Prey

Arkane’s risky immersive sim is happy to take any shape the player wants.

We’re feeling a little silly after just having opened fire on a bin. In our defence, it was rolling at us in a provocative manner as we crested a staircase, and to lend further context, many of the other waste-disposal containers we’ve come across prior to this moment have turned out to be mimics. These skittish, shape shifting alien creatures can take on the form of any object, and tend to turn back into their smoky, arachnoid form and attack whenever you get too close. In this particular instance, however, our harasser really was just a bin.

It’s an amusing moment that highlights Arkane’s delight in toying with players’ expectations and wracking their nerves whenever possible, and the darkly anarchic sense of humour that runs through the game. Earlier in our play session, for example, we find ourselves doing a series of bizarre lab tests while a disinterested scientist takes notes on our performance. In one test we must find somewhere to hide in a glass-walled chamber that only contains a chair (“Is he… He is, he’s actually hiding behind that chair”). And in a multiple-choice quiz apparently designed to gauge our moral compass, we’re repeatedly presented with the option to push an overweight man onto a train track in order to save ourselves or others. It feels like a sequence from Portal, but somehow even more unhinged. What happens at the end of this appraisal – which is too good to spoil here – propels protagonist Morgan Yu into a nightmarish struggle for survival.