 The latest game by Arkane Studio in Austin, Texas, preys an underrated and undersold gem. It takes place on a research space station by the name of Talus One, which is orbiting the moon. In it, clandestine scientists do clandestine research for the non-clandestine advancement of humanity. It's a wonderful place filled with the most friendly aliens who'd love nothing more than to eat hug your face. Those are called the Typhon, by the way, and they are lovely. First thing first, though. Good morning, Morgan. Today is Monday, March 15th, 2032. You take the role of Morgan Yu, scientist, extraordinaire, and brother to Transgen's chief executive officer, Alex Yu. The game begins with Yu, ha ha, waking up in bed just before leaving for Talus One, ascending in through later, and, well, actually, let's save the narrative for later. First, let's talk about gameplay. Now it's time to beat the mind game, now it's time to beat the mind game. If you asked me, day in and out, to point out a particular section or two that showcases Prey's greatest strengths, I will have to say, without a doubt, world and level design. Every single time. Talus One is a vast space station, a many-headed beast whose every face is different from the one before, and still more different from the one to come. You will explore extravagant, executive suites, classical and stylish, futuristic laboratories with slick equipment, maintenance corridors and premises that look very much inspired by current space station designs, and through this ecosystem, the guts. An acronym, very much on point, showcasing the ship's insights, all the maintenance bits, all those fun little things that go into a gigantic big-ass space station in an alternate history world. The design of Talus One speaks to a fleshed-out, realised world filled with well-hidden secrets that will enrich the depth of your appreciation for the work that's gone into creating a constantly tense atmosphere. At least in the first few hours, that is, you do eventually get used to all the mimics skulking around in dark corners, pretending to be cups and chairs and trying to eat your face. There's a lot of eating face here. It's only natural, and works well with the narrative. Eventually, no matter how crappy the situation you find yourself in, you do get used to it. There are about a dozen distinctive levels, all locations, if you will, with Talus One. Each of these is a celebration of the freedom this genre offers, allowing you an uncanny amount of choice in your approach to how you tackle the level's challenges, reach objectives and discover secrets. Your best friend in this endeavour will often be your glue gun, which launches blobs of instantly hardening foam and allows you to create platforms to climb and jump on and from and permits you to get almost anywhere with enough work and enough glue. It's good enough a weapon that you might just reach some places that the developers don't want you reaching. Depending on how ingenious you are with your use of it, there are moments in which the game is frightened to give you control, times when, instead of giving you full freedom, it does not permit you to access certain places, even though there is no likely explanation as to why not. Unfortunate that, but what can you do? Now it's time to beat the matter game. Do you like making things explode with your mind? Because diamond powers will give you all the opportunity to make things explode, blow up, be decimated, annihilated and so on and so forth, as well as to jump into the air, to create a shadow copy that aggros enemies while teleporting forwards and even morphing into your everyday staplers, for example. There's also Mind Jack, which allows you to take control of humans, Psycho Shock, which disables psionic powers and Remote Manipulation, which will let you control objects from afar, as well as a few others. Useful, the whole lot of them, and the damage output makes dispatching enemies far easier than with guns, even fully upgraded guns. It's very resource intensive in terms of psionic energy, but there is an absolute payoff as to the ease with which you handle creatures, dangerous creatures, especially when you have levelled up your abilities, powers enough. My first playthrough was done almost exclusively with my trusty shotgun in hand. While at first not particularly effective, especially against the stronger typhon organisms like the techno parts and teleparts, once you use several neuromots in gun smithing and weapon upgrades, the shotgun really packs one hell of a punch. But human abilities go a lot further than just allowing you to upgrade your guns to the fullest. Dissecting typhon corpses for exotic materials, hacking high level computers, increasing your health, granting you more stamina and psycho mana, pardon, psycho psi energy, it's all very good what you can do, the ways you can improve yourself with all these skills. The gunplay, however, isn't anything amazing, it's nothing to sneer at either. It's