Prey Reviews: 11 Critical Reactions You Need To Know

7. The Non-Linear Gameplay Really Works

"Arkane doesn’t do much handholding in telling you that you may be missing a very key item, cool side-quest, or that you should focus on this or that part of your upgrade tree at certain points in the game. It’s all wide-open for the player to determine. Prey is a learning experience, and once you do learn you can always backtrack to go places that you couldn’t access before. There are definitely some elements of the game that feel like Metroid-vania, even if they aren’t completely necessary for progression." - Attack of the Fanboy

"It’s an open world, that lets you explore areas of the space station in (almost) whatever order you wish. Everything is connected, whether you want to naturally get to an area using the winding corridors of the space station or you want to leave the station and re-enter it elsewhere while floating in space. Prey’s densely packed world, shortcuts and connections all come together to give the game a sense of having an open world without the barren filler environments that commonly come with it." - Press Start Australia

"Prey is set on an open but heavily gated map, and so there’s a lot of backtracking through the same areas as you’re sent around on quests to find various items. That works well because each of these areas is big enough and full of a ton of nooks and crannies everywhere that become more accessible as you upgrade your abilities." - IGN

As you adventure around the Talos I, you're largely left to your own devices in terms of figuring out what to do next, which is said to be a refreshing change from the usual A-to-B-to-C objective-based gameplay that's typical in the action genre these days.

Non-linear gameplay is always a risky proposition that can end up irritating or overly obtuse if done badly, but the consensus is that it suits the game's spare atmosphere perfectly, and while many similar games make a dull slog out of backtracking, here the renewed context of revisiting an old locale makes it highly entertaining.