When Prey's DLC, Mooncrash, was announced (and simultaneously released) at E3 this year, I was a bit skeptical. After all the teases about the moon, I was really excited for more Prey. I loved Prey last year, and as more time has passed, I only find myself thinking more fondly of it. But the thing I loved most about Prey was the universe, the lore, story, themes, characters, etc. Actually playing Prey was fun, but the idea of turning Prey into a rogue-like-lite was a real head-scratch moment for me. What I wanted was more story, more time spent in those intricately designed levels, piecing together what happened.
My experience with Mooncrash ended up pretty different from what I expected. Not only was there actually just enough new story to get me hooked all over again, but it turned out it was that rogue-like-lite structure that made playing Mooncrash compelling enough that even as I'm typing this, I've got an itch to go in and play some more.
Thinking back on Prey as a whole after playing Mooncrash, and while people like to talk about how it's an immersive sim (which it is!), but it's really more of a survival horror game than anything else. Yes, I know, game genres are a mess, more now than ever before. But systems built around scrounging for ammo, health items, etc, while trying to avoid or outwit big spooky space monsters is a perfect fit for the rogue-like-lite mold, and I'm surprised I hadn't realized that sooner. Or not, I'm not a game developer, after all.
But before I go on, give me a moment to attempt to explain the quirks of Mooncrash, because even after hearing people try to explain it, I didn't really get it until playing it myself. Mooncrash is a game about a simulation, in which the main objective is to escape from the moon. Five times. In a single run. If that didn't confuse you, then let me say that I, at least, was a bit confused by what Mooncrash considers "a run." There's five playable characters (only one unlocked at the start), and a single, full run consists of an escape attempt with each. When there are no characters left (either through escapes or death), the simulation resets, and a new run begins. There's also an option to reset the simulation at any time, which is handy for trying to do something with a specific character, or for situations that seem like there's no hope for success (but more on that later).
And because this is a rogue-like-lite, and not a rogue-like, there are persistent upgrades. Like original Prey (2017), there are Neuromods used to unlock and upgrade passive and active abilities, and those carry over on each character. On top of that, fabrication plans found in game not only unlock access to the fabricators for crafting, they also give access to those items when starting a new escape attempt with a character. Not for free, those are at the expense of the simulation points attained through playing the game (everything from killing enemies, to escaping, finding dead crew members, and even picking up fabrication plans themselves).
So, in short: character unlocks, upgrades, and new items to buy between characters carry over between runs. Inside a run itself, the state of the world stays the same between characters, except for any changes you make, and the enemies getting harder over time. But when the simulation resets, the world can change. One time an area might be fine, but the next there's a massive water leak and exposed wiring, which leads to a lot of electric damage. Or maybe the power is out, or maybe my favorite shortcut tunnel is caved in, or any number of other things, never mind enemy and item placement changes. Some things, like dead bodies are always the same, and sometimes (especially near the start) those bodies always have the same items, but for the most part, what they have on them has some level of variation from run to run.
Okay, I dunno that I actually did any better a job of explaining it. Trust me when I say that if you play it, a few runs in you'll get it. And I think that if you liked playing Prey, and want more of that, this is absolutely worth playing. But very specifically you have to want more Prey, but harder. Harder, and requiring a lot more thinking on your feet than Prey originally asked for.
Main Prey is a game that allows for a tactic I find hard to resist: Save scumming. The ability to save and reload saves anywhere, at any time is incredibly powerful. If a scenario seems like I might die, then I just save, and if I die, I either retry, or find another approach. There's no save scumming in Mooncrash. If you die, that character is dead for that run. But it isn't just about dying or not. True save scumming is when you reload a save to get through a scenario perfectly. That meant there weren't a lot of instances in Prey where I was in a truly awful state, and having to scrap together weird approaches to things just to survive.
