YMMV / Prey (2017)

• Adorkable: In addition to her geeky interests, Abigail is hilariously easy to troll, as exemplified when Danielle briefly tricks her into thinking she's massively violated station protocol before revealing it was just a gag to set up asking her out. Comes back to bite her later, when she shows no hesitation in trusting the Chef.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Was Alex right to experiment with the Typhon? It's obviously incredibly dangerous, unethical and risks drawing their attention (and the experiments did result in the outbreak on Talos I), but given the possibility that they may eventually find their way to earth regardless was it worth the risk to learn more about their ecology and ensure that mankind is prepared?
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Nightmare can be reduced to one by a properly equipped player or exploiting AI quirks. While they are exceptionally fast and do massive damage with their attacks, they're near to Glass Cannons in practice. A fully upgraded shotgun with all the relevant weapon upgrades combined with fully-upgraded Combat Focus can kill one with only 3-4 shots at close range before it gets a chance to do anything, making it reasonable to farm them for neuromod materials.
  • Dahl is nowhere as intimidating as his minions. In fact, you can remove him as a threat with a single, fully charged Stun Gun blast, which you should have a fairly well upgraded one by the point of the game you find him. He'll even be facing a wall in one scenario for an easy sneak attack, making him the least threatening hostile being in the game.
  • The Apex Typhon. While it's technically the biggest, most powerful Typhon in the game...you don't actually get to fight it, only the tentacles it sprouts on Talos I. Even then, said tentacles can't be killed and can only be repelled, only serving as a stage hazard for the very final portion of the game. It borders on Cutscene Boss.
• Awesome Music: With Mick Gordon aboard, many people got interested in the soundtrack, and it is awesome indeed. Pretty much the entire soundtrack is this, in fact. Among tracks of note:
  • The opening credits track,“Everything Is Going to Be Ok”, is a very catchy Synthwave beat that gets you excited for the beginning of the game.
  • “Mind Game”, composed by Audio Director Matt Piersall and Raphael Colantonio, is a very catchy tune, especially for something that only plays in the alarm clock and the credits.
  • "The Phantoms" is a tense Industrial track that outright tells you there is no time to mess around.
  • "Semi-Sacred Geometry", a song played to gain voice samples from Danielle Sho is a fantastic techno song. This version is from the game with a female singer, while this is from the soundtrack with two male singers. Both are excellent.
  • "Human Elements". The melody is solemn and sad, and it being played during particularly emotional moments (such as coming face-to-face with Danielle Sho for the one and only time) can easily turn any of those scenes into Tear Jerkers.
  • "Into the Tunnels", with its heavy, trippy bass, that plays when you first enter the GUTS. Behold also its extended version (which is sadly not on the soundtrack).
  • "Alex Theme" is just one giant Tear Jerker from beginning to end.
  • The unfortunately unreleased "Last Request" plays at key emotional moments throughout the game, lacking the synthy punch of the rest of the soundtrack, leaving it a particularly beautiful, peaceful standout piece.
• Demonic Spiders: It would be easier to list what isn't a demonic spider.
  • The three variants of the Phantom, which amp up every bad about the original and add effects that are even worse.
    • Etheric Phantoms can double themselves to fight you, Flash Step much more often than the standard variant, and release a damaging cloud of mist on death. If you can't kill one right off the bat, you're in for a bad time.
    • Thermal Phantoms create a thermal geyser under your feet at regular intervals as long as they know you're around, and this attack does not need a line of sight to target you. This forces you to be constantly on the move. Melee is also out of the question, as they do constant heat damage if you close in.
    • Voltaic Phantoms are by far the worst. They release constant electricity which disables everything in range (including your guns), damages power conduits to create environmental hazards, and electrify metal surfaces and puddles of water, all of which makes getting close to them a death sentence. If you're too far away, they fire a damaging lightning ball that homes in on you. Finally, they're much tougher than the other two. This does at least come at a cost: they are the only variant that do not Flash Step or even run, just methodically march toward you, and are vulnerable to EMP in addition to a Phantom's usual weaknesses to psychic attacks and nullwave.
  • Weavers are a form of Typhon that float and drops several Cystoids to charge at you and explode. What makes them jarring is their ability to cause Interface Screw once their shield is down. Thankfully, it is alleviated with a Psychoscope chip that makes you immune to fear effects, or drinking alcohol while affected. Until then, however, it is advisable to avoid them, or come prepared.
