Prey (2017) is a favorite game of mine, and it uses breaks its mechanics down into several simultaneous arcs for the play to enjoy. Every interaction with an obstacle is a single arc, and over the course of a play through, the player will experience several expanded loops created from these arcs. As the player learns more and more about the game’s complex underlying mechanics, their loop will get bigger and bigger as they take more and more information into account—information that they are learning every time they complete an arc. By the end of the game, the player will be utilizing, thinking about, and being consciously aware of so many different mechanics that a wonderful skill chain is created in which the same set of high frequency actions are leading to a greater and greater number of potential low frequency actions.
