Two survivors becomes three, and then four, and finally five. There’s a constant give-and-take, and even the lowliest item left for a future run could end up making the difference between escape and failure.Īnd it just gets more complicated the longer you play. Mooncrash is a tour de force because every decision is a hard decision. That is, in theory, what Prey as a whole is about-but you always have a surplus of tools, and so the constraints aren’t nearly as obvious. It’s all about discovering the most efficient way to achieve your goals with the tools available. Killing off the most powerful enemies nets you an item that lowers the Corruption level temporarily, forcing another risk/reward analysis-can I spare the shotgun shells now if it means facing easier enemies later? Mooncrash even lets the player govern time itself, to an extent.

Do you really want to spend time exploring the crew quarters, in hopes of netting better gear? Or do you beeline for the objective and plan to swing back later? The Corruption meter sits in the top-right corner, always creeping upward. That last bit is the part that’s been hardest to adjust to, as someone who strip-mined every room in Prey proper. Mooncrash breaks that cycle because you’re always short on resources-on ammo, on health packs, on armor, or even just on time itself. These games are prone to letting players fall back on familiar patterns. Over and over, and the fun is in realizing that yes, you did indeed need that pistol ammo. “Okay, I’ll leave these shotgun shells here because I don’t even have a shotgun in The Volunteer’s loadout, but The Engineer can use them later.” “I’ve already got two health packs, I guess I can leave this one for later.” “Hm…do I really need this pistol ammo?” It turns the entire Pytheas Moonbase into a chess game, except you’re playing chess against yourself. If you strip a corpse clean with your first character, those items are still gone when you come back with the next.

These elements are persistent across a set of runs, so if you use the hacking character first and come back to that room later, the door will open. You’ll find machines that need repairing, and only one character is good with repairs. Because the simulation resets only when all your characters are finished, you’ll come to doors that can only be hacked open, and only one character is good at hacking. In Mooncrash, you don’t have those luxuries. I also invested heavily in any stealth-centric skills, and barely touched Typhon powers. For me, it was the wrench for Mimics, the silenced pistol for Phantoms, the shotgun for anything larger, and the EMP Charge for robots. In Prey proper, as with any systems-heavy game of this kind, there’s a tendency to find a pattern and exploit it.

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