Arkane Studios’ Prey (2017) was a surprise hit for me, mostly because it was such a great experience but also because it seemed to come out of nowhere with no real hype. I had barely heard anything about it when it was released, but the promise of it being a spiritual successor to System Shock 2 (one of my all-time favorite FPS games and one of the most highly regarded immersive sims ever created) immediately caught my interest. I figured it would be a good game, knowing Arkane’s pedigree (I’ve enjoyed every game of theirs that I’ve played) but I wasn’t expecting to be so thoroughly enamored with it or to have my mind blown by its creative twists and clever open-ended design. Sadly, I don’t think it sold very well, and so I was fully expecting it to be considered done and over with by publisher Bethesda, which then made the sudden Mooncrash DLC announcement even more shocking. After about a year of radio silence from Arkane and Bethesda, they began vaguely teasing something Prey-releated and then a few weeks later made the official announcement the very same day the DLC launched.
Mooncrash is a quasi-roguelite game mode featuring a new protagonist on a new level, the Pytheas moon base operated by TransStar rival Kasma Corp. You play as Some Guy in a small one-man satellite orbiting the moon, running through simulations as various characters trying to escape from a Typhon outbreak on the moon base. As a roguelite game mode, death is permanent and you can't save, while a lot of elements like item spawns, enemy placement, environmental hazards, and so on get randomized every time you start a new run, although the level layouts and the general objectives you’re trying to complete remain the same. The twist, compared to other roguelite games, is that you play multiple characters successively in a shared, persistent world -- what you do as one character affects how things will play out for another character, since someone else has already gone through and changed things by the time the next character’s run begins. Each of the five characters has their own unique skill trees, stats, and abilities which affect how you play the game as each character. Your goal is to find a way to escape with all five characters in one run, but you’ll have to run the simulation multiple times to unlock each of them, as well as to complete their story missions and to figure out a good strategy to ensure successful escape attempts.
This DLC is a very different experience than the base game. While they share similar settings and have a lot of the exact same gameplay mechanics, the base game focused more on slow-burn atmosphere and exploration with a lot of carefully scripted events, a linear main story, and a wealth of side characters, side stories, and side missions to flesh out the rest of the world. Mooncrash focuses less on the story and plays more like an immersive-sim sandbox; you’re dropped into four adjoining maps (which are themselves fairly spacious and open) with a bunch of randomized variables and given a single primary objective -- escape. There’s still a backstory that you can gleam from assorted emails, audio logs, notes, and even the five main characters’ personal story missions, but there’s no “main story” to speak of, since it doesn’t play like a straightforward campaign -- it’s a mashup of gameplay mechanics meant to bring out the best elements of emergent gameplay and fast-paced, improvisational thinking. In essence, Mooncrash takes the gameplay elements of the base game and cranks them up to eleven.
