Prey: Mooncrashing Into the Roguelike Genre

I began my first run of Prey: Mooncrash like I played through most of the main game of 2017's Prey: by looting, equipping, or scavenging anything that wasn't bolted down to the floor. My objective was fairly simple: I was within a simulation of TranStar's secret moon base, playing one of the myriad of Russian prisoners used as a guinea pig for Neuromod testing. I had to get to an escape pod and leave the Typhon-infested station, a course of action that shares a lot of DNA with the main story of Prey.

I shot, wrenched, built, and ran my way through the moon base towards the escape pod, strapped in, and jettisoned off to space. The simulation came to a close, and I was informed that the memory data of another person on the moon base, this time an engineer, was available. Shrugging, I loaded into the engineer, and exited the first room to find ... nothing. There wasn't a scrap of loot in sight, not a bullet, not a bag of chips, nothing. It was then that I realized the genius of Mooncrash.

You see, unlike other roguelikes, the scarcity of resources was not due to a bad dice roll or playing on a harder difficulty, the reason everything was gone was because I already took it. You see, Mooncrash features five playable characters aboard the TranStar moon base, and your objective is to get all of them off the base before the simulation corrupts itself to the point of needing a reset. However, until that reset occurs, all five of these characters, all five of these runs, coexist in the same world. That means, in short, that picking up some bullets or a medkit now means nothing will be there in your future runs. If you're like me and vacuum up everything you can on your first run, your second run will see the path of your previous character barren, requiring you to take new paths to find anything of value.

This also goes for escape methods off the Moon. My first run ended with me hopping into an escape pod and flying away, easy peasy. When I loaded into the engineer for my second run, I saw that the escape pod was gone, presumably hurling through space with my dazed ex-prisoner inside, munching on all of the snacks I didn't need to pick up. In this run, I needed an alternate route to escape, in this case being the last spaceship docked at the base. The rub was that this character couldn't fly a spaceship, meaning I had to run through the world to find the Neuromod that gave me the piloting ability. This new escape means was much more involved and, as I explored the world further and started to get an inkling of the other three escape routes, I realized they only got harder.

If there was a single-sentence pitch for the original Prey (er, rather, the original Prey that came out in 2017) it was "Play as you choose". On top of the normal variety of playstyles available in a lineage of immersive sim-style games going all the way back to Ultima, Prey notably constructed its main story in such a way that you could complete the game in a myriad of different, interesting ways depending on how you wanted to drive the story.

If there's a single-sentence pitch for Prey: Mooncrash, it's "Play as you choose, but choose wisely". Opting for a playstyle now frequently means that you're locking yourself out of it later, either because you're consuming a resource that will be unavailable in future runs, or because the skillset required is limited to your current character, due to Mooncrash's five playable characters each only having a subset of Prey's skills available to them. This means that once the engineer either flies off the Moon or eats it after a Typhon attack, you aren't going to be doing much engineerin' until the simulation resets.

The idea of games that are completed over multiple runs is hardly revolutionary, but the idea of a limited persistence of the world between those runs is, if you'll pardon the pun, game-changing. You still feel the freedom to solve the challenges of the game however you want, but instead of feeling like you have a Batman-style utility belt that grows and grows over time, until any given problem feels trivial due to the sheer number of ways you can tackle it, each of these solutions feels like bullets in a gun: immensely useful, but once you use it, it's gone.

This structure of gameplay leads to so many interesting gameplay moments. Players are forced to think about how many resources they want to consume per run, deciding if they want to starve now by choice or later by necessity. Players can also invest in their future runs by using their current skills to clear obstacles in the path of future runs, obstacles that the character in those runs might not be able to clear. Normally games like these let you play the game in any way. Mooncrash demands that if you want to beat it, you must play it every way.

Before you think I'm heralding Prey: Mooncrash as divinity on Earth (er, the Moon), it totally has significant problems. The base game of Prey featured a mute protagonist, but scattered enough information about them through the world that you still got a sense for who Morgan Yu was. Mooncrash's protagonists are also mute, but is far more scarce with the characterization of them through in-game texts and audio logs, resulting in a much weaker connection to the world. This lack of characterization also extends to the rest of Mooncrash's cast of characters, resulting in a much weaker sense of setting than Prey.

Also, Mooncrash has this impossibly obnoxious timer that counts down until the simulation resets, which I'm not convinced gels terribly well with Prey's exploration-heavy, experimentation-focused gameplay. There are ways to mitigate it, but they boil down to "give yourself more time", which doesn't feel terribly interesting. Moreover, it doesn't really inspire you to play the game any different, it just makes you stressed out as you play. I'm not normally one to rally against timers in games, but this one rubs me the wrong way (maybe it'll grow on me).

Despite these flaws, I still think Prey: Mooncrash is an absolutely wonderful addition to my favorite game of last year. The way this game takes immersive sim gameplay and the roguelike formula and runs with them in sucha fantastic new direction is just as inventive as the innovations of the base game. I highly recommend picking up Mooncrash to experience this new way to play Prey, and, if you're like me, to get your mind spinning about to use scarcity in games.