Always one to keep my finger on the pulse of gaming, I recently started playing 2017’s Prey [See? Now the ‘typo’ in the title makes sense, right?]. As opposed to 2006’s Prey, which as far as I can tell is completely unrelated to this game. I played a little bit of that one too, back in the day, but I don’t remember much about it other than it made me motion sick.

In THIS Prey you are on a space station overrun with what I assume are aliens or maybe it is some life form that was created in a lab? Too soon to know for sure. But the ‘trash mob’ of the game is the Mimic. This is a little tentacled thing that can disguise itself as anything in the game. You’re walking past a chair and suddenly it turns into a critter that attacks. This has made me SO paranoid that sometimes I go into a room and just do a melee attack on EVERYTHING to be sure nothing is a Mimic.

I’ll admit right away, I’m confused when I’m playing Prey. I’m sort of not sure what I’m supposed to be doing yet. I don’t really know who I am. I have some general goals that game has given me, but no real indication of what I should do first. There are also areas basically locked behind a skill system. You collect these geegaws that let you upgrade your skills. For example you find a broken door and it requires Repair 2 in order to fix it, but you only have Repair 1. So you make a mental note to come back here when you have managed to upgrade that skill.

Let’s just say at this point I have a LOT of these mental notes. I’m assuming Prey is one of those games where you’ll be retracing your steps a lot.

One of the first tasks I got was to get into a doctor’s lab. I can’t get into this dude’s lab. I have been all around it, found secrets and passages to other rooms, but thus far I cannot get in. I even found the doctor himself — dead unfortunately for him — but the keycard to his lab door wasn’t on his corpse. I’ve gotten into at least one locked room by crashing through the ceiling but so far haven’t found a way to do the same with this lab, though I haven’t ruled it out yet.

Normally, this is where I’d go online and look up how to get into this lab. But I’m not going to do that, yet. Lately I’ve been on a bit of a kick where I’m trying to play games like in the old pre-Internet days. No instant solutions via search engines. Not yet anyway. There’re other places to go in this space station and maybe if I explore them I’ll find enough geegaws to level up my skills to get past some of the obstacles blocking my way.

I learned a little bit of a trick to help me stick to my guns on the ‘no lookups’ thing, and that is to play short sessions. Once I start feeling the frustration of not making progress, I just save the game and go play something else. This might mean it takes me a LONG time to finish Prey, but it’s about the journey, right? I’m having scary fun exploring this world (I’ve met bigger enemies than the Mimic and they KICK MY BEHIND), wishing I could find MedKits, and scavenging everything in sight to break down into components for crafting. Prey is the game that reminded me I have a headset for the Xbox; since we moved I hadn’t dug it out. But the Mimics make a skittering noise and the better directional audio in the headphones helps me figure out where the noise is coming from. Anyway I put those on, turn the lights down low. and creep around this station, freaking out about Mimics, trying to explore, hiding from the big bads. It’s just the right amount of frightening. Like a tingle rather than anxiety and dread. (I don’t normally indulge in horror media, be it games or movies. I’m a big chicken!) I managed to do a spacewalk and that was crazy fun.

Not a surprise that I’m having fun, really. Over on Steam Prey has a “Very Positive” score with over 21,000 reviews (and it’s on sale for $5.99 during the Spring Sale) so it’s not like some dark horse game I just ‘discovered.’

But y’know, sometimes you just want to write a blog post about a game you’re enjoying even though it’s some old-ass game that everyone else has already played.

[BREAKING NEWS!] So while writing this post I fired up the game to take some screenshots, including the one of Dr Corvino’s corpse. And what did I notice floating in space a little ways away from him? Yup, his Lab Keycard! Woohoo! Who needs the Internet!!?