That sort of scenario happened to me all the time in Mooncrash, at least at first. Plenty of scenarios where I'd wind up with 20 health (the amount the game regenerates without any healing items), and a "trauma" (newly added status affects) to boot. Nothing like being almost dead, and having broken bones preventing me from sprinting, or hemorrhaging blood that doesn't do any damage...unless I jump, or sprint. These situations in which everything went wrong right up until the part where I managed to survive are things I never experienced in main Prey. Video games have, over the decades, trained me to want to do things as optimally as I can, and because of that I would find it hard to let myself get into a state like that when the game lets me reload saves.
So in other words, the thing I was most leery about in Mooncrash actually ended up being one of the keys to why it worked so well for me. Weird how professional game designers who have been doing this sort of thing for years know more about what actually makes their game good than me, some goof who writes this stuff because I have far too much free time on my hands.
Another key element is that the characters all play differently from each other. I looked over what I wrote about Prey last year, and one of my biggest complaints was that the game not so-subtly encourages you to not use the Typhon powers. And, in my time with the game after that blog, I found that getting those powers didn't really enhance my enjoyment of playing the game as much as I hoped. There was a lot of similarity in the powers (several that are just elemental variations on targeting a spot and making a small explosion), and the game didn't do much to really show how best to use them.
And while Mooncrash certainly leaves a lot of things up to the player to figure out (in a good way), the abilities that each character has access to are pretty smartly designed. Both narratively (ie, the test subject has a lot of Typhon powers, but the security chief has none), and in terms of making each character feel unique, and fun to play. I never found a use in the main game for the power that creates a vortex thing that gets an enemy stuck up in the air. But when I was scrambling around in Mooncrash, and trying things out because I had no other option, I figured out how to make it useful. And that specific power also came in handy for getting that character up into some spaces he couldn't otherwise reach.
There are some things I wish I could tweak about the powers across characters. Joan, the engineer, is the only one that gets the ability to upgrade her inventory, and the number of chipsets (more passive bonuses) she can have equipped at once. The inventory was less of a factor (due to something I'll get to in a bit), but the limited chipsets for all the other characters meant I ended up relying on just a few specific ones, rather than experimenting. The ones that did things like increased resistance to traumas, or more efficient psi power (the meter that governs abilities) were a lot more useful, a lot more of the time, than most of the others.
On top of the game play differences, each character has their own story objective, which is unlocked by escaping with that character in a specific way (and similar things are required to unlock the characters in the first place). Because there are (so far as I know) only five different ways to escape the moon, and the game is pretty clear about which method is the ideal for which character, it creates this extra layer of strategy where if I want to get everyone off the moon in a single run, I need to do the right thing with each one. For example, there's one method that only Riley Yu (cousin of the Yus from the main game) can use, so obviously I want to do that with her, rather than taking the escape pod. And on top of that, there's one specific escape method that requires multiple characters to set up for someone else, meaning even the order of the characters is important.
These different escape methods can have their own stories attached to them too, whether that's built into the game (like Riley's), or something that I concocted in my head after a particularly memorable run. Like the first time I got security chief Bhatia to escape with the Mass Driver, which is basically a cannon that shoots cargo containers off the moon, and to Earth. The first step of escaping that way is to collect enough food, non-alcoholic beverages, and anti-radiation medicine to survive the trip. The Mass Driver itself is located in the Moonworks area, which is largely for mining. On this run, there was some of the flooding and exposed wiring (okay, it's more than exposed wiring, but I think it's funny to word it that way) I mentioned earlier. Now, the ideal way to deal with that is to use a Gloo cannon to shoot the exposed wiring, and repair it (only Joan can).
I didn't have a Gloo cannon. And so, the first leg of this journey was a mix of trying to use what I could to stop or avoid the electricity (involving Gloo grenades, which I had mixed success with (I'm bad at aiming my throws)). I made it to the necessary container, and was scouring around for supplies, when...I fell from too high a height, and even with his pseudo-jetpack, I managed to break his legs. So there I was, unable to sprint, barely able to jump, and having to listen to some really disturbing bone crunching sounds, all while trying to avoid electrified water. Seriously, games rarely make me cringe, but those broken bone sounds are bad. I mean, they're extremely well done, but also bad.
