The Horrifying Prey Iceberg Explained

good morning Morgan today is Monday March 15 2032. in the year 1955 the Space Race began between the Soviet Union and the United States in full force with both countries launching satellites and eventually targeting manned missions to the Moon but in 1960 a hidden Soviet Communications satellite named Verona one immediately ceases Transmissions with ground control unbeknownst to the Soviets on the earth at the time Verona had just made first contact with non-terrestrial organisms codename Typhon which had slaughtered the crew in an instant and so marks the beginning of prey the most underrated video game of all time that's hiding some of the most disturbing insane and crazy lore in theories you've ever seen buckle up foreign why choose this as our goal and they may well ask why climb the highest mountain five 35 years ago fly the Atlantic [Music] for those of you who don't know what an iceberg is it's a deep dive into the strangest and most interesting lore in theories in the series and prey has that in Spades but my Iceberg specifically are a little different as I try to make sure every single theory is interesting and as in-depth as possible instead of just trying to go down a pre-made list and for prey especially we have some really cool Revelations throughout this entire video so sit back and enjoy and as always thank you guys so much for all the support Phantoms are one of the most common and horrifying enemy types we encounter in all of prey and our foreign from Weaver typhons when they find dead and rotting human corpses which they then swiftly turn into monsters that we know and love while the standard Phantom's frequent Talos won throughout the game there's also many lesser known and more rare variants as well like the thermal Phantoms that raise fire from the ground the voltaic Phantoms which shoot electrical bolts and the etheric Phantoms which fire off large kinetic blasts potentially the most haunting thing about the Phantoms in prey though has nothing to do with their extraordinary abilities in combat but rather their haunting voices you see it's not uncommon when playing the game that you will hear what sounds like strange hums screams and screeches coming from the Phantoms hiding in rooms close by but what a lot of players might not know is that by specking deeper and deeper into the typhon-based abilities in game these horrifying screams start to become more coherent are you angry Morgan what does it look like what was originally scary sounds becomes even more horrifying when we hear the Phantom start to make remarks about Morgan himself and what is going on in the station which makes perfect sense considering taking too many typhon-based neuromods in game starts to change Morgan into a Typhon himself which is by the way also why security turrets and operators on the station begin to attack you if you level up too many times into typhon-based skill this starts to make us ask the question though then are these Phantoms sentient why are they trying to communicate with us in the first place some theories postulate that these Phantoms are merely repeating words and phrases they have heard from other people on the station or even mimicking the speech patterns of the Jose originally took over we can see examples of this where phrases we hear from the psychologists speaking to Phantom subjects can be heard being repeated by the Phantoms over and over in game you seem frustrated but then how are some Phantoms saying things like what does it look like the shape in the glass which is an obvious reference to the ending of the game where we find out everything has been a Looking Glass simulation so maybe then the Phantoms are actually just glitching out in the simulation itself but then how could Morgan's memories still see so many human-like behaviors from the Phantoms in the first place a perfect example of this comes from one of my recent streams where we actually found a phantom that became scared of Morgan and tried to hide in a corner I'm glad you guys like the wrench by the way all right that guy just teleported away that's no fun he's definitely hiding in the back 100 about to just sneak up on me there he is oh he's hiding what the hell I almost feel bad for Yuri almost looks scared though is that intentional oh what do we got here either way something weird is going on with the Phantoms in the prey Universe with my best guess being that their ability to take over hosts leaves them with some lingering side effects of the previous humans emotions and personality but maybe The Story Goes even deeper and the Phantoms themselves are actually screaming out in pain for help from something could the Phantoms actually be prisoners in their own body whose minds are now melded with their horrified host if there is in fact a way to bridge the gap between humanity and the biggest threat we've ever seen Phantom secret power and ability to take over a host in their mind is probably it for anyone who is into immersive Sims like I am you probably have become intimately familiar with the number sequence zero four five one for anyone that doesn't know this secret passcode originally came from Looking Glass Studios and their cult classic System Shock where the code 451 was required to get past the first door in game this code or some close version of it was then used in the beginning sections of most of their titles going forward like System Shock 2 and thief and to pay homage to this now lost and forgotten great game Studio of old many modern day Studios that work on immersive Sims like idos much real and Deus Ex 2K Games on Bioshock and Arcane Studios on Dishonored and prey include the number on a beginning door in all of their games and prey specifically we can find the sequence used to get into Morgan's office right at the start of the game a perfect place to put it in my book and speaking of books it's been widely assumed that the reason this code was originally used was in reference to the famous novel Fahrenheit 451 which tells the story of a firefighter who is being forced to burn outlawed books and is a cautionary tale about government overstepping their bounds and the importance of freedom and listening to others with ideas different than your own something all of us could take a look at nowadays however what a lot of people don't know is that some developers in recent years have come out and said that the real inspiration for the secret code is actually just that zero four five one was the passcode to get into the Looking Glass Studio headquarters in Cambridge Massachusetts during their Heyday either way it's an awesome Legacy for my personal favorite genre of games of all time in my opinion prey has one of if not the best introduction sequences to a video game of all time where a mysterious and relaxing day turns into a horrific and mind-bending twist and in these beginning moments at one point you enter a research facility where a group of scientists start to run a sequence of mundane tests on you before you presumably will be heading out into space and in that last round of testing right before a mimic appears and starts killing everyone you're met with these two questions a runaway train is bearing down on five