DLCwolf Prey Review

Prey starts off very well—brilliantly, in fact—but rather quickly loses its edge and appeal, due to a poorly blended mix of gameplay details, narrative development, and game mechanics. The result is a lingering sense of frustration and disappointment, as if something with great potential slipped through the cracks. The strongest part of the game is definitely the beginning: a brilliant sequence that turns out to be a cleverly constructed deception, leaving us with the tension and excitement of discovering a reality that completely contradicts everything we thought we had just experienced. It feels a bit like the first episode of The Walking Dead, or the opening of 28 Days Later, where the protagonist wakes up to find that the world around them has collapsed into chaos. In this case, what we had just "played" was fake—a simulation. We discover we’re in some kind of space-age Truman Show, with the added twist that the simulation station—Talos I—has just been devastated by an alien attack, or an experiment gone wrong… or maybe something else entirely. And here comes the first problem: after hours of exploration, as we slowly uncover the architecture and organization of the station (truly well designed, with a logical layout of living quarters, reactors, labs, hangars, command centers, HR, sales and marketing, recreation…), the main narrative begins to unravel. The plot direction becomes increasingly unclear. At one point, I thought the central theme was the question of consciousness: are we truly still ourselves after having had our memory reset? But even that gets lost. The relationship with our brother—who initially seems to be the main antagonist or perhaps complicit in the disaster—shifts multiple times. Is he the enemy? An ally? Just another ambiguous piece on an already opaque chessboard? But what is that chessboard, really? The final twist—which can be partially foreshadowed by unlocking certain optional endings—comes only after the credits. And at that point I thought: Wait, what? A finale that left me with more questions than answers, and a sense of logical incoherence that’s hard to reconcile: too many disconnected subplots, too many unresolved but crucial story threads. You don’t need to explain everything, but at least tell me who I really am, how I got there, why, and how my memory was taken—these are key questions left suspended in a completely new reality. But the problem isn’t only the narrative: the gameplay mechanics are also quite uneven. The enemies, while initially fascinating and terrifying, soon become repetitive and lack variety. Always the same, always elusive, and eventually easy to overpower. Character upgrades through Neuromods aren’t well balanced: some are essential, others absolutely useless. From the very beginning, the game encourages you to compulsively collect every object you can carry to feed the recycler, which produces ammo, materials, and more Neuromods. But this mechanic quickly becomes a tedious routine: emptying drawers, looting desks, picking up junk—a never-ending scavenger hunt to craft resources. And it’s unclear why only certain items can be recycled: cups, trinkets, small objects you can throw but not pick up are excluded. This leads to an imbalance in resources: metal is always lacking, while organic material is abundant but mostly useless. Weapons are few, offer little variation, and feel weak without mandatory upgrades. What’s truly baffling is how the game completely fails to indicate that your actions have consequences. Only after the credits do you find out that saving or killing humans, completing side missions, or choosing human versus Typhon abilities significantly affects the outcome. But during the game, there is no communication of this. A player focused solely on the main storyline, perhaps skipping side content, might end up being judged negatively at the end—without ever realizing there was any moral evaluation going on. And the questions keep piling up: who exactly are the Typhon? Where did they come from? What do they want? Who are we, really? In the end, everything is reduced to a kind of simulation within a simulation, with no real attempt to provide coherent meaning to what we’ve experienced. You can’t help but wonder: So why did I play all this? The only element that truly works is the setting: Talos I is fascinating, coherent, and believable. But that alone isn’t enough to carry a game that’s too long, with clunky mechanics, and a storyline that starts strong but derails, trying to merge too many elements into a chaotic whole. Even the character stories, presented only through emails and scattered audio logs, become tiresome—especially because of the overwhelming number of secondary and tertiary characters, most of whom are irrelevant. It feels like wandering through a corporate office building and reading every employee’s computer, trying to piece together their personal lives. It becomes more of a chore than a pleasure, and ends up flooding the game with too many plotlines, some more engaging than others. Prey is a game I would only recommend to die-hard sci-fi fans who don’t want to miss any title in the genre. The first 10 hours are intriguing, full of mystery and atmosphere, but all the flaws described weigh the experience down and break immersion. It’s also excessively long: every time the story seems close to wrapping up, a new problem or twist is introduced, artificially extending the game and making it feel almost tedious. If I had to give it a score, I’d say 6–. It barely passes thanks to a well-crafted sci-fi setting and a captivating introduction. But the rest—a bloated and confused plot, tedious mechanics, and underwhelming game design—weighs it down too much.