Prey (2017 video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Prey, the 2017 first-person shooter made by Arkane Austin and published by Bethesda Softworks, opens by lying to the player about where they are. You wake up as Morgan Yu in an apartment in 2035, and within minutes you learn the apartment is a simulation. Three years of your own memory have vanished.

  The real setting is Talos I, a research station orbiting the Moon, and the alien Typhon have broken out of containment. Armed at first with a wrench, Morgan has to survive, work out who did this, and decide how the station's story ends.

  Several questions run underneath that setup. Why does this game carry a name that its own creators resented? How do you build a station where almost every problem has more than one answer? And why did a game that grew more admired with time still change the direction of the studio that made it?

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• 2. An Alternate Space Race

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  In 1958, the Soviet Union met a eusocial alien species aboard its satellite Vorona 1. The aliens were the Typhon. Moscow and Washington chose to fight and capture them together, and they kept the whole matter from their own populations. Their joint prison was a station called Kletka, placed in orbit around the Moon.

  The partnership broke down after a failed assassination attempt on President John F. Kennedy. Afterward, the United States took full control of Kletka. American research went on under the name Project Axiom until the Pobeg Incident of 1980, when Typhon killed some of the scientists aboard. Washington shut the project down but left the captive Typhon alive.

  In 2025, the newly founded TranStar Corporation acquired Kletka. By 2030 it had refitted the station as Talos I, a fully working laboratory for studying the Typhon and pushing neuroscience forward. That research produced Neuromods, which draw on Typhon physiology to restructure the human brain and give users new abilities, some of them superhuman. Neuromod sales on Earth made TranStar rich.

  By about 2035, the company had expanded Talos I into proper living quarters. Staff stayed up to two years at a time, with regular shuttles linking them to Earth.

  Raphaël Colantonio, the game's director, first conceived the story on a flight. It then took roughly a year to build the alternate timeline, and the question behind it was how the future would look if Kennedy had survived.

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• 3. An Unwanted Title

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  In August 2006, the success of the first Prey game led to the announcement of Prey 2, with 3D Realms continuing development. The sequel never found stable ground. Ownership of the property passed to Bethesda Softworks under ZeniMax Media, and in 2011 the developer changed to Human Head Studios.

  Arkane Studios, meanwhile, finished Dishonored in 2012 and divided its team in two. One half would make Dishonored 2. The other, based in Austin, Texas under CEO and director Raphaël Colantonio, would create a new science fiction property. Its stated aim was a game "in first-person, with depth and simulation and narration".

  Human Head's game was cancelled in 2014. Bethesda then required Arkane to use the title Prey. The team called its project a re-imagining and said it had no link to the earlier games beyond aliens hunting the player. It used none of the cancelled sequel's assets.

  Colantonio said later that nobody on the team was pleased with the decision. They wanted their own property and were overruled by corporate choices at Bethesda. He called the naming "gross" and "disrespectful" to his team and to the creators of the original game.

  The real ancestor was System Shock, from 1994. Arkane also treated Talos I as a thematic reinterpretation of the underground dungeon from its first game, Arx Fatalis, released in 2002.

  Just before launch, the Prey name caused trouble for a much smaller studio. No Matter Studios renamed its game Prey for the Gods as Praey for the Gods after ZeniMax objected. ZeniMax said it had to defend the trademark or risk losing it.

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• 4. Everything Connects

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  Designer Ricardo Bare described Talos I as a "skyscraper floating in space". As a corporate experimental facility, it had to look functional and believable, with every room and utility a fully staffed workplace would need. There are no separate levels. Colantonio called the game an "open structure" and compared it to one long, self-contained mission in which players keep returning to the same areas.

  Colantonio wanted players to read the "full ecology" of the world to get past obstacles, from overpowered enemies to the station's collapsing infrastructure. Puzzles with a single answer, such as finding a key for a locked door, were avoided. So were climbable ladders. Bare admitted that freeform design was "tricky" because players can turn up anywhere regardless of progress, and fixing bugs became the team's biggest technical challenge.

  From Dishonored, Arkane kept the idea that players choose their own approach, plus a lore-filled world learned from notes and terminals, and a simple interface. Colantonio said Prey leaned less on stealth and more on role-playing upgrades through chipsets. The puzzle of failing systems came from FTL: Faster Than Light, and Bare called the result a "chaos of systems". Arkane also tried procedural generation in the main campaign, feared players would skip content, and saved the idea for later.

  The player's first weapon is a wrench, and ammunition stays scarce. Arkane reasoned that a research station's guards would carry only ordinary weapons such as pistols and shotguns. The advanced weapons were styled as flawed prototypes, drawing on Stanley Greenberg's book Time Machine and on a CERN database of experiments from the 1960s and 70s.

  The Gloo Cannon became the signature tool. Its foam freezes enemies in place and can be stuck to walls to build makeshift stairs. Console limits mean gloo must always attach to something in the world. An early mechanic that let players fly freely through the station was scrapped.

