Prey (2017) is one of those games people keep rediscovering years after launch — writing retrospectives, calling it a masterpiece, wondering why nobody told them about it. Someone told them. They just didn’t listen.
Developed by Arkane Studios (Dishonored) and published by Bethesda, Prey is a first-person immersive sim set aboard a stunning art deco space station. It has essentially nothing to do with Prey 2006 beyond sharing a name — a branding decision that confused everyone and helped nobody. What it actually is, is one of the most thoughtfully designed games of the last decade. And most people missed it.
Table of Contents
Story and Setting Prey: Alternate History, 2032
You are Morgan Yu, a scientist at TranStar corporation aboard Talos I, a research station orbiting the Moon. In this alternate timeline, JFK survived his assassination and an accelerated Space Race led to the discovery of alien life — the Typhon. You wake up one morning to find them loose, most of the 267-person crew dead, and your own identity disturbingly unclear.
Prey tells its story through the environment: notes on dead employees’ desks, audio logs, half-eaten meals still sitting on cafeteria trays. Nobody hands you the plot — you piece it together. The central question the game keeps asking is a simple one: who exactly is Morgan Yu? The answer depends on how you play.
Prey doesn’t lecture you. It drops you into a situation and trusts you to figure it out — and the lore lives in the world itself, not in cutscenes.
Gameplay Prey: How Prey Actually Plays
Talos I is one continuous space structured like a Metroidvania — you unlock new areas gradually as you find abilities, keycards, and alternate routes. Nothing leads you by the hand. A locked door might open through hacking, a found keycode, a vent shaft, or a GLOO cannon shot that builds you an improvised ramp to a window above it. That freedom is the entire point.
Neuromods and Upgrades
Neuromods are the upgrade currency — injected directly into your eye socket. Human neuromods cover engineering, hacking, medicine, and combat. Typhon neuromods give you alien powers: telekinesis, shape-shifting into objects (Mimic Matter), Kinetic Blast, Mind Control. The more Typhon abilities you take, the more Talos I’s security systems start treating you as a threat. At a certain point, something worse happens.
The Nightmare — What It Is and How to Deal With It
The Nightmare is a massive Typhon hunter created specifically to kill Morgan Yu. It first appears after you’ve spent six neuromods on Typhon abilities and cannot be permanently cleared from an area. Early on, the smartest move is simply to run — it gives up pursuit after two or three minutes. Later, pre-placed turrets and the GLOO cannon make the fight winnable. On the Nightmare difficulty setting it’s considerably more aggressive.
Looting and Crafting
Scavenging is not optional. Everything in the environment can be recycled into raw materials, then fabricated into ammo, medkits, and grenades. The inventory system — one unsorted grid for every item type — is the part of the game that ages least gracefully. The first few hours ask for patience. Push through it.
Talos I: The Real Star of the Game
The station is built in 1960s art deco retrofuturism — the architecture of a world where the Space Race never slowed down. A gym with personal lockers, a bar with drinks still on the counter, an arboretum with plants still growing under the lights. Arkane wrote background stories for every single one of the 267 crew members, including those already dead when the game begins. None of it is required reading. All of it makes the game worth finishing.
Prey 2006 vs Prey 2017: What’s Actually Different
All Prey 2017 Endings — How to Get Them
The ending you get depends on three things: what you do with Talos I, how you treated survivors, and what kind of Morgan Yu you built. The main outcomes:
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“Destroy the station” — Detonate the nullwave and eliminate the Typhon threat along with everything else aboard.
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“I and Thou” — The best ending, earned by playing with consistent empathy: don’t kill survivors, complete the optional rescue missions, help people when asked.
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“Take the escape pod” — Available from the second-to-last chapter. Leave. Let the station be somebody else’s problem.
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“Self-recycle” — Use a Recycler unit on yourself. The game accepts this as a valid conclusion.
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“No Needles” — Complete the entire game without installing a single neuromod. Extremely difficult, with a unique ending for those who manage it.
The final sequence lands very differently depending on whether you’ve been paying attention the whole time. Players who rushed it found it abrupt. Players who read everything found it genuinely affecting.
A free steam account with a few installed titles can be a good starting point.
Prey: Mooncrash — Worth It?
Mooncrash (June 2018) is not a story expansion — it’s a roguelite. Five characters with distinct skill sets, each trying to escape a Typhon-overrun lunar base, with enemy placement and item locations changing each run. It lacks the atmosphere and narrative depth of Talos I, but as a pure gameplay loop it holds up for 15–20 hours. The Typhon Hunter multiplayer mode is a clever concept that never found a player base and is effectively dead now.
Prey System Requirements for PC
Performance on mid-range 2014–2015 hardware is fine at medium settings. Console versions run without major issues, though load times between areas get noticeable in the back half of the game.
Pros and Cons Prey
Should You Play Prey in 2026?
Yes — and not as a historical artifact. Prey holds up. Its design philosophy of giving players a space that rewards curiosity without punishing experimentation is rare enough that it still stands out against most of what ships today.
It won’t work for everyone. If you want constant forward momentum and satisfying gunfights, look elsewhere. But if Deus Ex, BioShock, or Dishonored ever gave you that specific satisfaction of a game that anticipated the weird thing you tried — Prey is that, taken further than most.
It’s been given away free on Epic Games Store more than once. Plenty of people downloaded it and never launched it. Don’t be one of them.
How to play Prey for free on Steam via VpeSports
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to wake up on a space station and not remember who you are while real chaos is going on around you, Prey is about that. Talos-1 greets you not with a tutorial with hints, but with cold silence and the feeling that something has gone catastrophically wrong. Facial expressions hide in an ordinary mug on the table, neuromodes rewrite your personality, and every decision has consequences. It’s not just a game, it’s an experience that’s hard to forget after the end credits.
The good news is that you can get on board Talos-1 for free, and we’ve already done most of the work for you. Just register on the website, log in to your account and go back to the beginning of the article — there will be a get account button. No complicated setup, no extra steps. Just a few minutes — and you’re already inside.
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