Unpowered parts of the station can be lit up again if you can find and turn on the power unit, which for me lead to some tense creeping around well after I'd already felt I was powerful enough to roam unhindered through most of the rest of the station. Power is a critically important element in Prey, allowing you to do everything from operate the recycler/fabricator systems which provide you with survival tools, to being able to see anything at all. Speaking of grounded, Prey's treatment of electricity might be one of my favourite things about it. Those larger-than-life characters don't exist on Talos 1 - despite being much, much further above sea level, Prey is a more grounded environment. To contrast it against BioShock - Irrational's undersea epic did something similar, but the nature of its inhabitants (elitist libertarians) saw their squabbling become grander, resulting in the likes of Sander fucking Cohen. Arkane created a paradise in space and then filled it with petty human squabbling, and it's perfect. Those in the Neuromod Division had their own stuff to work through - and they did it in their own ways. The people in Psychotronics, who develop ways to study Typhons - they were committed to their goal. Instead it feels like every area on Talos 1 had a purpose and had people working towards that purpose. It does this via emails and audiologs, which I know some aren't crazy about, but it does it in a way that never seems to overlap or overwhelm any other information. The brilliant thing Prey does is it melds all of this into the act of gathering quest relevant information, which means the more informed you become about how things on Talos 1 work, the more you peripherally learn about those who lived here. Stealing from the company and smuggling in contraband. Playing Dungeons & Dragons, holding secret Robot Wars, using fabricator technology to create and perfect nerf-style blasters. The scientists aboard Talos 1 were humans, doing human things. It's tricky making a space station feel like it was properly lived in, but Arkane manage it beautifully. The attention to detail is second to none. The level design is such that you are constantly staring at otherwise unnoticed areas of rooms to find hidden items - blueprints, contraband Neuromods, stashed food - which makes hidden areas of ingress that much harder to hide. The opening sequence forces you to question what is real and what is not, which means anything that occurs outside of the internal logic of the game comes under extra scrutiny - which is an awe-inspiring prospect in a game as ambitious and large as Prey. For that to work Prey needs to adhere to a keen sense of internal consistency - and it does. The mimics - the most basic of the Typhon aliens you'll come across - take the shape of regular objects, which means seeing one too many mugs might mean you're in trouble. Prey makes players study every single detail, question every inconsistency. Prey is at its best when you're creeping slowly through it, staring intently at everything. This happens more often upon revisiting an area late in the game, when the function of Prey has changed from tense survival game into a playground for you to experiment within as a Neuromod powered god. It feels dead, when it should instead feel simply… terminally infected. There are times, after you've normalised the presence of murderous aliens, where Talos 1 feels too empty. It actually touches on one thing I wasn't crazy about with Prey. System Shock - which is clearly the primary source of inspiration for Prey - and BioShock both show you a wonderful, captivating environment and then fill it with nastiness. That's how you know Prey is a 'Shock' game - because key to those games is a feeling of a paradise turned bad. Talos 1, on the other hand, is a place I'd love to live. Still, I know where I'd wind up in such a world - probably gutting whales - and so I never wanted to live there. This made the rampant murder inside the beautifully appointed homes of the ultra-rich elite so much simpler. World traversal saw you flitting through (or above) Dickensian cobblestoned streets which framed the soot-covered hovels of the average citizen. That's sort of the point - the steampunk Victorian-era vibe was designed to force a clash within the Industrial Revolutionary class struggle. The problem I always had with Dishonored is that I couldn't ever imagine anyone living happily in that world.

Prey review ign ps4