Video Game Review: Prey Mooncrash

Prey is one of the best games from last year that nobody played. In a year as jam-packed with high-profile, high-quality releases as 2017 was it still stood out to me as one of the best, so when I heard about the announcement of the Mooncrash DLC I thought “oh cool! That’ll be a nice reason to get back into it at some point!” and went back to being hyped about everything else going on in E3.

And then I found out that not only is Mooncrash already out – and not just slated for “soon” as I initially thought – it has rogue-lite elements, and I bought it instantly. Two great tastes that taste great together, right? Right.

The implementation of procedurally generated challenges works surprisingly well with the already existing framework of Prey. The procedural generation aspect of the DLC is somewhat limited by the set level design of Pytheas moonbase – which is just as phenomenal as that of the Talos I space station in the base game – but the development team pull some creative tricks to make it all work. Enemy placements, weapon locations, and newly introduced weapon quality and degradation percent all help to make Mooncrash a tense experience in a way that even the base game was not.

Mooncrash has three levels to it. The entire campaign is framed as a simulation of the memories of five crew members from Pytheas, being lived out by a corporate hacker to uncover what happened as things went south. Within the simulation, there are two further levels, which for simplicity I’m going to refer to as runs and sub-runs. The goal of a given run is to escape with as many of the five survivors as you can, and each of them represents a life or sub-run that gives you a chance to escape. It’s entirely possible, though difficult, to escape with all five at once, and indeed that is the ultimate goal of Mooncrash.

This structure works remarkably well, especially once you get deeper into the DLC. The simulation starts off relatively harmless. Enemies are fewer, weaker, and there are fewer steps between the player and escaping the moonbase. However, the more objectives you complete – things like escaping in a certain way with a certain character or even just unlocking characters – the more variables are added to the simulation such as environmental hazards, zero-oxygen environments, or forcing you to choose which areas of the moonbase to power, all of which add to the aforementioned feeling of tension. Additionally, the longer any given run takes the higher the difficulty becomes, though this “corruption level” can be delayed if you want a more casual experience.

One of the best additions is the moonshark, an extremely dangerous new enemy that stalks the central hub of the moonbase and forces you to either get very good at the combat or sneak around it entirely. Occasionally its presence is frustrating because at a couple points it got stuck and I had to purposefully die so that I could progress, but overall it helps set the atmosphere and sense of challenge.

If all that seems like a lot of information to throw at a player at once, don’t worry. The mechanics of Mooncrash are introduced piecemeal, and even though I had trouble understanding what the tutorials were telling me as I read them, it all made sense once I saw it in practice. That said, some of the early runs were frustrating, especially since the game almost forces you to fail once or twice in the earliest attempts. Part of that may have been a simple lack of understanding of what exactly was going on, but there are definitely a couple of points where a new variable is introduced that feels purposefully obtuse because you don’t realize what it’s going to mean until after it’s put you in a bad situation.

As far as the story and world the expansion presents go, it still feels like Prey. The personality of all the books and emails and notes you can find scattered around carry the same mix of tragic but occasionally heartwarming or funny lore as the base game – including, yes, a continuation of that one gloriously trashy pulp novel series. The bits of personality you pick up about the moonbase crew are cute and charming right up to the point where you remember again that they’re all dead. In terms of plotline, it’s a lot like the base game – some entertaining twists and turns, but nothing that’ll knock your socks off.

A good way to sum up my feelings on Mooncrash would be to say this: I’m a bit of a rage-quitter. If I get frustrated with a game, I tend to put it down and come back to it later, rather than let myself get upset. Usually, I have to be in a certain mindset to go back to a tough title, but Mooncrash is one of those rare titles that I was so entranced with I would start it back up fifteen minutes later. It’s a genuinely engrossing experience that makes a good addition to Prey and helped remind me why I loved it so much last summer.