfectly recreates what the base game had which is more and more dangerous enemies appearing over time Including some new enemies that were not in the base game if the corruption bar fills all the way up on level five The game is over This puts a hard cap on how long a run can last unless you use a particular item You can find or craft that drains the corruption bar down giving you more time But those items are relatively rare and expensive which makes finding them on a typhon corpse at the beginning of the game All the more satisfying so while slowly exploring and looting every nook and cranny is important for character upgrades And to find items that make escaping easier taking too long makes the game harder and harder as such The entire game is finding the most efficient balance between looting and escaping one final Great little feature is that because you're playing each character in chronological order if one of your crew members died Overflowing with materials loot and weapons the next character can find their corpse and take that stuff Or if you were particularly lucky in a run just before you escape You can put all that stuff in a container or on a corpse and retrieve it with the next crew member If you happen to pass by an item that is crucial for leaving with the escape pod You can stash somewhere easy for your next character Or if you noticed on your first escape attempt that the shuttle is guarded by a bunch of fire typhans You can make certain to purchase several of the burn cure items for the character you plan on using the shuttle with Over time a truly tremendous amount of items and information needs to be memorized So much so that until I completely learned the map I took the writing down notes Each discrete run is fun just on its own because the levels are gorgeous and fantastically designed But the cumulative depth of attempting a perfect extraction is daunting in the early game getting three characters off is quite difficult And getting five is really daunting But while it's hard the consistent progression system Constant tension and extremely fun gameplay mean it's never actually frustrating Deaths almost always occur because you made a bad decision Combat is not and was not prey's focus It can be somewhat fun at its best, but it's better to think of this as a strategy game Prey does not give the player tools to just tear through enemies by being good at a shooter Prey and mooncrash are not fps games They are immersive survival horror sims that happen to have guns and a first person perspective Each enemy encounter is a balance of time and resources and often the best thing to do is sneak by or flee The base game of prey suffered from an ability to level up so much It became possible to slaughter almost everything in your path the time and resource mechanics and mooncrash have pretty much solved that problem Even if you are able to slaughter everything in your path, you are still on a strict time limit It works amazingly well at driving home the game's sim nature You are just trying to get off the moon as quickly and safely as possible If you aren't damn sure that you can easily and cheaply kill a group of enemies, you probably should not even try Don't starve Okay, on top of all that gameplay depth mooncrash has light but effective survival elements No, you will not starve to death or die of thirst if you don't keep an eye on some survival bars at the bottom of your screen Eating is beneficial, but not mandatory food will give you a quite helpful well fed bonus And there are numerous status effects like concussion Hemorrhage broken bones radiation poisoning and burns that result from either not being careful Or from getting surprised by a group of powerful enemies each of these status effects can be cured by items But the items are rare if you don't have any burn cure in your inventory Maybe you should think twice before attempting to fight fire phantoms if you get the hemorrhage debuff You'll take damage from jumping sprinting and climbing So unless you have the appropriate item to cure that you'll now need to move slowly and be very careful All of these debuffs create interesting player decisions Do I go back to the fabricator and try to make the radiation pills and risk getting into another fight? Or do I just try to push on and hope I can make it to the escape pod without dying? I'm shocked and impressed by how perfectly all of these mechanics mesh together I generally don't like survival elements in games, but this in my opinion is survival done right Not annoying busy work, but rather a system that confronts the player with actually difficult decisions Randomness and moderation as a gameplay mechanic Moon Crash is an amazing example of how just a tiny bit of randomness laid on top of Ridiculously deep gameplay systems and a judicious amount of player freedom can combine to change how a game plays out In Moon Crash you will start each runs with the same characters Those characters will have the same goal each time, but there are a crazy amount of variables that will fort your best laid plans time and again at the start Plan on taking the volunteer straight to the shuttle? Great plan until you realize a door you thought would be open isn't or that the elevator you planned on using is broken And only one character has the skill to repair it So now you'll have to try something else while switching to having the character who can repair the elevator Escape through the shuttle Maybe the third character will stumble upon a crucial item for one of the escape methods And she might have the time to quickly run through an area She already cleared to stash it in an easily accessible place for the next group member Your fourth character might need to take the tram only to find that power is out So you'll think wait, I saw one of those battery things with the second guy It was in the gym I think at the start of a run you might have looked at the radiation cure and thought What are the odds I will actually need that in this run? Wouldn't I be better off buying some chipsets and neuro mods while saving money for the next character? And sure enough the room you have to pass through on the way to a terminal Will get you irradiated in five minutes Meaning you got the track all the way through a dangerous area to craft the rad pills wasting precious time and resources These small little choices and changes snowball with each character you start up And the pressure and tension rises as each moment passes and you watch the corruption meter go up and up As each character backtracks through the map meeting