  • The Nightmare is a deliberate demonic spider that appears from time to time and is one of the most powerful enemies in the game, made specifically to hunt the Player Character. It's reasonably fast, will launch several slow-moving Area of Effect projectiles at the player when it cannot reach the player, and has a decent health pool. It will relentlessly chase the player until the timer is up, after which it will despawn if it cannot find the player. Its appearance means either hiding for a few minutes until it despawns or a whole lot of Typhon material if you can reliably kill it.
  • The Poltergeist is a Phantom variant that is completely invisible save for an aura whenever it uses a psychic ability. It can be in a room and you may never know it unless it chooses to speak or until you're attacked. By itself, it can be handled easily and is merely a goddamned bat, but when paired with other Typhons it becomes very dangerous as a support enemy.
  • Military Operators. They only show up in the final third of the game, and for good reason. They're well-armored, recover quickly from EMP blasts, and are armed with powerful beams that can chew up your suit and health within seconds. Making matters worse is that they always patrol in packs, and destroying them outright causes nearby operator dispensers to generate replacements.
  • Technopaths and Telepaths are very infrequently fought, and for good reason. Their basic attacks are intensely damaging and their abilities mean that taking one out almost always requires time spent removing whatever resources they've taken control of. They also have good defenses, and anything less than a powerful explosion does only negligible damage to them. Doubly so for Telepaths, because while Technopaths only have one attack you can evade fairly easily if you're mobile, Telepaths have ranged and close-quarters attacks to keep you on your toes.
  • Harvesters in Mooncrash. They are very slow robots, but they are extremely durable and their main way of attacking is by inhaling everything in front of them. If you're sucked in, you die instantly. The weird thing is that the non-corrupted ones are arguably more of a threat than the corrupted ones. While Corrupted ones chase you, the normal ones simply potter around and do their material-harvesting work without much of a pattern. This can easily result in you hearing their warning siren, abruptly being yanked sideways and killed instantly.
  • Mooncrash takes place on the moon... and thus there are Moon Sharks in the Crater. Step directly on the moon's surface, and they'll come to investigate - if they confirm your presence, they'll rapidly fling large rocks at you that cause massive damage and are almost guaranteed to inflict hemorrhages. They CAN be killed, but they won't go down easily because they resist most forms of damage. And don't think you're necessarily safe in the Moonworks...
  • Mooncrash also adds elemental Mimics, variations on Greater Mimics that spawn empowered like the three Phantom types. Here, however, they can still disguise themselves, leading to a nasty surprise when a Voltaic Mimic suddenly wakes up and starts shocking you.
• Difficulty Spike: In Mooncrash, the optional status ailments, weapon degradation, and oxygen meter from the main game are enabled by default. This is especially bad because the Moon Shark inflicts bleeding, which damages you for sprinting and jumping. The Corruption clock ramps ups enemy difficulty the longer you spend in game. There are randomized environmental hazards that force you to plan your run around which parts of the map need to be repaired first. Finally, unlike in the main game, there's much less logical progression of items and you're very likely to stumble upon a Weaver or Telepath without the weapons needed to put them down. However, this is mitigated to a degree by the fact that character progression is maintained between runs and sim points can be used to purchase necessary equipment as long as you've unlocked them. Even though the game gets progressively harder, you get to keep up with a better starting loadout.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • The finale of the main game is seen as this by some. It locks off many parts of the base which renders further exploration impossible, and the final boss, such as it is, cannot be conventionally fought, only avoided, and can only be destroyed by choosing which method by which you finish the game, which boils down to pressing a button on a terminal.
  • Mooncrash features an endlessly recycled version of the same level, in which you have to complete various objectives. As you complete objectives, new hazards and features are unlocked. While this would seem to indicate increasing difficulty, it in fact operates on more of a curve, steadily becoming more difficult until you reach a point where no new hazards unlock and your own skills have been upgraded to the point that winning is rather trivial. By this time you're finishing off the last few objectives, you have unlocked almost all the neuromods for the characters that you want to use, you know the layout, and the tasks that made the exits difficult (finding the piloting connectome for the shuttle, finding the volunteer for the brain upload) are already done and don't have to be redone. With proper preparation and usage of Hourglasses, it can be done almost by rote. The only catch is that the Hourglasses will result in significantly lower payouts of points at the end. While this is a negligible issue for those simply wanting to complete the game, playing the game at higher Corruption levels is beneficial for those going for the Galaxy Brain achievement (all Neuromod abilities unlocked on all characters) or those simply looking for high scores.