  A device called the Psychoscope scans the environment for Typhon. Scanning an alien lets Morgan learn and use its powers, which opened unexpected options. A small object could slip through narrow gaps, and a non-flammable one could roll through fire. Neuromods feed a skill tree that mixes human abilities, such as hacking, with alien powers. Those include lifting enemies, psychic blasts, short teleports, mimicking matter and taking over a mind. A Psi meter governs the cooldowns.

  The systems also interlock. Boltcaster bolts can trigger terminal touch screens, skills can be chained for devastating damage, and mimicking a robot lets Morgan essentially fly around the station.

  That power has a price. Inject too many alien Neuromods, and the station's defenses begin treating Morgan as an alien while a hunter called the Nightmare tracks the player down.

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• 5. Neo Deco and Shadows

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  Artist Sébastien Mitton called the look of Talos I "Neo Deco", a blend of futuristic ideas with mid-20th-century style. The team asked what architecture would have shaped the people running the station in each era. The answer was a layered mix. Retrofuturism from 1960s America sits beside the brutalism of the Soviet Bloc, and both sit beside opulent Art Deco added by wealthy TranStar executives. For the present day, the artists imagined how backers of modern commercial space ventures, such as Elon Musk or Google, would style a station.

  The entrance Lobby was the first location built. Its furnishings drew on Frank Lloyd Wright and Wilhelm Wagenfeld, while the in-game technology followed IBM and the consumer electronics designer Jacob Jensen. Other influences included architect Hugh Ferriss, painter John Berkey, early NASA spacecraft, the Viceroy hotel in New York, and unrealized projects such as South Ferry Plaza. The team plastered the station with TranStar posters, inspired by Ansgar Oswald's book "Offices Construction and Design Manual", which shows how corporate identity permeates a workplace.

  Harvey Smith of Arkane is credited with establishing the Typhon and the reason they exist. Arkane rejected insect-like or lizard-like aliens and chose designs inspired by paranormal ideas. Colantonio wanted the monsters black. The artists made them "visually undefined, mysterious, blurry", with their complexity carried by silhouette alone. Time-lapse photography of people in motion, especially Frederic Fontenoy's Metamorphosis series, shaped the look. Animators studied praying mantises, octopuses and squids.

  The Typhon have their own ecology. Cystoids rush the player and explode, Poltergeists turn invisible, and Telepaths unleash psychic attacks. Phantoms are human corpses taken over by the aliens, each with randomly generated powers. Mimics act as scouts and can merge into a larger variant called the Weaver. The Mimic took its name from a Dungeons & Dragons creature. It copies any object smaller than itself in the room, and its artificial intelligence picks the disguise without scripted events.

  The Nightmare owes its inspiration to the Alien in Alien: Isolation. Its psionic attacks can be nullified with throwables, which leaves it vulnerable.

  The score came from Mick Gordon, who had earlier composed the soundtrack for Doom (2016). Ben Crossbones, Matt Piersall and Colantonio each added a single track, and the soundtrack reached streaming services a week before launch.

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• 6. Trust Nothing

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  Inside Arkane, the project began under the name "Project Danielle", a nod to SHODAN from System Shock. Design documents describe three concepts, each centered on a character named Danielle Sho who discovers that her apparent world is false and deals with an artificial intelligence that steers events. The settings were a futuristic lab on Earth, a secret lab on a remote island, and a retro-futuristic world.

  The finished game keeps that distrust. The team built the opening as a fake tutorial to unsettle players from the start. Arkane held back on horror elements, since it could not predict where a player's attention would be. Colantonio preferred to call the game a "psychological thriller".

  In March 2032, Morgan's brother Alex recruits Morgan to TranStar's research team on Talos I. During pre-flight tests, a supervising doctor is attacked by a Typhon and Morgan is knocked out. Back in the present, an Operator AI named January explains the memory loss. Removing Neuromods erases every memory gained after they were installed, and Morgan and January had spent three years testing them. January says Morgan built it to destroy the station along with the Typhon and all the research. Alex proposes a special Nullwave device that would kill the Typhon and spare the station.

  Austin Grossman of Arkane helped set early plot details. Bare approached Chris Avellone around 2013, and Avellone worked on the story from June to about November 2016. He also helped design several non-player characters and the missions around them, which he felt created dilemmas that let players define their own Morgan. Because Talos I is small, Arkane gave every character a name and a background, even those already dead when the story begins. Books, notes and audio logs carry the lore. Players can ignore them, which Bare said made the station feel more real, and the game rarely cuts to non-interactive scenes.

  As the story unfolds, Morgan meets survivors and can choose whether to help them. Alex has Morgan scan the Typhon growth called Coral, which reveals a neural network. TranStar's board then sends a cleanup crew to kill both the Typhon and any surviving crew. Alex later concludes that the aliens are signaling something into deep space, and a gigantic Typhon called the Apex arrives to devour the station. Morgan must choose between self-destruction and the Nullwave device. Which ending follows depends on earlier choices, and the game falls into three major narrative structures.