obstacles They can't handle or that another character is better equipped to handle the complexity of the game continually rises Is it better to use your second character to run and hack that terminal and quickly escape right at the start And save your combat specialist for the later stage or should you use the combat guy second? Kill everything heading up to the tram So your squishy guy has a clear run to the shuttle if everything plays outright and of course again All of your great plans go to shit quickly There are layers upon layers of complex interactions that leave me marveling that it even works at all So many small changes are possible. It's an amazing feat that all of the larger objectives still have solutions But moon crash like the base game gives a player so many tools and options There is always a solution. It may not be easy or convenient Hell you might not even remember it was there, but it was there It is like a symphony of gameplay systems all working in a huge messy open-ended sea of possibilities It's glorious Game devs tend to use randomness as either an artificial time sink or a crappy punishment mechanic Rare is the game that uses randomness as a central mechanic of the gameplay And have it work so well And there's one more thing I think we should mention before we talk about graphics and performance and then wrap up In my games of the year video I mentioned that one of the major problems with prey was that the typhoon design isn't terribly scary or interesting And from a pure art design angle, I stand by that But something amazing happens when you add permadeath mechanics to the fold Suddenly those typhoon that aren't all that scary looking are really fucking scary Because death means failure here You will quickly develop a healthy fear of almost all the typhoons you come into contact with And the particularly strong ones will fill you with true dread in the base game You'd see one of the hulking telepaths and be like, well, fuck it I can probably kill him with a shotgun and then use 731 med kits to heal the damage I'll take And if I die, so what in moon crash a room of four typhoons will have you smashing the duck button and slowly creeping behind a desk Prey works best as a horror sim and the base game was at its best when you were creeping through spooky darkened rooms But even when it was playing its best the base game never truly scared you because death only meant reloading a save from three minutes ago You almost had a role play to really experience what the game had to offer It's only now in this release that preys horror side actually works Even the smallest enemies are able to fuck up all of your carefully thought out plans And watching the corruption meter go up and up as you too slowly creep through a room is incredibly tense When one of the large dangerous typhoons sees you your heart will race as you flee like a madman trying to get through a door And smash the lock button before it attacks And crouching in that room listening and waiting for it to wander off before sneaking out to be back on your way Is exactly the kind of real organic tension the base game never quite achieved Moon crash uses the same assets Same level in enemy art direction and succeeds where the base game failed Which made me realize something actually scaring the player cannot be accomplished through only graphics or sound or art direction Those things are important, of course, but they aren't enough jump scares don't actually lead to any kind of lasting player fright Tense or terrifying gameplay moments that organically arise out of dangerous situations Do more to scare the player than all the gore in the world moon crash is the horror experience Prey was designed to deliver the horror is in the gameplay mechanics It took this release for me to realize exactly what was missing from the base game It looks so good So I bought prey on ps4 when it launched I don't even remember why now and when the pc screen grab started appearing very soon after release I regretted buying on console. I happen to like this mode so damn much I am seriously considering buying the game on pc as well But for now everything in this section is about the ps4 slim version of the game Prey looks great Even on console it looks quite a bit better on pc But even on the ps4 it is a gorgeous game The lighting is beautiful and I recommend turning the brightness setting down from default so the flashlight becomes necessary The game runs smooth and the level in art direction is just perfect There's nothing particularly fancy or different here, but just solid execution The moon days like the base games talus one feels real It feels lived in and logical corpse locations tell a story The levels feel like places that real people lived and worked and died Nothing here will take you out of the game, which is obviously very important for a game That's main draw is immersion and you will come across a whole bunch of beautiful art direction that if you weren't Desperately short of time is cool enough to make you want to stop and stare for a bit But you won't because you'll be short of time I experienced one bug The first time I actually got all five crew members off the moon on the final attempt the game stuck in a loading spree Now I freaked out, but it was fine It saved exactly where I was and that is huge in a high pressure game like this And unlike some roguelikes that insist you play in one single setting Arcane was good enough to create a save and quit feature so that you don't lose any progress if you need to come back later Like all other arcane games, the level design here is amongst the best in the business with insanely dense and vertically interactive levels All with multiple ways to achieve different objectives There were several several times. I'd discover something I'd missed and thought to myself How the hell did I miss that pipe up there? The map isn't huge, but it isn't small either. It's basically perfectly sized There's an awful lot to keep in your mind as it is So any bigger would have been completely unmanageable at least for me when I first started I would find myself straining to remember where I put something or to visualize exactly how two areas connect But the more you play the more accustomed you become to the layout and by the time you finish the game You will have a perfect representation of the map in your head making success much easier And I should point out what I just said there Yes, the game does end. This is not an open-ended roguelike like nuclear throne or binding of Isaac It has an overarching narrative and