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Now that it is sufficiently discounted I have picked it up- $30 right now for the Halloween sale.

Basically the upshot is that it's the whole semi-linear Deus Ex/System Shock horror/suspense thing as done by Arkane Studios. It's polished, has a unique visual style, a lot of interesting lore/world building stuff laying around all over, and a cast of insanely uninterested voice actors.

The aliens are extremely alien in concept which is kinda cool; their thought process, how they perceive the world around them, and their general motives are almost completely inscrutable. Unfortunately they take pretty boring corporeal forms; a spider thing, several varieties of the same bipedal black blob thing, and a few varieties of large blurry black blob thing. The game has a handful of insanely telegraphed jump scares but not as many as you think because instead of scripted stuff Arkane REALLY fucking leans on the most basic enemy type for "organic" jump scares, which is the mimic. These pricks are the spider things from the trailers; when you spot them they either rear up and attack by leaping at you like headcrabs, or they skitter off and disguise themselves as any small to mid-size object they can find.

I only say this because the devs really must have loved these things because they're fucking everywhere. Every area has a handful of these assholes around and the environments are almost entirely made of physically simulated objects small and big for them to mimic. You'll spend the first hour or so running around smashing everything you see that has a duplicate object next to it because the mimics are programmed to jump you the instant you turn your back if you come close enough and look at them first. You eventually get a piece of equipment that lets you scan the aliens to open access to Alien Neuromods, and it has upgrade slots- one of the first upgrades you'll find is one that lets you scan for mimics. It's a trick though, because the scope muffles sound and limits your field of vision which is in turn used by the devs to have the other alien-types and mimics you didn't spot blindside you.

That being said I'm actually really enjoying it. The space station really feels like a place that was logically laid out for use by human beings and even with loading screens separating each zone since you have to spacewalk outside of the station to various airlocks for "fast travel" you can see and feel how each zone fits the station as a whole. They also do the "play your way" thing pretty well too because of this- there's a ton of vertical space and with the Gloo Gun (basically a gun that fires blobs of auto-hardening cement), crawling, explosives, hacking, matter manipulation, and a literal nerf crossbow you can go damn near anywhere you want in the areas you have access to if you're creative enough- including a lot of places that you're only meant to backtrack to in the endgame. It's very slick and the game accounts for that.

I dunno if it's really super scary but it's pretty cool and I feel like Bethesda really fucked it by saddling it with the name. I'd say it's more of a $20 purchase though for most people.

Hey, I liked the original Prey, like a lot. Bonus points for best segue from Barracuda into Don’t fear the Reaper in any video game ever. The name is not a saddle.

Ah, I wasn't saying the original Prey was bad. It was really good IMO. The problem is that a lot of people apparently were looking forward to the cancelled Prey 2 thing that was about being a space bounty hunter; which for some reason turned into anger when they decided to reuse the Prey name for this.

Ah, fair cop.

Prey is a really good game;  however, I was surprised that the urge to replay was simply Not There.  Odd, considering the System Shock 2ness of it.

Well, the station is pretty big but ironically since everything has multiple solutions it generally means nothing is off-limits to any particular playstyle outside of no-neuromods. Leverage, Hacking, Matter Mimic, etc all get you into basically the same places- you just have to come at different angles. In the end, going around to a different area and tossing some heavy boxes out of the way, or turning into a coffee cup and hopping through a broken shutter, or hacking a keypad to just walk right into the same area results in access to the same place.

I beat this a couple weeks ago and did just about every sidequest. This game is really good. It's not particularly scary but it's really fun.

I wasn't interested in playing System Shock 2 again for a while because I agreed that babies need meat and I wanted to steer clear of that.

They suddenly dropped DLC, and it's pretty interesting.

It's basically a ghetto roguelite version of prey. You're some unknown party forcefully contracted at a moonbase ran by Transtar's competitor, and you're going through simulations from a group of poor sods who apparently got to experience a Typhon outbreak on Transtar's moonbase. The layout/rooms are randomized, loot is randomized (and stuff like suit chipsets are randomized as well), etc. I don't like you're stuck playing as a low-HP character with a psychic affinity to start out but it definitely kinda feels more like a survival horror/resource management game. Pretty cool.

The main game got a patch that adds New Game+, Story Mode, and some other stuff.