• Fanfic Fuel: The three years before the game begins and what happens as a result of the many ending combinations are ripe for this.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Recycler Charges. They're plentiful if you save them for the right situations, and easy to make once you get the blueprint. A few well-placed charges can take out most enemies, up to and including the Nightmares. They can also be used to bypass some obstacles that would otherwise require the Leverage ability, allowing you to save your neuromods for other useful upgrades. The only trade-off is that you won't get any of the loot the Phantom type enemies carry if you kill them with one.
  • The Disruptor Stun Gun is kind of a joke at first, being that it takes forever to charge, has crappy range, only stuns for a couple seconds, and doesn't have much punch against the foes it does damage. Put some effort into upgrading it, though, and it will put down Blackbox Operators in a couple hits and stun even the largest Typhon for around 10 seconds, allowing you to beat them to death with impunity. Combine that with the Sneak Attack Neuromods, and the Disruptor becomes an important addition to your arsenal.
  • The Disruptor is even more broken in the Mooncrash DLC. While it's still effective against corrupted Operators, its main usage is temporarily disabling Typhon Gates, which block a door if Typhon are detected about, and will detect you as Typhon if you have enough Typhon neuromods installed. Being able to go right past the shield without having to fight all the Typhon around you — saving time, health and real weapon ammo — is a huge bonus for a mode where every second matters, and is more or less required for characters that can't disable the gates on their own when fully modded (Vijay is the only character who will never trip the sensor, Joan has Typhon-based electrical damage, and Andrius can burrow under them).
  • The Leverage neuromod upgrade. Having it at level three will allow you to pick up huge objects for throwing at Typhons. It does a whopping 100+ damage with every throw and sends the poor Typhon flying to the ground, allowing you to pick up the object and throw it at them again. If you manipulate the object for it to become horizontal, you can launch multiple high-level Typhons to the ground with one throw. To top it all off, Leverage requires no psi to use, giving you an extremely powerful damage ability with unlimited use.
  • The Psychostatic Cutter from Mooncrash. While it does not have the raw damage of an equivalent-rarity Wrench, its charged attack sends out a psychic missile attack if you have 20 Psi available, which is the bare minimum once the auto-regeneration kicks in. This projectile can pierce some solid objects, and can nullify the attacks of certain enemies and cause them to flee, and as it hits with both the physical weapon and the bolt, it can oneshot enemies quite often. What makes it even better is that an Elite version is guaranteed to spawn within Pytheas Labs, and this one can be easily Reverse Engineered by Joan, making it possible to mass produce in a Fabricator or add to your loadout in the ready room. It is also highly likely to be found/spawned/created with the Electric Damage modifier, so it can be used to shut down Typhon gates with a single strike, which makes it an invaluable speedrunning tool. As icing on the cake, it is one of the few items that does not have Durability, meaning it is reliable and even more likely to hit the Electric mod.
  • Multiple Mooncrash items work together to break the ever-increasing difficulty of the simulation.
    • Delay_Loop.Time (the Time-Hourglasses that reduce Corruption). You can find multiple through basic exploration and loot them off of high-tier Typhon (all enemies stronger than Phantoms), and can also find or reverse-engineer a template, allowing you to craft it in-simulation as well as buy a supply on loadout for relatively inexpensive 2,500 game-points. This almost nullifies the corruption timeclock, as you can keep the corruption at level 2 almost indefinitely. This does, however, vastly reduce the points you get for completing tasks.
    • The Mule Operator breaks any remaining difficulty, as you can use it to store accumulated items, breaking the inventory management restriction. Better still, it also shifts items between characters, so the "take it or leave it for the next character" decision becomes a "take everything and just give the mule the best stuff before your exit".
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Mimics are a constant nuisance throughout the game, able to disguise as anything, and become push-overs once you acquire the psychoscope. However, Greater Mimics cannot be detected without a specific chip you may never find, and may disguise as more complex machinery such as turrets.