However! Through a lot of care, and some luck, I managed to find a skeletal repair kit, the supplies I needed, and I was able to complete the escape. It was a mess, and I only barely got through, but I did it, and it was great.
The problem with the escapes, or at least some of them, is that while the initial escape can have great moments like that, there are ways to negate all of the challenge. Joan's suggested method (though anyone can use it) is to escape on the shuttle. Getting to the shuttle the first time was easy enough, but once there, I realized Joan didn't know how to pilot it, so the main challenge became finding the person who did (their corpse, at least), taking their Neuromod (while having to spend a Neuromod point to unlock the pilot skill), and then make it back to the shuttle.
But then the next time I played as Joan, I realized she still had the pilot ability. So all I had to do was get to the shuttle and leave. Now, of course getting to the shuttle can have its own problems, especially if the power isn't working in that part of the station, but it made that method of escape fundamentally easy in a way it wasn't before. It became an expected part of my runs, rather than a challenge. Which was good in a way, because it sure helped when I got all five out in a single run. But that was a challenge I only had once, as opposed to something like the Mass Driver, where I need to get those supplies and make the last minute dash every time.
And I feel like this is as good a segue as I'm going to get to the thing that actually breaks Mooncrash. Now, I don't mean breaks as in it's no longer fun. I mean breaks in the video game sense, where it might be too useful. Fairly early in my runs, I unlocked a MULE Operator, which is a robot buddy I could use for extra inventory space. At first I didn't even remember to use it, but after a while I got into the habit of it, but then I noticed something. Any items I put in there with one character would stay in the MULE when I switched to another. The didn't stay after the simulation reset (which would definitely be overpowered), but it was enough.
Instead of feeling like I needed to be careful with what I took, so other characters would have things to find through the areas, I could horde everything I wanted, and right before I escaped, just put all the good stuff into the MULE for the next one. There was no reason to not just take every gun I found, because I could keep the good ones, and recycle the rest for crafting materials. Sure, Mooncrash added weapon degradation, but a good run order with Joan around the middle to repair the weapons meant they stayed in working order long enough to negate that problem.
That, and the ability to buy lots of things, like the cures for the various status ailments, or medkits between characters, and send them onward without having to re-buy them each time if they weren't used meant I was rarely in situations where I didn't have what I needed to deal with the traumas. There were still things that could go wrong, unexpected problems to deal with, or enemies that just got the better of me, but overall, it became a situation where I was gaming it to the point where it lost some of the fun.
I was even able to circumvent the mechanic that Mooncrash uses to prevent players from taking too long. Over the course of a run, a corruption meter fills, and each time it levels up, enemies become more prevalent, and more difficult. I believe once it maxes out after level 5, the simulation crashes, but I never let that happen. That was because one of the items in Mooncrash is a glowing hourglass that drains some of the meter. It can't be use to reduce the corruption level from, for example, level 2 back to level 1, but it can prevent level 2 from going up to level 3. There was one instance where the game had started the sound effects and whatnot for it leveling up, but I used an hourglass before it could finish, and I stalled that off.
Like all the other items you can find in game, it can be fabricated in game, or purchased between characters. Meaning that if you find enough materials in a run, or just spend enough points (and I had hundreds of thousands of points by the end (one of these hourglasses costs 2,500)), you could prevent the meter from ever filling. Usually I didn't exploit this until corruption level 3. At that point the enemies are still pretty manageable, and the meter fills slowly enough that it didn't have time to sneak up on me (it fills faster on the lower levels).
So, again in summary, the ability to transfer items between characters, and to basically permanently stall the corruption meter removes a lot of the difficulty from the game. Now, obviously you don't have to do any of that. But, like I was saying earlier, it's hard not to manipulate these systems after all these years of playing games.
