If you haven’t played it, 2017’s Prey is an excellent Bioshock-style game from Arkane Studios, the creators of Dishonored. A few months ago the studio released a new Prey expansion, Prey: Mooncrash, and it was looking likely that a Prey Game Awards reveal would be coming to the show later today. A teaser from yesterday suggested as much, but now the full trailer has actually dropped ahead of the show. The trailer reveals that the new game is Prey: Typhon Hunter, and the game’s release date is far sooner than we expected. It’s next week in fact, on Tuesday, December 11.
The tease for the trailer appeared early yesterday, on the official Prey Twitter feed. It showed a short video gif of a drinking bird on a desk, which didn’t appear to be related to any previously related Prey material. The CGI is high quality, far better than the game’s visuals, and was almost certainly taken from a pre-rendered trailer. We believed the full CGI trailer would almost certainly appear at The Game Awards tomorrow, which it still might do, but instead developers Arkane Studios and Bethesda Softworks decided to release the trailer early.
In the tease released on Twitter the water in the glass seemed to turn black when the bird “drank” it, suggesting that it was actually a Typhon Mimic in disguise. Now we’ve got a look at the final trailer, which is a mix of CGI and in-engine gameplay, it’s more likely that the drinking bird itself is the Mimic. The trailer starts by taking an ominous look at various items of furniture, which is not something we ever expected to type. The music picks up and intensifies as a cat clock ticks in the background. It quickly becomes obvious that a number of items, including the bird, a banana, an iconic Prey coffee mug, and a chair, are not only moving between shots, they also seem to have some sort of black goo on them. Eventually, after a very long close-up on a comfortable chair, it comes alive and launches itself at the camera.
“These things will kill you,” the trailer promises. “Kill them first.” We then get some snippets of gameplay footage, showing Prey‘s notorious spider-like Typhon Mimics scuttling about several locations from the main Prey campaign, including a bar, an office, and the opening lab area location of the game. One player takes on the role of Hunter, who has to track down and kill five other players playing as Mimics. Mimics hide by imitating objects, and in Prey they could attack if the player didn’t spot them quick enough. We do see a Mimic attack the Hunter player in the trailer, so they don’t seem to be harmless. The Hunter character is armed however, with at least a pipe wrench and a pistol.
This is the proper reveal, at last of Prey: Typhon Hunter, a multiplayer-focused expansion which was briefly announced at E3 this year, although only Prey: Mooncrash was actually shown. It was supposed to launch in the Summer before being delayed, but was always promised for this year. It seems Arkane are making good on that promise. Typhon Hunter can be played with or without VR, which should be interesting, and is basically a game of hide-and-seek where a player has to find five other human opponents hiding as Typhon Mimics.
It sounds and looks a lot like Prop Hunt, the popular Garry’s Mod game, which also later made an appearance as a mode for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Call of Duty: WW2. The gist of the game is that one team of human hunters has to find another team who are disguised as various objects in the environment. In Prop Hunt, however, the props can move but can’t fight back, and it has a team of hunters rather than just a single player going up against five alien monsters.
Prey: Typhon Hunter will be a free update for players who own Prey: Mooncrash or Prey Deluxe Edition when it releases next week. Presumably the trailer will still feature at the Game Awards, and there may even be a further look at the new mode’s gameplay too. We’ll find out in a few hours, but either way Prey owners will be able to try for themselves on December 11.