  • Cystoids are especially annoying while travelling through the G.U.T.S. Better hope you have that seemingly useless Huntress Boltcaster to shoot one of them, or some objects to throw at them, otherwise they will chase you, explode in your face, and likely give you radiation poisoning.
  • Broken electrical panels. While it's usually simple to avoid them, it's all too easy to accidentally get caught in their "attack" radius. This stuns the player and takes off a hefty junk of health, leaving it possible to get stun locked to death. Especially irritating as they're often placed in areas where the player must go. It's well worth it to get the Neuromod upgrade that allows you to repair them. Or just use the GLOO gun for a temporary fix.
  • Tenatcle Nests in Mooncrash are easy to miss because they only react to movement, don't give any warning to their presence, and can do a fair amount of damage if their tentacles catch you. While easy enough to kill if you spot them, they can be annoying to hit with guns because active tentacles will often shield the main body unless you aim nearly at the base.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The infamous recycler glitch, wherein putting already-recycled materials into the recycler's bin and then splitting the pile produces a net gain of materials. Once the appropriate fabrication plans are found, you can essentially create infinite items. The bug was sadly patched in v1.02.
  • If an environmental explosion you caused kills a human NPC, it doesn't count as a death for the "Do No Harm" achievement. This is an important bit to know if you knock out the impostor cook before he kills himself at the end of Danielle Sho's quest since rendering him unconscious isn't enough.
  • It's rare, but possible for a Nightmare to show up, at most, once or twice besides its initial scripted scene, and then never appear again no matter what.
  • As demonstrated in Summer Games Done Quick 2019, it's possible to clip through the escape pod walls by using the glue gun, ending the game in about ten minutes.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Just like Fire Emblem: Awakening, the game gets around having to change too much dialogue by using the Gender-Blender Name Morgan.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: In Mooncrash, Riley's Story mission is trivial. It only has one objective, takes place entirely in the Crater control room, and the only required item is Control Nodes, which you can easily loot from the power conduits downstairs. You can complete it in two minutes with only a minimal amount of combat at worst, and it's practically impossible to die doing it. It's neat from a story perspective and enables the use of the Typhon-killing perimeter defenses, but it's by far the weakest of the character storylines due to how short it is. Since the benefit for completing it is minimal, it is often suggested that people save it as the last KASMA objective, in order to avoid crossing the Point of No Return.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Thanks to their ability, calling any object a Mimic (such as the Transtar coffee mug) or/and adding a "Not a Mimic" post-it note has become a common joke. Another one is calling the game Prop Hunt and jokingly asking a for a multiplayer mode like it. And now with the release of Mooncrash, that has come true.
  • "Not if I'm going to get my pee-pee slapped."^note Due to a severe glitch that occurs upon entering the Power Plant, causing an infinite loop of the audio recording of the conversation between Connolly and Brooks to play. This happens even after you've left the Power Plant and moved to a different area of Talos I, and can only be fixed by quitting the game and reloading your save file.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The clatter of processed materials falling into the output bin of the Recycler, and the clicky sound effect of picking them all up rapidly.
• Nightmare Retardant: In the demo, the mimics tend to just rush you instead of actually disguising themselves, making them feel like standard low-level FPS enemies instead of the Paranoia Fuel Station Attendants they're supposed to be. As a comment on a video of the demo states, "An hour of running around and killing spiders with a wrench. Thrilling." Mitigated in the game proper, where Mimics tend to behave unpredictably, sometimes attacking, sometimes running away to hide again, sometimes running away to run back in and sucker punch you when you think they're gone...
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The Typhon can mimic perfectly ordinary objects. You can find a way to detect them, but it's not foolproof...
  • Bad news: there is a more powerful variant of the Mimic that cannot be detected by the standard psychoscope upgrade. Good news: there is a separate upgrade that can detect and mark disguised Greater Mimics. Worse news: the upgrade is a Random Drop and so you're not guaranteed to find it in any given game. Better start praying you get lucky...
  • One of the things Mimics can disguise themselves as? Mimic corpses. There's nothing quite like beating down a swarm of Mimics, only for one of the ones you thought was dead to jump back up.
  • The reveal at the end of the opening segment that your day-to-day routine has been an elaborate lie in which your own brother is complicit. It may or may not make it worse that, according to one email, Morgan (i.e., you) deliberately wiped their own memories in order to do whatever it is Transtar is doing.
