It has come to my attention that I’ve been playing a lot of space station games this month – Dead Space, Tacoma, now Prey: all tell the story of some horrible disaster happening onboard a space station. Not just games, either; recently I’ve been reading Harrow the Ninth, a novel about the eldritch ghost of a dead planet attacking a space station – and listening to Splendor and Misery on repeat, a concept album about a slave who survives an uprising on a space ship. Last week @kfwyre mentioned “snow day” games, sort of comforting, warm and fuzzy experiences you return to; maybe my snow day indulgence is the “space station crisis” subgenre.
Playing them in such close proximity it’s hard not to draw comparisons between Prey (2017) and Dead Space (2023), and not just because of their similar surnames. Mechanically, narratively, and in terms of world design, they’re often remarkably similar, and while playing Prey I was constantly thinking of it in relation to Dead Space – not its more obvious direct inspirations, like Bioshock or Dishonored, which I played and enjoyed years ago. But while I was quite critical of many aspects of Dead Space – you can read my writeup on it here – I was, broadly, extremely satisfied with Prey, which ended up being everything I wanted Dead Space to be.
When talking about Dead Space, I praised its tenth chapter, which saw you travel to the crew quarters of the USG Ishimura and finally, finally get some sense of the humanity of the crew, how they navigated their world being devoured and their lives being destroyed by horrible monsters. The best way I can describe Prey’s world is that it’s as if Dead Space chapter 10 was a whole twenty hour game. In Prey, there is no escaping the crew of the Talos 1, the space station where the entire game takes place. A whole 250-person complement – all there in the world to be found – their bodies, or the eldritch creatures they’ve become, or the cells of survivors and holdouts they belong to. And not just them, but the detritus of their lives, their workstations and quarters and rec facilities and labs, horrible experiments intermixing with mundane life.
On Talos 1, they were making neuromods – technology that records brain signals and uploads them into a subject. Use a neuromod made by a master pianist, and you too can achieve mastery – with no effort, with only one payment to TranStar corporation. Where things go wrong is when our playable protagonist, Morgan Yu, decides to make neuromods based on these strange, quasi-magical aliens known as the typhon. Where regular neuromods could make you a genius, typhon neuromods could give you extraordinary powers – telepathy, psychokinesis, basically all the abilities from Dishonored. These might be fun in gameplay but it's implied that the typhon material in these neuromods is active, and actively dangerous: converts humans into Typhon when they die; becomes part of a golden entelechaic web that does… well, something, to be sure.
So, look, Morgan and her brother Alex and their family’s Big Evil Corporation do all kinds of vile human experimentation and implement ad-hoc authoritarian surveillance on their employees and make sophistic speeches and eventually all this wax-winged flying has predictable consequences. The typhon escape, overrun the station, kill almost everyone, disguise themselves as office furniture, start weaving their webs. Great, now go fix it. What really works about the story is not so much about these broad and predictable strokes – it’s the texture, the humanity of it all, that really made an impact. So the character you play as, Morgan, she set this whole disaster into motion. But since then she’s had her memory repeatedly wiped, and her personality written, by her brother. So a huge part of exploring the world is reconciling the person you are now (in my case, the typical self-sacrificial video game heroine) with the person you must have been to do those awful things. And the survivors on the station remember, too: remember what you did, and many of them distrust or even hate you for it. It’s a premise that immediately created a lot of narrative buy-in for me. Buy-in the game capitalizes on, by regularly giving the player choices for how they interact with the other people on the station: choices that are often less black-and-white than those present in Arkane’s previous games, and have a real impact both on the characters you meet and, presumably, the one you inhabit. Unfortunately Morgan Yu is a silent protagonist, which I’m so fucking over at this point. A compromise is being made here, of course: we are sacrificing the massive and compelling drama that would come from Morgan actually, you know, talking to other characters (as opposed to her main verbs of picking things up in one place and putting them down in another, killing enemies, or jumping around looking for secret passwords) – for the ability to self-insert to some extent, to embody Morgan and map your own opinions and experiences with the game onto her (or him, I guess, if you chose to play as male Morgan). I don’t think this compromise is worth it, personally, especially because Morgan is a person in the world who should, at least in some cases, have good reason to talk to these characters that she knew in a past life, and because interacting with these characters is like a major part of the game that often feels a little stunted because Morgan can’t talk. But I digress.
