Finished the game over the weekend. I have... mixed feelings.
The first half of the game was phenomenal. The mystery is doled out in ever so small chunks, crawling through the massive ship feels scary yet also empowering as you start to accumulate more weapons and abilities, and you're constantly encountering new Typhon which only heightens the suspense and mystery surrounding the plot.
Then a few things happen that make the whole experience go sideways.
First, once Mimics are no longer the primary enemy you no longer have to creep around the station slowly, and instead of walking around with my wrench at the ready, I was walking around with my shotgun drawn. That's also the moment when the game stops being a tense survival game and more an action game, which is a shame because combat in this game does not feel good.
Second, you start doing some serious backtracking. The Talos I lobby should be the freaking Arboretum given how many times I had to run back and forth through that area. You have to go out the airlock and chase down objectives all over the damn station, retreading areas until you're sick of the whole station. At this point I enabled an unlimited health and unlimited ammo cheat on my PC version and just shotgun blasted every enemy I came across because I didn't want to deal with Prey's combat system and awful encounter design anymore. I just wanted to get to the end of the story.
Third, the ending was dumb. I figured this out once I pursued the December objective and realized my character was starting at a Looking Glass device all along. Another couple hours and it turns out, just as I expected, that everything was a dream and none of it mattered. I know the post-credits scene is supposed to make it look like everything did matter, but it didn't. It was a dream; a simulation. Morgan is dead, the station was overrun, Earth is destroyed.
Honestly my biggest issue with the ending is that it invalidates itself (and this explanation gets a bit mind-bendy so stick with me). The simulation only works if you think you are human. In other words, as the Typhon organism sitting in the simulation and being judged by Alex and the operators, when you wake up in the fake apartment you have to believe that you are human, that it is normal to be human, and that everyone you have ever known is human. And this makes sense when you, the real human player, are playing Prey the video game, because you are actually a human and you expect everyone you interact with to be a human. However, if the game is saying that you are actually a Typhon organism in a simulation, wouldn't you expect everyone you know to be a Typhon? Wouldn't it be weird for you to wake up in a human being's body? The whole premise of the simulation would fall apart once you realize you are a human. At the end Alex very clearly says that they have started putting parts of humans into the Typhon, so you are clearly Typhon first human second, and your true nature is a Typhon. So how would you ever believe that the human world you are waking up to is business as usual?
Anyway all of this to say that the first half of Prey is an ingeniously designed experience, but it falls apart at the halfway mark and never really regains its footing. Classic example of a game that doesn't really know what it wants to be.