mediocre in truth, run of the mill, middle of the road, all very average. The aliens on Talos, while great in number, don't thrill with variety. You'll mostly fight mimics, two varieties, phantoms, four types, and a few bigger nasties which take a lot more time to cure, as well as resources, and yes, patience as well, like the techno parts and teleparts and weavers. The weavers create small nasties called cystoids, which pop in your face covering you in bile radiation and explosive death, just like cysts. Adorable last but not least is the nightmare, which is unpleasant. It will hunt for you every 20-30 minutes depending on how you decide to dispatch it, in certain areas for about 3 minutes before you either murder it or wait it out, yes it will disappear automatically after 3 minutes, if you do kill it however you extract a lot of material from it which you can then turn into useful exotic resources as well as other types of resources. Other enemies you'll encounter are robotic in nature, that it will eventually shoot at you and dislike you heavily if you invest in typhoon powers. Corrupted in military operators will stun, burn and laser the living hell out of you whenever you meet them. This game enjoys murdering you, it did it a lot to me, maybe because I played it on higher difficulties, especially on my second playthrough, but yeah, I died a lot. I love a lot. Not that I'm complaining, I usually suck at killing aliens, I'm way too scared, no no, yes I am. If I had to describe the story of Prey in one sentence, I would say this, exceptionally captivating start, a middle that mulls through a rushed ending and then a real very strong mind blowing post credits ending, the real ending to the game, amazing. We will discuss that ending later. You take on the role of Morgan Yu, whose gender you pick, which doesn't change the story in any way with the exception of your voice, which is interesting since you're also a silent protagonist. Right off the start, you experience this gorgeous sequence of a futuristic city, I'm not sure which city it is, but it's one hell of a sight either way. You've woken up in a lavish apartment, a chopper is waiting for you on the top of the building, you're getting ready for the first day and going back to work with your brother and all you've got to do is pass a bunch of physical tests, no biggie, right? Well things get a bit weird, you see when you get to the tests, Dr Bellamy, your resident physician, seems pretty frustrated with whatever it is you do, the wildest becomes clear bit by bit, not at first, not at all. See while you may not know it at this point, Bellamy and the other scientists expect that a neuromod with a typhoon power has been imprinted in your brain as it were. Neuromods for the record are devices which allow humans to imprint different skills or alien abilities into their minds. Unfortunately, there's a side effect. As soon as you remove a neuromod, all your memories from the point when you originally installed it to the point of removal are gone, just like that. Bellamy and his fellow scientists expect to see you use these abilities to handle the tests they give him. And when you, for example, hide under a chair as a human, it's ridiculous and kind of mind-boggling. Anyway, that's when everything turns to complete and at a shite. Soon enough, you find everything about that last day a lie, a well-crafted illusion more like, homemade trap you reliving the same day day after day. You've been reliving the same day for three weeks now, but why would your brother, Alex, you, consent to that? Indeed, you. How about you? This you thing is getting really confusing. I see what you're doing there, developers, but making my life more difficult. You know, what follows next is an attempt to discover what's happening to you and how the space station came to be overrun by the bloody typhon. It's a puzzle and one you take your time piecing together. Who's January, the mysterious voice on the intercom who saves your life, who guides you, who helps you, the only one who's willing to give you any kind of answers and just where is your brother hiding? Why is he going to all the trouble of hiding certain information from you, trying to keep you in the dark? Why? Why would your brother do that? And most important of all, are there any other survivors? The first few hours capture you and don't let go for some time. With a psychological element to the story that promises a lot. Does it deliver? Not quite, to a point it does. But as I said, the middle really quite muddles through. There's something about it and something about the later parts of the story. It feels rushed. Almost as if Arcane didn't quite have enough time on their hands, in which knowing Bethesda is not entirely impossible. Now we're getting into more spoilers here. January, it turns out, is an operator made by you, voiced by you in a moral compass who will judge your actions according to who you used to be three weeks ago. January, so