I tend to think of the immersive sim genre as a series of very interesting compromises. Combat in Prey is not deep, or obviously expressive, or even really mechanically compelling. You rarely fight more than a couple enemies at once; encounters are slow and attritive; everything costs huge amounts of resources that you might not have a surefit of. But of course, despite the lack of depth, there’s still a huge amount of breadth, and from that breadth comes the fun. All of your weapons and grenades and, if you unlock them, combat-applicable neuromods are completely unique and usable against different sets of the dozen-or-so highly differentiated enemy types. The gear and abilities you choose to upgrade determine what enemy types will be pushovers, and what types will be intractable. And so you can gauge, when you see an encounter over in the next room, how thorny it will be for you. Are you equipped for it? Or should you use your expansive movement toolset (which, again, is not mechanically deep, but has a lot of options) to bypass it entirely – build a path over it with the Gloo Gun; sneak past with the shadow dash? My point is that Prey gives you a lot of options for how to engage with its lush, gorgeous world, at the expense that each individual option is a bit uninteresting. But, in aggregate, you get a wonderfully interactive sandbox that often has this almost natural-language quality of “if you can think of it, you can probably do it.”
The problem is that this design approach is at its best and most enjoyable when the player has full access to a wider toolset. But Prey has progression systems that seem to undercut that. Combat abilities must be paid for. Weapons are upgraded separately. Many neuromods are strong – game-changing even – but highly specialized, so spending the very limited resources to unlock them might feel like it locks you into a particular mode of engagement. There are THREE achievements for beating the game without unlocking a wide variety of upgrades. The problem with that popup at the beginning of the game that says stuff like “play your way” and “if you can think of it, you can do it” (an ImSim genre convention) is that any one single “your way” isn’t going to be that interesting. That hacking minigame is fine but it’s not fine enough to sustain 20 hours of gameplay. And because I knew this going in, I was able to invest in a wider swath of my toolset, to plan my upgrades to always have a variety of options and resources available – to not lock myself into one potentially boring playstyle the whole time. To have a lot of fun with the combat and the hacking and the sneaking around because I did all three! But I can certainly imagine someone bouncing off Prey early, before they have a wide toolset – or never even getting one. That’s a shame.
You know what’s not a shame? The world design. I described Dead Space’s Ishimura as tactile – a space you could touch, feel, manipulate, shape. Talos 1 has a similar quality, maybe not tactile, but palpable let’s say. Whereas in Dead Space most of the environments you explore are systems – engines, power distribution, food production, etc., in Prey much more time and space is given to living spaces: quarters, offices, gardens, entertainment options. By the end of Dead Space I felt like I knew how it would feel to fix the Ishimura; by the end of Prey, I felt like I knew how it would feel to live and work on Talos 1, this orbital company town rendered in a lavish post-art deco style, vocal luxury that thinks itself inconspicuous. The sense of interconnectedness is perhaps not as strong in Prey; the sense of place, however, is unmatched, and facilitated by the breadth of interactivity. Everything can be interacted with, usually in multiple ways. Every door can be opened, usually in multiple ways. Every email can be read, and a lot of them are about nonsense, D&D games or melodramatic sapphic breakups or – what’s this, a secret far-reaching plot to surveil Dr. Gallegos? Well I need to follow up on that one for sure!
This all synergizes very neatly with the monster design. The first, most basic enemy you’ll encounter is a mimic, which works like the other players from Prop Hunt; can disguise itself as anything – environmental props: coffee mugs, chairs desk lamps; useful pick-ups: medkits, ammo, turrets – or even, on one memorable occasion, as the gory corpse of an already killed mimic. So everything in the lush, detailed environments is interactable, and anything interactable could be an enemy in hiding. Especially early in the game, when mimics still pose a credible threat to the underprepared Morgan, this creates an almost unprecedented level of tension, demands close attention to detail. Not long ago I played The Exit 8, a truly harrowing horror game about finding problems, discrepancies, with an ordinary environment. The sense of paranoia Prey fostered in its early hours was similar: similarly dreadful, promoted a similar level of caution and methodical play. But where in The Exit 8 that feeling was the whole point, in Prey it serves another purpose too: if you have to pay close attention to the environment to survive, it also encourages you to engage with the environment fully. To look carefully for loot (as well as mimics) or alternate pathways or alternate solutions. Prey’s paranoid early hours are extremely good at immersing the player in its environment and promoting the right kind of engagement with it.
So I like Prey, like it a lot, and feel bad for putting it off for this long. I am finding that I don’t have all that much to say about the narrative, which I largely liked, even if it was clunky in places and ended with a twist that I didn’t much care for. But, I am gonna rant about that ending a bit; again, some spoilers follow!
