Please help me understand the stealth/gameplay. (Mild early-game spoilers)

I'm playing this game on Hard and right now I'm about 6 hours in. I have the silenced pistol, shotgun, Q-Beam, Boltcaster, a random assortment of EMPs and lures and that sort of thing. I have Level 2 hacking, Level 2 leverage, and some points into weapon damage upgrades. I've got resources out the ass and a handful of blueprints to use them on so it's not like I'm hurting for ammo, medkits, upgrade kits, etc.

My plan was to play slowly and use my abilities to navigate the world, while being able to peck away at enemies from stealth. With that being said, every single enemy sees me immediately. Coupled with it being very, very difficult to tell an enemy's orientation, I'm left at a complete loss as to how to approach a situation. It seems like your height in the game world doesn't matter at all, only line-of-sight. It uses the Dishonored-style crawling and ducking but that just seems good for accidentally backing yourself into a desk and dying. Whenever I try to clamber on lighting fixtures or ceiling tiles to get the drop on something, they spot me and immediately open fire. Couple that with the absurd amounts of damage enemies do and the clunky controls (playing with a PS4 pad), and combat just seems impossible to gracefully engage with unless it's a stray mimic or a single Phantom.

And on that note, is there any way to tell where or what a Mimic is going to be? I hear the music cues but try as I might, I simply cannot tell if an item is posessed. I've even let the game idle while I drank a coffee and just stared at the space but ended up with a Mimic jumping down my throat anyway. Sometimes it seems like they phase in and out a little bit but other times there doesn't look to be any real indication.

Whatever it is about this game, I can't wrap my head around what it wants of me as a player. My turrets always get blown up, I always get spotted as soon as I round corners, I die immediately in any kind of substantial fight, and none of my weapons have enough stopping power to make a dent in open combat. I understand that there are some alien-type abilities that can be unlocked later on; am I better off to mainline the story until I have access to those, or is this something I can remedy with an adjustment to my playing style?

As someone who plays a ton of FPS games and who loves Arkane and played both Dishonored games on hard and had no issues, I had to lower the difficulty to medium in Prey. Its pretty brutal early on when you're trying to wrap your head around the enemies and mechanics. By the end of the game I was OP as fuck though as I got more skill points and learned how the game worked. Mimics become much less of an issue a few hours into the game so don't worry about that too much, just keep progressing in the main story for a bit. Turrets aren't very useful early on and they're kind of not worth the hassle even when you beef them up later on. If you don't want to lower the difficulty Id suggest just plowing through the main story until you unlock the alien powers. Its not long into the game.

The early game on Hard is definitely frustrating, and the stealth in this game is not good like Dishonored. I ended up investing everything in the shotgun (it's the best weapon in the game, nothing you get is better than it because 95% of engagements are are practically at melee range) and sneaking up to enemies and blasting them, then fighting it out from there until I could enter stealth again. The pistol is extremely weak no matter how much you upgrade it, and enemies become aware after the first shot, so I wouldn't invest too much in it outside of killing mimics. After a few hours you will unlock certain abilities that open up the combat more and give you more options. Two in particular, (minor ability name spoilers) Psychoshock and Mindjack, make the combat much more manageable.

The mimics themselves become less of a thing after the first few hours, they are more of an early game annoyance. Unless you are paying really close attention to every object and listening very closely, walking very slowly, you won't be able to tell what objects are mimics. They shimmer and move sometimes, make little noises occasionally, but for the most part they just serve as things that are suppose to take you by surprise in the first few hours. Honestly, keep investing in the shotgun and health upgrades and you will do fine. That would be my advice for anyone trying to play this game, the shotgun is your lifeline and you should put everything into it (until you get access to the other abilities after a certain point).

@doctordonkey: @mems1224: Thanks. I'll give it another go today. One last question: is there any way to respec, or am I totally locked into my upgrades? I don't think I've fucked myself yet but I guess I'd like to throw a few mods into HP and that sort of thing.

Shotgun is the best "stealth" weapon in the game. Upgrade the hell out of it + get the stealth skills, especially the sneak attack damage boost. You can instakill or at least open a fight with a huge advantage with a well placed shot on unaware enemies. Mimics just get splattered. Pistol is not that bad actually, but you have to rapid fire headshots. Also, it has great range. Don't upgrade it, though, it's a bit of a spoiler, but you can find a strictly better unique version of the pistol later in the game. I beat the game on hard with no alien abilities on my first playthrough, you just gotta persevere through the early game when you are very weak. It may be wise to avoid some enemies altogether until you get some serious skills\upgrades. Oh, and sorry, there's no way to respec, but there are plenty of weapon upgrade mods in the game anyway, and you learn to manufacture Neuromods eventually.

@the_nubster: You cannot respec. There is a lore relevent reason though, they mentioned in the beginning that people who have their neuromods removed have their memories reverted back to just before they installed their first neuromod.

Thanks again y'all. I figured that there was no respec but I didn't know if they'd lore their way out of it the same way they lore'd their way into it. Shotgun and mainlining it is for now.