to a proponent of you getting two arm and keys and using them to blow up the station to make sure the typhoon threats being destroyed. What you've decided to do so is entirely up to you. You're free to kill or destroy every character you meet, changing the course of the story as you do it, obviously. Over here, you from the simulation. Second task was to make sure you saw your video. Self-destruct protocol for Talos I is activated by two arming keys. Your brother has the first. You had the second. Alex destroyed your arming key. But you hit a fabrication plan for a new one in deep storage. It's time to beat the magic game. Throughout your journey, you'll meet several supporting characters, some of whom I liked, some of whom I didn't care much about at all. First and foremost, the Neil Show, the most Banner's chief archivist you'll ever meet, voiced by Mae Whitman, who brings a take no shit attitude to the character. She's probably the most developed character besides Alex Yu, since you'll spend some time in crew quarters looking for her voice recordings in order to gain access to deep storage, which she was basically in charge of. My only complaint about her is that she disappears midway through the game without much of an explanation at all. The one and only time you meet her is through a few inches of thick glass, while Show is in space. Other supporting characters include Mikaila, with whom you had a romantic past, Funboy and scientist Dr. Igwe and Sarah Eleazar, the security chief and person responsible for dragging about a dozen people to safety in Cargo Bay B, also a person most likely to have a stick up her arse. A lot of the story isn't explicit, not in the sense that someone will talk to you for hours and hours carrying exposition. No, a lot of what's happening in Talos is spread out through hidden compartments on computers that are most easily accessible via the hacking, new remotes and consecutive minigame. It's the many characters, most of them dead now, whose stories are the most interesting. You'll spend over half the game alone finding bits of information, audio logs about scientists and personnel on the station, which when put together reveal tapestry of connections between most of them. One of my favorite things are the Dungeons and Dragons-esque characters sheets you can discover in the crew courses does really quite adorable, adding to the feeling of this world as something breeding and self-contained, and not just a sandbox for you to play in. Mind-blowing, unexpected and very welcome after some underwhelming scripted scenes depending on what you decide to do. Empathy Quotient shows to be exceptionally high. It probably thinks it was dreaming and nothing mattered. It thinks like us. It's life depends on it, ours too. It all comes down to the choices it made. It saved me if I would have suffocated otherwise and later it recovered the like-naked neptomes. They were of no practical use, deeply meaningful to me. It installed multiple typhoon-based neuromods. It could mean an instinctive return to its own kind, or an attempt to integrate its two natures, but its most surprising act was sparing dark, while perhaps for purely selfish reasons, this, at least in principle, enabled others to escape Daloswai. M'kayla. I would have died without my medication. That wasn't easy. That says a lot, I think, about its heart. Can I say that it has a heart? Then, there was a man in psychotronics, Ingram, that was cruel. There was no other way to see it. Would you let it live? Sarah, you're next. The situation in the cargo bay was bad. None of us would have survived without its help, and it destroyed a large number of typhoon across the station. That has to be a good sign. Further, it forwarded Dalos' attempt to use us as hostages. If it were one of my officers, I would give it the commendation. Danielle, what do you say? It found me. It didn't need to, but it did. By then, it had already stopped Volunteer 37. Hard to say why. A lot of humans controlled by the typhoon ended up dead. Not that it was easy to avoid, but I think it's worth the risk. In the end, it chose to destroy Daloswai. Why? To protect her, we can't really know what its motives were for anything it did. But we have to make a choice. You can't hear us, can't you? Here. I wanna show you something. What you experienced was a reconstruction based on Morgan's memories. This is the wall today. We spent years trying to put what you can do into us. We never tried putting what we can do into you. Until now, you're the bridge between our species. I need to know if you see us. I mean, really, see us. There's a lot of promise to that scene. The promise of what could be a genuinely exciting sequel if Bethesda decides to go with it. I left this section for last. Because I believe it's important to look at the relationship between the youth siblings through the knowledge that this entire experience has been a simulation. First of all, it's very interesting that nearly