  The film influences were Moon, Starship Troopers and The Matrix, and Bethesda partnered with the Alamo Drafthouse to screen all three in April 2017. Avellone also cited Aliens, whose comedy amid heavy action he reused. Sunshine, Total Recall and Lovecraftian fiction left marks as well.

  A post-credits scene reveals that "Morgan" is a captured Typhon implanted with Morgan's memories, an experiment in teaching it empathy while the Typhon invade Earth. Alex and his Operator assistants judge it by the choices it made. If it showed no empathy, Alex destroys it and restarts. If it did, he lets it go and offers a choice between peace with humanity and killing him.

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• 7. Mooncrash and Typhon Hunt

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  At E3 2018, Bethesda released a free update that added New Game Plus and a Survival mode with modifiers such as weapon durability, along with traumas that hinder combat performance. The first paid expansion, Mooncrash, arrived the same day. The team wanted to evolve the immersive sim formula without losing the core of Prey, so it added roguelike elements.

  Most players never fully explore the main game's station, given its linear plot. Mooncrash was therefore built to be shorter and replayed many times. The layout stays fixed, but enemies, weapons and items are randomized each run. Five survivors of the Pytheas Moonbase start and finish at different spots, so players cross the same space by different routes. The station's state carries over from one character to the next. Escaping with all five survivors, without deaths or resets, completes a run.

  Players earn points inside the simulation to improve starting gear, and they can permanently unlock skills by collecting certain objects. Difficulty climbs the longer a run lasts. A September 2018 patch added skins that honored the team's favorite roguelikes: Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, Risk of Rain, Don't Starve, Darkest Dungeon and Dead Cells.

  In 2036, a man named Peter is stationed in a remote satellite orbiting the Moon. The Kasma Corporation, a rival to TranStar, forces him by contract to relive a Typhon outbreak on TranStar's Pytheas Moon Base through repeated simulations. His handler, Basilisk, warns that Kasma will betray him. Once he finishes, Kasma claims budgets are too tight to retrieve him and shuts off his life support. Peter overrides the satellite's controls, crashes it near the real Pytheas facility, and takes a shuttle home. A final scene shows a Mimic stowed away aboard.

  On the 11th of December 2018, Typhon Hunt followed, also free. Its asymmetrical mode lets up to six players compete. One plays Morgan, who has a limited time to find and kill everyone else. The others are Mimics, who rearrange items, disguise themselves as nearly any object, and ambush Morgan before moving on. It was inspired by the Prop Hunt mode from Garry's Mod, which fans had mentioned after seeing early Mimic details. The package also included Transtar VR, a set of escape-room puzzles set before the main game.

  Both Mooncrash and Typhon Hunt began as prototypes in an internal game jam after Prey shipped.

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• 8. Slow Recognition

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  Bethesda announced Prey at its E3 2016 press conference, and the game launched for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One on the 5th of May 2017. Pre-orders came with the Cosmonaut Shotgun Pack. A console demo covering roughly the first hour appeared about a week earlier. Windows players got no demo at launch, and Steam's return policy served as a stand-in until a Steam demo arrived in August 2017.

  Metacritic recorded "generally favorable" reviews. Prey earned nominations for Best Storytelling at the Golden Joystick Awards, Best Action Game at The Game Awards, and Excellence in Narrative at the SXSW Gaming Awards. Critics praised the level design and environmental storytelling. Several found the early hours sluggish before upgrades arrive, and many faulted the combat. They disliked Mimics for being too agile. Phil Savage of PC Gamer traced the weaknesses to a game serving many playstyles, with no mechanic as polished as in BioShock or Dishonored.

  The story split opinion. John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun admired how the game lets players "improvise, explore, make big decisions without needing to tell you they’re big". Arthur Gies of Polygon enjoyed its sense of distrust, and critics liked that even dead characters have names. The main quest drew complaints for thin plotting, uneven pacing and backtracking. Several outlets also praised the Asian protagonist.

  PCGamesN called the Windows version "the best performing triple-A game" it had seen in several months. A bug then corrupted saved games after several hours, which made some playthroughs impossible to finish. Arkane released a fix on the 12th of May.

  Over time, opinion warmed. Nic Reuben of Rock, Paper, Shotgun called Prey the studio's "masterpiece". Cass Marshall of Polygon wrote that it was "a testament to human imagination, and one of the best immersive sims ever made". Rick Lane of GamesRadar called Talos I "the single finest example of 3D level design" and felt the game had exceeded System Shock.

  Sales told a harder story. Prey debuted at No. 2 in the United Kingdom, behind the Nintendo Switch port of Mario Kart 8. Opening-week sales ran 60% below Dishonored 2, and holding review copies until release day was blamed. Prey reached No. 1 in its second week, the first Bethesda game to do so since Doom in 2016. It was the 5th best-selling game in the US in May 2017.

  Still, Prey and Dishonored 2 both underperformed. Bethesda and Arkane shifted away from immersive sims toward live service games, Colantonio left Arkane, and Redfall followed in 2023.

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