What is it with video games and this allergy to having falling action? I'm looking through my library now and like half of these game or more have endings that I would describe as “abrupt,” ending essentially right after the final boss or whatever. Prey, to its credit, has no final boss; the enormous horrible creature that shows up at the end is barely comprehensible, much less killable. But the game still ends right on the climax (or did in the ending pathway I chose) and apart from a very brief post-credits epilogue to reveal The Twist and summarize your choices, cRPG-style, that’s it. That’s it? Dead Space was the same way. Most games with a narrative are the same way, I’d wager. I’m sure there are plenty of counter-examples, and games that do an abrupt ending well, but off the top of my head I can only immediately think of Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 (whose epilogue was added in a post-launch patch!) as games that buck this trend, that don’t leave me sitting there scratching my head like, “oh, that was the ending?” Okay as I write this more counterexamples are coming to me but you get the point. Prey ended, and as many games do, left me wanting more in a bad way; more resolution, more time with the characters and world; more compelling drama, more marination in the impact of my choices. But it also left me wanting more in a good way. More games with detailed and engaging worlds, more compelling decision-making, more breadth of interactivity. More space stations! Prey provided where so many games fail to, and as a result was for me a cohesive and really delightful experience.

As someone who generally tries to be positive and even-handed when I write and think about art, I wasn’t really sure whether to even do a writeup on Call of the Sea, a game which, ultimately, I thoroughly disliked. But if Call of the Sea is bad, it’s bad in a way that’s interesting to me, a neat little puzzle to explore, and so here I am, writing down my thoughts on it – if for no other reason, to get them out of my head. Nonetheless to stem the tide of negativity that will soon flow forth I will attempt to use the compliment sandwich method, starting and ending this writeup with praise, so let’s talk a bit about the environment.
We might conceive of Call of the Sea as a three-legged stool, where one leg is the visuals and environment design, one is the narrative and themes, and the third is the puzzles. And that first leg, at least, is a really good leg. Call of the Sea’s environments are consistently gorgeous – the art style is a little generic, that shiny plasticky Unreal Engine 4 Indie Game Look, but used to great effect: scenic vistas with vibrant colors, strange stone ruins vibrating with strange energy; a great wrecked ship, creaking and groaning beneath a raging thunderstorm – each of the game’s six levels takes you to a new environment that is both visually stunning and deliciously atmospheric. There was a brief period while playing this game, for thirty minutes at the end of chapter 2 and the start of chapter 3, where the game managed to convince me on the strength of its atmosphere and visuals and sound design alone that this would be a puzzle-y adventure game in name only; that we had taken a sharp turn towards cosmic horror, excellent cosmic horror, tense and scary and gloomy, starring a largely powerless heroine. This was ultimately an illusion. Though Call of the Sea appropriates elements of Lovecraft’s fiction, most notably “Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “Dagon,” it uses them to convey a story that is for the most part airy and whimsical, only occasionally muddied by the record of some death or tragedy.
Call of the Sea tells the tale of Norah Everhart, a woman with a mysterious chronic illness that causes unusual pigmentation on her skin, makes it hard for her to walk, and gives her a plot cough. Her husband, Harry, embarks on an obsessive search for a cure, which eventually leads him to arrange an expedition to a mysterious island in the Pacific, where he and his crew are beset by challenges and madness and failure and death. Playing as Norah, we arrive on the island in November of 1934, some months after the failed expedition, to investigate what happened to Harry, his team and the cure for Norah’s ailment. It is a strong setup, to be sure; one with all the right elements both for compelling puzzles and a moving, character-driven plot. We'll address the puzzles later but I found the plot weightless and immensely disappointing, for reasons that I don’t even need to provide spoilers to fully get into. In short: there is simply no compelling emotion here, no believable character work, no gripping drama. As we uncover what happened to the Everhart expedition, how it unraveled, it’s hard to be invested because Norah doesn’t know any of these people (except Harry), and the jumbles of personal effects we find in their tents aren’t near enough to build a solid picture, or even a passable sketch, of them and their relationships. Through Norah’s voiced inner monologue we do at least get a lot of information about her and Harry, her husband, how much she loves him, how her illness has been affecting her, how much better she (mysteriously) feels on this strange island – but Norah just tells us all these things, often in a wistful or reflective tone, that makes her life and relationship and struggles feel flat and insubstantial, just a series of mildly interesting anecdotes. As a result nothing in this story, none of the character beats, certainly not the bittersweet ending, had any emotional effect on me. Where the narrative is at its strongest, it’s exploring the mysterious connection between Norah and this mysterious island, but even that connection is painfully straightforward and literal in the end, and sometimes hinges on specific imagery that I have specifically seen used to much better effect in Returnal, a much less narrative-driven game.