I probably use the pistol more than any other weapon. All the weapons are useful in different situations. But play with a mouse, please. I don't know how you could possibly have fun playing this with no ability to aim. BTW, Prey is my top game of the year. I freaking love it, now on my second playthrough.

@memu: Played for another 5 hours. Got the magic helmet and the ability to fabricate unlimited neuromods and I am having a much, much, much better time now. I've got a fully-upgraded shotgun and I've put a couple kits into my pistol too (holding out for the unique one mentioned above) and I've spec'd in the direction of health and sneaking. I still don't think that the stealth is very good but at least I can have a couple seconds to rethink my position and basic Phantoms aren't ripping me apart anymore.

if I had one complaint that I think might apply to everyone getting into the game, it's that there is not enough room to breathe and experiment before you start to kit yourself out.

Also yes, play M+KB. It's too late for me now but I wish I had started that way.

Yeah, stealth will only get you so far in Prey and then you will have to fight. It isn't like Dishonored, which I also love. But I was able to navigate around with stealth and then just run for it when I got spotted to avoid fights a lot of the time. Towards the end of my first play I was running past a lot of the monsters to get to where I needed to be. Plus you learn stealthy routes to move around over time. You pick up a ton of resources in this game and can breakdown stuff and craft other stuff. So you can play however you want as far as what weapon you like. I didn't know about that gold pistol when I played so I wasted several upgrades. But at some point you can craft those too, so it wasn't that big of a deal. In my first play I went pure human mods. Now I am going purely alien mods.

Ehh Keyboard and Mouse ain't that big a deal. I played it on PC but used a gamepad just because it was a bit more comfortable and it wasn't a dealbreaker or anything.

You want to upgrade your wrench as combined with the sneak attack skill can be deadly when you get the drop on on lesser foes from behind.

From the offensive Typhon powers I think Kinetic Blast is good, Electrostatic burst is pretty powerful and Psychoshock works wonders on bigger enemies.

@humanity: The wrench and sneak combo has been doing me well since I've spec'd into it. M+KB isn't such a huge deal now but early on, when a single Mimic was pegging me for huge chunks of my health and I had no healing items or repair kits on-hand, the added accuracy would have been a lifesaver. There's something weird about the X and Y axis speeds in relation to each other on a gamepad that are really apparent during combat.

@the_nubster: yah definitely agree about the general feel of aiming being weird on a pad. In retrospect I might be remembering only latter parts of the game where I had a ton of abilities and tools at my disposal so precision aiming wasn’t an issue anymore. The Gloo cannon can alleviate those issues somewhat by freezing guys in place but for the smaller “headcrab” types it was always a pain to get a bead on them. I played on PC and went back and forth between mouse and gamepad and I remember both setups have their own awkwardness.

I just played through this recently, on normal. Hated it at first, the combat starts out terrible and I didn't find the plot all that compelling -- I felt very detached from Morgan Yu's plight or well-being. I get that there's kind of a survival horror-ish aspect they're going for with the combat and atmosphere and whatnot, that you're meant to feel small and limited and weak, and I was being deliberate and careful about engaging enemies, but I just thought it was clumsy and messy and bad. The phantoms suck, and the respawning especially rubbed me the wrong way. I think you just kinda have to plough through the start, collecting as many neuromods and resources as you can until you can get a steady flow of ammo and put enough mods into key areas like health, medkit effectiveness, stealth, and movement. There are also a few chips that contribute towards these things, which, again, you just have to find. Until then, be careful, be generous with the GLOO, and try to make good use of your recycler grenades.

I think what eventually saved Prey for me was that this game Deus Exes hard. The neuromods get good even if you don't go for the Typhon mods, there's some really good Deus Ex-style movement modding that you can opt for, the guns become satisfying and allow you to strike a balance between resource conservation and how much you fucking want this enemy out of the way right now, and in general I was able to improvise and choose how to tackle combat.

Also, whilst the main plot turns into clichéd ethics of scientific experimentation crap rather than having anything new to say, the STEM culture among employees is heartening and well done, and I feel like the plot eventually kinda acknowledged my apathy towards Morgan Yu's well-being in a few ways that left me feeling satisfied. Also, I don't mind the ending at all.

Prey's combat is very simple stealth is not needed and a waste of time the gloo + shotgun works 90% of time and the few cases it doesn't gloo + kinect blast / recycler grenade does the job, your main goal in Prey is immobilizing with stun / gloo then hit them with their weakness.

COME ON man this is my pet peeve; people always notice subtle visual cues but never the sound stuff. The obvious music will not clue you in because the music only changes if they're already attacking you. The mimic will ALWAYS make a mimic noise when you're close. Sometimes you're running too fast toward the object to react in time and that's fine. But if you're "staring" at something and still surprised it is a mimic, it means you haven't figured out how to recognize the sound they make while disguised. Remember, they only sometimes shimmer, but they ALWAYS make the sound. It sounds like a cute bug rubbing something; no other good way to describe it.

@monsieurpooh: I've put about 100 hours into the game. I'm sorry to have angered you by not being very good at it when I started. I only hope now that you can find it in your heart to step down from your pedestal and forgive me.