every employee aboard Talos 1 has a bone to pick with Morgan, but even more importantly with Alex. Now, there's two explanations of this. Either the youths are really quite the pieces of work. Not surprising, since it's Morgan and Alex's parents that give Dal the order to exterminate everyone on board of Talos. The other explanation is more complex, but I quite like it. I had found it strange that all these employees felt such vitriol and downright hate for Alex. But it wasn't until I watched Joseph Anderson's pray, a critique of the mind game that I heard this theory. Here goes, what if Alex made sure that the simulation will paint humans in the best light possible? It's unlikely that so many people on Talos wouldn't know what's happening. Damn unbelievable, even. The experiments in psychotronics, what if more people were all right with what was going down there? Using prisoners to experiment on in order to understand the nature of the typhoon organisms. What would this creature that are revealed to be think of this? No, Morgan and Alex are painted as scapegoats and that, I believe, is quite likely. They're painted with these Machiavellian designs and a morality that is like nothing we see from other characters. The figures we see on screen are entirely different from the ones you hear about from the employees, from their audio logs, from the emails. Alex is, if anything, too cautious, too careful. He gives the impression of a thoughtful, introverted person. Not a kind one, but not a cruel one either. He let himself be convinced by Morgan of all people to go ahead with this entire ground experiment. And Morgan himself, while ambitious, certainly doesn't seem evil. The Morgan of before, I mean, not the Morgan of you. At one point, Alex tells Morgan he broke his arm for deleting some game's save files. That might have happened, but I remain unconvinced. It seems just to reinforce this vision of Morgan and Alex's a lot more unlikable than they might have been in reality. I also quite enjoyed one moment in particular, if you sneak into Alex's office before he's invited you in. Hacking was matter of course in my first playthrough when I had invested heavily into the ability. Come my second playthrough, however, and having seen the post-credits ending once already, I really think that's a tiny hint that something's not quite right with Morgan. On account of him having the knowledge to hack long before he used his first neuromod. And neuromods, as I have mentioned before, don't ever remove knowledge and memories from before the time you started using and then decided to remove a previous neuromod. It's just between these two points in time that your memories are completely removed. Really, I like this bond between the siblings and it's, I think, the strongest part, the pushing force of the story. I wish they did more of it because at times it felt a bit too rushed. For example, never being able to go to Alex's hideout, even though I knew where it was in the second playthrough, it shows that Prey isn't quite ready to let you take full control of the wheel. They still don't let you craft your way, your own way all the way through. And that's a pity. It's a lost opportunity, I think. It's time to beat the mad game. Prey isn't optimised too well, going between 45 and 55 frame rates per second on medium. My laptop is fairly aged, so expected lesser performance. But when I'm playing Wolfenstein II, the new classes, and I get between 60 and 80 FPS, I find myself surprised at Prey's performance. There have been some minor bows other than that, but none that's readily come to mind. It's time to beat the mad game. I brought up a lot of Prey's negatives, the game's less shiny aspects to the front during this video. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy my time with it. In fact, Prey is one of my favourite games of 2017, and I once soon forget Tell Us One's mysteries, the difficult decisions I've faced in my two playthroughs, and the enjoyment I got out of the 35 hours spent with this game. There's more to be done too, and I'm sure I'll eventually revisit the empty hallways and laboratories of this spectacular space station. The post-ending credits scene makes a promise of a potential and ambitious sequel, whether that project will see the light of day or has been canned by Prey's. Unfortunately, less than the stellar performance on the market, I can't say. But I do hope it will be, because this alternate history world very much deserves more time to shine, and maybe a name change, eh? We wouldn't want to confuse everyone again. Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please like it, smash that like button, subscribe, don't forget to subscribe, it means a lot, it keeps me going, and I really, really enjoy having more subscribers. It's kind of a badge I pin on my chest, straight on the chest, not on the t-shirt. I just pin it right in my flesh, and yes, share it with your friends. Why don't ya? See you next time, bye.