Perhaps worse than the story’s utter lack of emotional impact is its thematic incohesion. It is customary for cosmic horror stories written in [current year] to have a Take on Lovecraft. He used his horrible creatures and the cults that sprung up around them and the transformations they fomented as a way to bash minorities – people of color, immigrants, artists, the working class, seafarers, lots of people really. But the reason these monsters, down to the specific creatures and environments Lovecraft devised, have stuck around is because there is something deeply compelling about them even absent the bigotry. Something nihilistic, about our utter inconsequence, powerlessness, our limitations, our inability to understand parts of our world. These themes can be explored without specifically incorporating Lovecraftian monsters – Control did so! Or by filing the serial numbers off and presenting your own take – Prey (2017) and Dead Space (2023) and Returnal (2021) all did so to some extent. But when a work as extensively cribs from Lovecraft as Call of the Sea does, you expect it to be having a conversation with him, to have something to say about his works. Not to be trite, but you expect it to answer the question, “if not minorities, what is the real cosmic horror?” The N.K. Jemisin novel The City We Became answers: racism, gentrification, the soul of a place being strangled by people who see it as dirty, unclean, degenerate. The John Carpenter film In The Mouth of Madness answers: a certain type of popular art, made to be consumed as escapism, keeping people from engaging with the real world. I am not sure that Call of the Sea has an answer to this question, not sure it has any central theme at all.
I can identify traces that seem to indicate the presence of a theme. Perhaps Call of the Sea is meant as a feminist text – when Norah says she feels more at home on the island than she ever did in the real world, is that anything? When she asks, “how could someone living in a cage all their life even know they were in a cage?” is that meant as commentary on what it was like to be a woman in 1934? But parts of the text contradict this: mainly, how much Norah loves Harry, how great their relationship is, and how the text doesn’t really say anything feminist when it comes to the other female character, expedition member Cassandra Ward. Okay, so maybe it’s meant to be an anticolonial text. This is maybe the strongest case I can make. The game spends a lot of time and goes to great lengths to distinguish Harry’s failed Everhart expedition, which often resulted to explosives, circumvention, or chauvinistic brute force to bypass the island’s puzzles – with Norah’s exploration of the same spaces, which involve listening to the island, actually solving its puzzles, and opening herself up to its black ooze. Maybe that’s why she survived and connected with the island, while disaster befell the Everhart expedition? But again the game contradicts this theme with an explanation about Norah’s special blood or whatever that both makes less thematic sense and feels a bit insulting frankly. And, worse, whatever anticolonial intentions the game might have had go straight out the window when Norah is treated to echoes of conversations by the fictional primordial Naacal tribe with gross dialogue like “We Naacal, we slaves, we suffer under masters,” just the most vile tribal stereotypes you can imagine. Okay, so maybe the story is about love, or transhumanism, or chronic illness, or the power of music? I could make a case for any of these, with textual evidence, and then also dismantle it with textual evidence from a different part of the game. The end result is that while I can pick up thematic threads I can’t weave them together, can’t figure out what, if anything, the game has to say; can’t find a strong emotional core to propel me through this story, or a thematic core to hold my interest.
That leaves the puzzles, which are inconsistent. The quick and dirty summary is that each of the six levels is structured like a really big escape room, with a few puzzles to solve usually leading up to one climactic puzzle that, in some cases, has a satisfying cumulative solution. When the game works, it scatters clues all around its environment. Norah copies them into her journal, takes them to a central puzzle, and solves it. This minimizes backtracking while requiring the player to actually explore the gorgeous world to solve the puzzle. Good stuff. But as the game wears on, the puzzles seem to get worse and worse. Less complex, less interesting, requiring more backtracking and, in one case, repeating literally the exact same puzzle like six times (it wasn’t good the first time). A few time I got stuck just because, despite knowing the solution to the puzzle, I couldn't find the right Thing to Interact With that would unlock the Contextual Prompt Required to Progress, which felt especially disappointing in the wake of the absurdly, context-agnostically interactive Prey, The puzzles are at their best in the opening three chapters of the game, when the wonderment is still alive and when you still think there might be some interesting answer to the questions the story seems to be setting up. But the puzzles get bad at about the same time the story reveals how shallow and incoherent it really is, which makes finishing the game a terrible slog.
I promised to make this critique a compliment sandwich but here I am having exhausted all I had to say about Call of the Sea, not having thought of a second piece of unalloyed praise. Call it an open-face compliment sandwich, if you like. I suppose maybe the production value, or the vocal performance of Cissy Jones as Norah, might be worth praising. Maybe there’s more to say about the game’s environmental storytelling, which, at times, does subtly convey some interesting information (without emotion, but still). But honestly, what would be the point? For however well made Call of the Sea is on a technical level, for however beautiful its world is, for however capable its leading lady, it all feels wasted on an inconsistent slate of puzzles and a story that I can’t even begin to connect with.