Now, back to the good parts of Mooncrash: The story objectives. If my main fear about Mooncrash was that it being perma-death-y would be bad, my second fear was that it wouldn't have any story in it. And while it doesn't have as much story as main Prey, nor as good overall, there's definitely just enough here to scratch that itch. Since it's told between five characters, and dished out in a relatively slow manner, it's got a great feeling of piecing everything together. I'm not going to spoil any of it, but I like it. I do think Riley's story objective wasn't great, because it was more of a tutorial on how to use a thing (which to be fair, I hadn't realized on my own) than a story. But on the other hand, her story feels like it's attached to her specific escape, so it's still there.
My biggest story complaint is that the guy who voiced Alex Yu in main Prey (Benedict Wong) didn't return for Mooncrash. I know there's only a handful of lines compared to the main game, and the sound-alike is close enough that a lot of people probably wouldn't notice, especially if they haven't played the game in a year, but I found it disappointing. I guess he was too busy being in Infinity War, huh? As a side note, I checked his Wikipedia page during this, and apparently he was in a completely unrelated TV show named Prey? I've never heard of it before, and it was probably bad, but still a funny coincidence!
But now back to issues I had, and I'll try to be quick. The first, is with the technical side of Prey. Prey has always had tech issues, whether they were game breaking bugs at launch, PS4 specific input latency (that I waited until it was patched before I played), long load times on consoles, or just framerate in general, it's got issues. At this point if you have a good PC I'm sure it's fine, but I don't. While I think the framerate is probably less stuttery than it was before (but I don't know, all I know is I only notice it sometimes during hectic fights), and the load times are just as long, the game seems to be worse at loading textures in.
Or at the very least, I ran into a lot of instances, especially with my later runs when I was really booking it through the levels, where textures took a long time to load. To the point where it was reminding me of Unreal Engine games back in the early days of the 360, but worse. It doesn't make the game unplayable, and once they load it's not really a problem, but it's pretty annoying. I'd like to think that at this point in a console generation, for a DLC in a game that came out the year before, they'd have figured out a better way to get that all optimized.
But again, I'm not a game developer. I have no idea. Hopefully it'll get patched to make that better.
On the other hand, an issue that does, somewhat literally, make the game unplayable is, well, you can't keep playing it after finishing Mooncrash. At least not without starting a new save. See, there is a story above the simulation about the moon stuff in Mooncrash. And the objective in that story is for the character (Peter) to see the stories of each character in the simulation and (I think but I'm not sure) have at least one run where all five escape. Once this happens, well, I won't spoil what follows, but if you load the save after watching the credits, it loads you back in after the ending sequence begins, when you can't access the simulation any more.
In retrospect, what I should have done was download my save from the cloud so I could keep going, and just not ever do the story objective for that last character. But I didn't think of that until I was writing this out, and thus all I can do in Mooncrash now is start a new save. That would still be some fun, but losing characters unlocks, all my Neuromods, and progress toward the simulation being harder (certain things, like the power being out, don't show up at first) would be a bummer. Hopefully they patch it!
Anyway, Mooncrash is probably one of the best experiences I've had all year with a game. Like, if this had been a standalone game instead of a DLC for a game from last year, it would definitely be high on my top ten list for the end of the year. While I do think you really shouldn't play Mooncrash without having played Prey, and thus I understand the logic behind why it's DLC and not its own thing, also I wish it was its own game. If only so I could be lazy and not have to put my Prey disc in to play it. It's great, and if you have any interest at all in playing more Prey, and the permadeath doesn't scare you off, I can't recommend Mooncrash enough. Just, you know, play it on PC if you can. I try not to let technical problems get in the way of my fun, but when I was just starting Mooncrash, died in literally the second room, and had to sit through the long loading screens again... It was a bit much.
Also you can have a pet mimic with a fun hat. What else could you ask for?
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