Prey: Mooncrash’s dystopic nightmare hits a little too close to home

Enlarge / The moon is in rough shape.

Warning: plot spoilers for Prey are contained herein!

Prey: Mooncrash is hiding a lot more beneath the surface than its premise lets on. The DLC's surprise announcement and release at E3 2018 promised an endlessly repeatable, never-repeating experience-a distinctly roguelike take on the first-person shooter genre. That means death resets most of your progress, and while certain character abilities carry over into each individual "run," total progress resets to zero with every load, along with inventory, item, and enemy placement.

The objective is simple: you need to escape the Moon by any means necessary. That could mean repairing an escape pod or zipping through an alien portal to a shoe store on Earth. While the objective might be different, the basic gameplay in Mooncrash is awfully similar to the core Prey.

Mooncrash is still a first-person shooter where you can sneak, shoot, or use psychic powers to get past goopy aliens called "Typhon." You still rifle your way through garbage cans and shipping containers for bullets and expired snack cakes. And, perhaps most interestingly, you still get to explore Prey's unusual alternate timeline, through from a very different perspective than that in the main game.

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