  • As discussed in the Demonic Spider entry above, being in the general vicinity of Harvesters is a constant source of discomfort. Given their seemingly random range of movement when non-corrupted, it makes every time you hear the warning siren a massive moment of panic as you try to figure out where it came from to prevent you from getting instantly killed.
• Replacement Scrappy: A common complaint towards this game is that it was released instead of the eagerly anticipated sequel to the 2006 game this game took its title from, and many fans of that game were infuriated that this game had no relation whatsoever to its namesake. This has died down a bit towards the game's release, but some still express the sentiment, and thankfully all the ire is directed towards Bethesda, who forced the name on the project and purely out of spite towards Human Head Studios (as far as anyone knows) for daring to resist their strong-arming tactics to take full control of the studio (much like what happened to Arkane themselves).
• Separated by a Common Language: "Morgan" is essentially unheard of as a female name in Britain, which can lead to its use as a unisex one here coming off as a bit contrived.
• So Bad, It's Good: The "Starbender" series found scattered throughout the station are cringingly bad sci-fi novels, but are so obviously riffing on B-movie-style sci-fi of yesteryear that they're entertaining and hilarious.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • The combination of survival horror, a setting that combines technology and exotic art deco design, and a protagonist that is capable of attacking with modern weaponry and psychic powers makes this basically a first person Parasite Eve.
  • The Typhon threat has many similarities to the Philip K. Dick story Second Variety, in some ways closer to the film adaptation Screamers: Humans are fighting a losing battle highly adaptive non-human threat. It manages to break through attempts to quarantine it and is unwittingly transported across space disguised as something innocuous.
  • There are also many comparisons made to Bioshock, both in setting and story (an isolated locale with an art deco aesthetic that has fallen to catastrophe, a protagonist with altered memory who communicates with others largely through radio) and gameplay (a shooter that involves extensive exploration and resource management, and combat that includes modding yourself using dubious technology to gain special powers, as well as the prevalence of audio logs, hacking minigames, and door codes).
• That One Achievement:
  • "No Needles" and "Split Affinity" collectively require the player to complete the game three mutually-exclusive times: once with no neuromods ("No Needles"), once with only human neuromods, and once with only Typhon neuromods (both for "Split Affinity"). However, there's an easy way to get them all in one go: collect a few neuromods without using them, play through the game, and save just before the end. Complete it with no neuromods, reload the save, unlock a human or Typhon power, finish the game again, then reload again, and repeat for the other kind of power.
  • "Dear Future Self", for listening to all of Morgan's TranScribes. Mainly because the last one is only available in a situation where you're really not thinking about looking for audio logs (the Apex's first attack on Talos), and if you choose to drag Alex to his safe room and lock the door before listening to it, you can't get it again.
  • The description for "I and It" explains that the player has to kill every human on and around Talos I. What this specifically means is that the player has to personally kill every living human in the game that can be killed. "Personally" is the important word there: you have to deliver the killing blow yourself. Mind-controlled humans forced into killing themselves in the process of harming you does not count, which usually necessitates stunning them unconscious and then finishing them off. Humans killed by other enemies or environmental hazards also don't count, such as when mind-controlled humans walk through the Gym's gas pipes. If you miss even one knocked-out human, they will despawn and lock you out of the achievement. The game likewise doesn't count indirect means of killing people such as releasing a Mimic into the volunteer's chamber in Psychotronics, with the exception of blowing up the escape pod with two people trapped inside, since you can't reach them otherwise. By the same token, the imposter cook killing himself with the recycler grenade also locks you out of the achievement]]. The only person you're allowed to spare is the one you can't reach: Danielle Sho. It is one of the rarest achievements for that reason, being ten times rarer than its opposite "I and Thou" achievement.
  • "Three-Body Problem" in Mooncrash requires immobilizing three enemies with a single GLOO charge. This is obnoxious for a number of reasons. First, you have to get three enemies to gather in one place, which is difficult to pull off on lower Corruption levels. Second, you have to manage to hit all three of them, which is harder than it sounds because the GLOO charge isn't terribly accurate and only has a range of a couple meters. Finally, unlike the companion achievement "Psychostatic Efficiency", you can't use Cystoids as a cheap workaround because they are killed in the process. You can, however, GLOO three hostile turrets, assuming you're lucky enough to have three spawn in the same section.