story beats to complete at which point the game ends and starts over and I really appreciated that The waypoints are also really well done in prey Maps and waypoints can ruin games if implemented poorly Too helpful and you're barely playing not helpful enough and you're constantly frustrated running around in circles Moon crash strikes a perfect balance in this regard The large global map shows how areas are connected generally And the mini map shows you important points of interest but not any specific information about what dangers are in the way Or really anything beyond these two rooms connect somewhere It ends up giving you a general idea of where to head but never stoop to putting a glowing path on the floor This is extremely important in a game like this The game map is too big to throw players to the wolves But too detailed a map would take away much of the exploration the game relies on Pray and now moon crash put a lot of trust into the player Arcane has created a deep complex web of mechanics and level design and had the balls to give very little actual direction Instead trusting the player to figure it all out It can be daunting at first, but ultimately the game shines as a result I implore you to resist any temptation you may have to look something up online What at first might seem opaque becomes clear just by playing And the game feels perfectly paced to have the player constantly feel like they're figuring something out Pray doesn't bury you in tooltips or helpful hints It will occasionally give you a gentle nudge, but arcane knows that figuring out the game's secrets and puzzles is the game here It's a crucial part of the design that is easy to overlook But needs to be praised all the same too many games these days don't trust or respect their players intelligence In a year where bungee launched a sequel that eliminated the choice to pick What subclass perks to use because they didn't want to risk players ever picking the wrong build Figuring out a deep web of mechanics in a game is incredibly refreshing None of the playable spaces here are boring or bland Great sound design level design and art direction combined to create the tension the gameplay deserves I love the aesthetic of pray just like I loved the aesthetic of dishonored and it all runs great and looks beautiful If you haven't bought it yet, I would recommend pc the base game has a great graphical and lighting mod That supposedly makes it extra creepy, but if you're a console player everything runs and looks great all that said There is one tremendously important problem with both the base game and especially with this dlc in particular The loading screens between areas are absurdly Unacceptably long so long I ended up timing them They average about a minute and a half and I had a couple take a full two minutes and they never take less than one full minute Now that might not seem all that bad right we can wait a minute for game this good Isn't that a small little nitpick? Well with the base game. Yes, it is but not here in this dlc and moon crash. This is a serious problem Once you get good you'll be going back and forth between zones frequently Certain tasks will require you to go to four different zones So you'll have to run quickly to one area to get something only to run back out You'll run to the labs for 40 seconds to grab something come back out for a minute and a half loading screen You'll spend three minutes sneaking back to the next area only for another minute and a half loading screen Then you'll spend 30 seconds getting to the next zone and hit another loading screen This is extremely immersion breaking it slows the game down and breaks all of the amazing tension that has been built up It's a real problem one that desperately needs to be fixed for the next game It hurts the experience and takes you out of the world that arcane is so carefully crafted Wrapping up So I waited to buy this because what I'd heard about it not story focused survival elements rogue like Didn't sound anything like what the base game was and I really regret that now Moon crash isn't like the base game. It's the base game perfected This is the experience. I believe arcane was trying to create with prey all along I give them tremendous praise for having a creativity and guts to create and release this It would have been so damn easy to just make a story based expansion Just set it on the moon had the same basic story with a six hour campaign And sell it for 19 bucks to people like me who liked the game and wanted more Instead arcane went back and completely reimagined the core of their gameplay loop It took me 31 and a half hours to beat this dlc This is basically a completely new game and there's easily enough here to have charged 60 dollars and call a standalone release For 20 bucks if you already own prey, this is a steal Something truly fresh unique and innovative It perfectly distills and perfects everything that works in the base game while fixing the things that didn't Unlike the base game there aren't six shitty hours where all you have is a wrench And it doesn't drag in the middle for 12 hours or so Each play session is tense right from the go and just gets more and more intense as you continue And the story moments on offer here are quite good Really memorable stuff as a dlc This is a 10 out of 10 one of the very best dlcs I have ever bought and a piece of software that makes something like the curse of osiris from destiny 2 Look like an actual scam And even if this was its own standalone game at a 60 dollar price tag, I might still grade this as highly as prey itself Values a funny thing nowadays man $20 I literally cannot take my kids to wendy's for less than 35 bucks and that's if I leave my wife in the car Don't worry. I cracked the windows. Don't worry about her. The more important question as always remains. Is this worth your time? Absolutely I'm sure that this game will be overlooked and underplayed too because Bethesda seems uninterested in promoting this game like it does its own But hell yes prey moon crash is a fucking triumph It joins the witcher 3's expansions as the rare dlc good enough to be sold on its own as its own standalone game Moon crash is good enough that if you didn't like prey you should try it And if you haven't bought prey you might even consider playing this first And if you did like prey, well, you will like this even more This is a dlc that people need to buy developers that trust the intelligence of their players need to be rewarded I can't recommend this thing enough man All right. Thanks. See you soon