Microsoft shut down a bunch of talented studios like Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin earlier this year. While it dropped the ball with Redfall, the studio was otherwise known for a litany of masterful immersive sims. Dishonored and Prey will go down in history as two of the genre’s best, and even now, I fear nothing else will ever measure up to the latter’s greatness. Putting the base game aside though, let’s talk about a forgotten expansion to the 2017 reboot that took everything the original experience did well so much further.
Released a year after Prey, Mooncrash brings with it a new roguelike mode where you play as a scientist named Peter working in an isolated space station orbiting the lunar surface. The expansion doesn’t explain much at all, as you repair a busted simulator while a superior’s voice asks you to dive inside the minds of multiple different people.
Each one has their own skills, story, and flaws as you spawn in the same location and try to discover their very specific escape route. But there is a catch - when you die, you must start again, but all the loot and enemy locations change with each attempt. This turns every run into a natural journey driven by constant discovery, inventive puzzle and encounter design, and a race to the finish where almost anything can happen. But not enough people played the base game, let alone a nifty expansion that was released 14 months after it came out. It deserves love though, so here I am.
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is yet another brilliant expansion that not nearly enough people played when it came out. So get on that if you love games like this.
Prey, like all great immersive sims, offers you a sprawling playground to explore where you’ll be able to tackle every single enemy, puzzle, and obstacle you stumble across in beautifully unique ways. While it doesn’t offer infinite possibilities, there are enough firearms, items, and special powers that few players will ever experience it in the same way. Spread over a whole campaign, there are massive parts of the game you will likely never experience in one run.
I have played it several times over the years and don’t think I’ve ever made full use of Neuromods to splice Morgan Yu with alien powers, which I know has an impact on both its story and how the world and its inhabitants interact with you. As a consequence, how you get about Talos One and engage with everything the game offers has to change.
Mooncrash takes that lengthy campaign and condenses it down to shorter runs where you can use accrued points to personalise your loadout, while each character will also influence exactly how you play because of their inherent strengths and weaknesses. In Prey, you will often find yourself locked into a specific playstyle after a certain amount of time.
This expansion, on the other hand, wants you to experiment in runs that can run from a few minutes to a full hour, where you’ll constantly be kept on your toes by changing circumstances and the need to both scrounge for resources and use your latent powers to their full potential. It is wonderful, and floors me with how it takes the slowburn nature of immersive sims and transforms it into a thrilling race against time.
I was hesitant at first as I stumbled clumsily across the moon’s surface, paranoid that an operator or mimic would ambush me only to take away what little health I had. But each death taught me valuable lessons, until I was picking up the right loot, only ever engaging with enemies in my way instead of picking fights, I knew I couldn’t win. But this never wrote off exploration, as you need to know where things are and how to take advantage of them in order to succeed.
While it isn’t the focus, main character Peter is forced to run through the simulation by his superiors again and again because it’s the only way he’ll ever see his family again.
As I play through Mooncrash for the first time, I’m reminded of Prey’s greatness and how it was never given the respect it deserves. Now the studio behind it is no more, returning to it is ultimately bittersweet, but still one of the greatest immersive sim experiences the medium has to offer. If you want to challenge yourself with a beautiful mixture of combat, exploration, and storytelling, give Mooncrash a shot. First though, hurry up and fall in love with Prey.
