I love Prey: Mooncrash, and I believe it is one of the best rogue-likes ever created. I have already talked extensively about why I love the mechanics of Prey so much, and I am now going to talk about how Prey: Mooncrash elevates those mechanics and creates such a unique version of fun. Prey has multiple expansive ability trees, and players will progress up them as they play the game. The trees are so expansive though (and opportunities to upgrade scarce enough) that throughout a playthrough, players will usually end up acquiring most of the basic abilities while only specializing in a couple of the branches on a couple of the trees. This plays into Prey’s Immersive Sim and Emergent Gameplay aspects that I love so much as each player will tackle different problems in different ways given the tools they currently have. That being said, re-specializing in another branch essentially requires a completely new playthrough. While I find this to be very enjoyable, it is a significant time commitment to try a new playstyle that you might not enjoy.
Prey: Mooncrash fixes all of this. When you start a run (which lasts from a few minutes to a few hours), you are forced to select a character with an extremely specialized and limited toolkit of abilities, and this forces players to experiment with unique combinations of abilities to truly test how well they understand the game’s several mechanical layers. Furthermore, each of the puzzles and their solutions are randomized, so you cannot truly know which abilities to prioritize since they rapidly change. Finally, you must progress through this randomized world five times in a row with five characters that play completely differently from each other due to their unique ability specializations, and a player’s actions persist across each of these runs. Did you ransack a kitchen for healing supplies with the first character you played? That kitchen will now be barren of resources for all of your remaining characters. Add on the fact that enemies and the environment get more dangerous as each character plays, and you can seriously screw over the last few characters you play as if you do not leave items behind for them. All of this together creates a unique type of fun in which you must learn to truly understand the many layers to the game’s core combat, ability, exploration, and physics systems; learn to think on your feet and figure out how your current character’s toolkit can solve each problem; and learn to be strategic about which items you pick up and which you leave behind to play to each character’s strengths and weaknesses. Prey: Mooncrash is a near-perfect improvement on Prey’s core mechanics, and it creates what I find to be a wholly unique experience and a phenomenal rogue-like.
