What's in a name? The world we live in is defined by names. We give ourselves names so that we may have identity; we give other things names so that we may know them. Some names have power; sometimes, a name means more than just a label. For reasons beyond that which I can fathom, Human Head Studios' 2006 game Prey, a linear sci-fi shooter running on the Doom 3 engine with a weird, vaguely appropriative plotline involving Native American legend, was something of a cult hit. I personally wasn't terribly impressed by it: aside from the occasional use of portals (an idea put to much better use the following year by Valve's appropriately-named puzzler Portal) there just wasn't much to write home about. But when Human Head announced a sequel, a more overtly sci-fi adventure, people got excited; lots of names were bandied about, like Red Dead Redemption; but despite a steady trickle of news updates about the game, it quickly ran into development issues, blew past its projected release dates, and was ultimately canceled in 2014.
Fast forward three years. Almost by surprise, Arkane Studios, which had made a name for itself with Dishonored, announced and released their new game: Prey. A stunningly good sci-horror immersive sim in the vein of System Shock 2, it was fresh, it was beautiful-looking, building on the foundations left by the greats that came before it, a genuine answer to BioShock to prove that an immersive sim doesn't have to strip itself down to sell to a wide audience. There was just one problem: weird nerds were mad that it was called Prey.
I don't really have hard evidence to prove it with, but it's my belief that the cult following that sprung up around Prey 2's development played a major role in Prey 2017 not doing as well as it could. I remember when Arkane's game was fresh, and seemingly every article about it had multiple dorks in the comments complaining that it wasn't Prey 2. I don't think I have to tell you how the people who hate something the most will often control the conversation around whatever that something is, from the way people who don't like horror movies are constantly trying to redefine the genre to justify the movies they do like, to transphobes forcing everyone to discuss transgender issues under their distorted framing. In my observation, the same is true for Prey 2017.
But what even is Arkane's Prey?
Prey is a first person, sci-fi survival horror immersive sim, set aboard the Talos I, a space station in orbit around the Moon. Talos I serves as a semi-clandestine research hub for TranStar, a biotech firm in the year 2035. Somewhat resembling a large office tower, complete with marble flooring in the lobby and utilities and logistics sequestered off in their own sections, Talos I is the current site for research of neuromods, injectable body mods that confer information scanned from peoples' brains to provide their knowledge, such as musical talent or language skills. This technology is derived from a mysterious alien species known as the Typhon, which hitched a ride on a Soviet satellite in 1959 (and indirectly triggered a major divergence in the timeline in which JFK survived his assassination attempt and went on to go all-in on the space program, allowing the United States to dominate in the Cold War, and the Soviet Union, unable to keep up, is eventually forced to ask its hated enemy the Americans for help restoring order to the collapsing Soviet hegemony.) You play Morgan Yu, whose gender is the player's choice (the promotional and official art all suggests a man; I exclusively play Morgan female.) Yu's family more or less runs TranStar, with Morgan's older brother Alex in charge of Talos I and Morgan running the science end of things. After an introductory sequence that challenges assumptions of the player's reality almost from the jump, Morgan is left alone and amnesiac as the Typhon rages throughout the station.
I mentioned earlier that it was walking in the footsteps of System Shock 2; though it mostly lifts the overall structure of System Shock while doing very much its own thing. It's rather more open than any of the *Shock games, often playing more like a first person metroidvania in that once you've made it out of the first area, you more or less have the run of the station, and you'll unlock areas one by one as you run down tasks. Once you get a helmet, you'll actually be able to leave the station entirely and go spacewalking; provided you stay within range of the station's magnetosphere, you'll be able to explore the station and the occasional bit of debris or abandoned shuttle surrounding it. Airlocks must be activated from within, but they serve as a means of quickly travelling from one end of the station to the other.
Gameplay should be fairly familiar to *Shock fans. As you progress, you'll collect neuromods, which you can spend to unlock new passive or active abilities, such as being able to hack more things or jump higher. Unlocking Typhon abilities opens up whole new lines of play styles, with fantastic powers such as being able to disable a Typhon's ability to attack you, or copy their notorious ability to mimic things, turning yourself into things like a coffee cup. The tradeoff is that security turrets will eventually see you as a threat, requiring you to either destroy them, hijack them with a Typhon ability, or hack them. Most every door has a corresponding control panel where you can lock or unlock them. The story is told through a combination of audiologs, emails on peoples' computers, and dialogue from what few people are still alive on the station.
The Typhon are, at least at a glance, all pretty samey, with just a few archetypal forms. All seem to be made up of living shadow, making for an enemy roster that isn't typically visually diverse. The basic one is the Mimics, the notorious little bastards who can turn themselves into coffee mugs and spring at your face without warning. Phantoms are humanoid creatures, most of which seem to have been formed from corpses laying around, that move fast and can hit you with psychic blasts, or worse. Weavers are formless blobs that float through the air and slowly spread coral, glowing golden filaments that eventually come to cover the whole station. Telepaths and technopaths are large floating Typhons that control people and machines, respectively. And so on. There are other threats too, like rogue turrets, possessed Operators (faceless flying robots that serve as assistants in a variety of fields) and hostile humans, most of whom are under thrall of a Telepath.
The cool thing about Prey is that its various abilities and the overall design of the station lets you find your own solutions to stuff. Can't hack that door panel? Maybe you can use the GLOO gun (a gun that shoots globs of quick-drying space cement) to build a stairway to a maintenance panel nearby. Need to find a particular character? Look them up on a security monitor and let the game navigate you to their tracking bracelet. It's as imsim-y as any game Arkane's ever made; it was the game that made me think, wow, maybe Arkane is the new Looking Glass; to a lesser extent, sometimes I look at their games' overall aesthetics and vibes and wonder if they might not be the new (pre-2007) Valve, too.
The world of Arkane's Prey is pretty interesting. Aside from the alt-history stuff, technology seems to have developed weirdly, with big reel-to-reel machines working alongside flatscreen monitors. There's a profoundly 1960s/1970s aesthetic to the whole station, a particular architectural style that ingame magazines refer to as "Neo-Deco." Honestly it all just looks like Syd Mead designed the sets for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
While Prey was a moderate success, enough that it got a DLC titled Mooncrash that cashed in on the roguelike craze, it wasn't as successful as maybe Arkane would have liked. And maybe the name is to blame; when Human Head's game was canceled, Bethesda wound up assigning the name to Arkane, wanting to make some money off the name. Arkane threw out most of Human Head's work and instead just applied the name to their existing project. And weird nerds have never gotten over it. But I gotta be honest: Prey 2006 just wasn't that good, babes. Prey 2 was never going to be much better. This is Human Head we're talking about, a company with a quite frankly very middling development history. However you might feel about the Prey name getting "robbed," the fact remains that Arkane's reputation as a developer is justified.
But you know what? None of this really matters. The game is nearly a decade old at this point, and while it definitely doesn't get the attention it deserves, I still think it holds up really well, despite ages-long loading times (which also plagued Dishonored 2) and a difficulty ramp that goes up really fast in the last few hours of the game. Arkane's Prey might better have been called NeuroShock or whatever, but it nevertheless lives up to the Arkane name.
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