Game of the Year 2017: Rebekah’s picks

Rebekah’s Game of the Year #7 – Prey

I don’t do spooks, friends. Any game that possibly falls on the spectrum of “scary” for me, be it jump scares or psychological trips, are all but non-starters for me. I originally started streaming Prey as a sort of joke, since only our reviewer on staff was playing it at the time and it seemed to be getting some noise. I chickened out after the first major segment initially and didn’t expect to return. But something stuck with me, and I eventually puttered my way through, slowly, and off-camera this time. Despite my regular shrieking and cussing, something about Prey hooked me and kept me to the game’s fabulously twisted end.

There have been numerous excellent think pieces on what works about Prey: its exploration of gender and gaslighting, its questions about what separates humans from any other hypothetical being, the way it explores trust in sciences, people and in oneself, as well as the way it looks at self-knowledge and self-reflection. I have nothing more brilliant to add than that I reveled in all of this while aboard Talos I. I may now be afraid of my own coffee cup, but Morgan Yu’s journey caused my mental wheels to turn in a way that few other games manage to do.