Nine years ago today, Prey opened the doors of Talos I and made players suspicious of coffee mugs forever.
Arkane Studios' sci-fi thriller arrived on May 4, 2017, bringing the studio's immersive-sim instincts to a gleaming space station full of locked offices, broken experiments and alien shapes pretending to be harmless objects. It was a strange revival of a familiar name, but it was not really a sequel to Human Head's 2006 shooter. This Prey was something colder, denser and more anxious. It took the systemic design language Arkane had sharpened in Dishonored, then pushed it into a world where every room could be read like a crime scene and every chair could be a predator.
That was the hook at release. Prey looked like a first-person shooter, carried horror in its bones and moved like a puzzle box. Nine years later, that combination is exactly why it still has such a devoted reputation.
Prey begins with Morgan Yu waking up for what appears to be an ordinary test day. The game quickly tears that reality apart, revealing Talos I, an alternate-history research station orbiting the moon in 2032. The station is owned by TranStar, a corporation built around neuromods that can alter human ability by rewriting the brain. The cost of that progress is everywhere. The Typhon, a hostile alien ecology studied aboard the station, has broken containment. Morgan is not simply trying to survive. They are trying to understand what they helped build, what they chose to forget and whether the station deserves rescue, destruction or something in between.
Prey worked because Talos I felt less like a level hub and more like a place with memory. The lobby was too polished, the labs too clinical, the crew quarters too personal and the maintenance shafts too full of secrets. You could read emails, listen to audio logs, follow staff names across departments and gradually understand the station as a workplace that had become a tomb. Its art deco lines and corporate luxury made the horror sharper. Talos I was beautiful, which made the rot underneath harder to ignore.
The spacewalks helped sell that scale. Step outside and Talos I changed from a maze of corridors into a huge object hanging above the moon. Airlocks became shortcuts. Broken exterior panels became routes. The station stopped being a backdrop and became something you moved around, through and under. Many games promise exploration, but Prey made exploration feel like comprehension. The reward was not only loot or a new keycard. It was the pleasure of realizing how a whole place connected.
That design put Prey in conversation with System Shock, BioShock and Deus Ex, but it never felt like a museum piece. Arkane understood that immersive sims live or die by trust. Players need to believe that if they think of a weird solution, the game might let it work. Prey built that trust through small decisions. A locked door could be opened with a code, hacked through a terminal, bypassed through a vent or reached by using the GLOO Cannon to climb somewhere the designer never needed to mark with yellow paint. A recycler charge could be a weapon, a cleanup tool or a way to turn junk into resources. Neuromods could make Morgan stronger, smarter, stranger or more alien.
The Typhon made those choices tense. Mimics were a brilliant enemy because they attacked the act of looking. A mug, a lamp or a stack of folders could suddenly unfold into legs and leap at the player. It was a simple idea with enormous psychological value. Prey trained players to scan desks the way survival horror players scan shadows. Even quiet rooms had pressure because the room itself might be lying.
Combat was never the cleanest part of Prey, but that almost suited it. Morgan was not Doomguy in a red suit. Weapons were useful, sometimes clumsy and often desperate. The GLOO Cannon could freeze an enemy long enough to breathe. A shotgun could save a run or waste precious shells. Alien abilities were powerful, but using too many of them changed how the station's security systems saw Morgan. The best encounters felt improvised, not choreographed. You survived by reading the room quickly and exploiting whatever the room gave you.
That is why Prey's reputation has grown. In 2017, it launched into a crowded year and carried an awkward title problem. The name connected it to a different game, a different tone and a cancelled sequel that some fans still wanted. Years later, Arkane founder Raphaël Colantonio spoke openly about the frustration around that title, which gave players another way to understand why Prey always felt slightly trapped by its own branding. The game itself was not confused. The box around it was.
Critics noticed its strengths at the time, especially the density of Talos I and the constant uncertainty created by the Typhon. Players took longer to turn it into a cult object. That slow burn feels fitting. Prey is not a game that reveals itself in a trailer. Its best moments happen when a player tests the edges: stacking furniture to reach a balcony, breaking a window into a hidden office, returning to an early area with a new ability or realizing an environmental detail was telling a story hours before the plot said it out loud.
The 2018 Mooncrash expansion made that legacy even more interesting. Instead of simply adding another corridor to Talos I, Arkane set a looping escape scenario on a TranStar moon base and bent Prey's systems toward roguelike structure. Changing hazards, different survivors and escalating pressure turned the base game's toolset into something faster and more repeatable. In hindsight, Mooncrash feels unusually forward-looking, especially now that so many games borrow roguelike pressure to refresh familiar systems.
Prey also carries a heavier meaning after the closure of Arkane Austin in 2024. Redfall became the studio's final released game, but Prey remains its clearest statement of identity: curious, layered, systems-driven and fascinated by the moral cost of power. It is easy to reduce studio closures to business headlines. Playing Prey now makes that loss feel concrete. You can see the craft in the shape of a hallway, the placement of a sticky note and the way one tiny enemy idea changes how players behave for the next twenty hours.
Nine years on, Prey is still available to revisit and its PC player reputation remains strong, with tens of thousands of Steam reviews sitting at Very Positive. More importantly, it has become one of those games people recommend with a certain urgency. Not because it is perfect, but because it represents a design tradition that never gets enough chances at blockbuster scale. It trusts curiosity. It respects backtracking. It lets the player feel clever without stopping to applaud them. It understands that a great immersive sim is not about freedom in the abstract. It is about spaces that remember what you did and systems that answer back.
Prey launched on May 4, 2017 and did not immediately become the obvious classic it deserved to be. Maybe that is part of its story. Talos I was always full of things hiding in plain sight. Nine years later, Arkane's space station is still waiting for players to look twice.