people you're standing on the platform next to an enormously fat man pushing him into the track will stop the train push the fat man do nothing naturally anyone with any sort of Common Sense and humor pushes the fat man here but the next question only gets more crazy a runaway train is bearing down on five people tied to a track you could stop the Train by jumping onto the track but you would die jump on the tracks push the fat man do nothing once again the obviously correct answer here is to push the fat man but regardless of what you pick only moments after the real game of prey Begins the more interesting part about this entire sequence though is just how much it relates to the game as a whole and its deeper meaning because you see the entire game of prey is really at its core a game about choices and empathy and how every choice you make can have drastic consequences the choices to these prompts early on are reflected in the themes of the game later with options to either sacrifice yourself for the greater good or to cause chaos and based on these choices you will be judged in the final twist at the end of the game in fact there's even an achievement in the game called push the fat man that players can get if they kill Alex you at the end of the game which directly relates back to this questionnaire In Praise opening where this connection starts to get absolutely insane though is the real world parallel that almost no one knows about because you see one of the founding members of Arcane Studios the guys that made prey was actually the great grandson of famous philosopher Philip of foot who originally created the now renowned thought experiment called the trolley problem that this prey questionnaire is based on why this relates specifically to prey though is because Philippa was a staunch supporter in her time of a cult called The Eternal Flame based in Northeastern Wyoming that had actually been disbanded by an FBI raid following a horrific event where Philippa and other cult members were said to have sacrificed a group of overweight civilians via a train in order to I'm just messing with you guys while the actual events that take place during the story of prey are fascinating in their own right potentially the lore of what happened before the game takes place is even more interesting and most of the people who have played the games don't even know about it you see the universe of prey is actually an alternative timeline of our real world where in 1958 during the space race between the United States of America and the Soviet Union the Soviets launched a satellite called Verona one into orbit but two years later in 1960 All Transmission signals from the satellite immediately ceased and so a secret covert ops mission was launched for the Soviet sent rescue probes into space to see what had happened only to discover that Verona one had actually made first contact with alien organisms called the Typhon which had slaughtered all the cosmonauts on board this discovery was kept top secret for two years but eventually in 1962 realizing the threat that these alien life forms might pose the Soviets reached out to John F Kennedy for assistance from the Americans and figuring out this potentially massive threat so in secret behind the backs of the peoples and both opposing Nations the Rival country's main priorities became understanding this new alien force which resulted in the founding of what was known as the kletka program in 1963 which by the way in Russian means prison or gate a massive space Dome was constructed around the original Verona one satellite that still contained The Living aliens on board and this Dome was meant to Shield the rest of the world from the typhoon threat but back on Earth the Soviets betrayed the Americans and initiated a failed assassination attempt on JFK which resulted in the Americans taking full control of the kletka program and pushing the Soviets out with their Newfound complete control of what was the most mysterious power in the universe the United States government launched a new top secret and highly funded program called project Axiom massive Mining and research operations were set up on the moon in order to gather the raw materials needed to construct a research station around the now imprisoned verona-1 satellite and for decades after this United States studied the typhons and their power which is originally where the technology for the neuromods and so many other things in game came from but in 1984 this massive research project was finally shut down after many years of deaths and near outbreaks along with massive budget deficits and a concern from Top government officials that the program was not yielding any beneficial results so for over 40 years the station sat dormant in space with no activity going on that we know of until in 2025 the massive private company known as Transtar was able to outbid rival company chasma Corporation in order to obtain rights to the station Morgan you who we play as in game is actually the son of the founder of Transtar with Alex you being our older brother who we talked to throughout the game now in full control Transtar also resumed operations on the moon mining bases that had sat dormant since 1978 and started to build out yet another station around the previous two this new space station was dubbed talos1 and served as a massive research facility and also lounged for transfer employees and directors along with any anyone else visiting the new and improved station full of beautiful architecture that we see a lot of in game and this is where the story we actually play along in in prey takes place with the opening line of the game hello Morgan today is March 15 2032 being the day that Morgan was sent to travel to Talus one in order to meet his brother regarding some of the research they were doing on the station it's crazy just how awesome and deep a lot of the prey lore is that many people don't even know about because it really is some of the best and coolest sci-fi lore I've explored yet in my entire Iceberg series with a massive set of three different space facilities built around one ancient Soviet satellite and it also gives so much context to the game and why we see such a variety of places and styles the deeper we go into the station and provide so many decades of Rich lore and mystery to pull from the first thing that most players do when they wake up as Morgan in his room in the beginning of prey is run over to their computer and log in to check their emails to see what's going on but for players paying especially close attention you may have noticed that Morgan's password is actually FP eradox question mark for those that don't know this is an obvious reference to the Fermi Paradox which is a popular question in science to ask why we have not found any intelligent life yet even with the high likelihood that it should be occurring more often we can even search Morgan's room more and find documents and books that directly talk about this weird conundrum and the connections only get deeper too when we look at the posters in the room as well which show diagrams of the Fermi Paradox as well as references to the Drake equation which was a mathematical model meant to calculate the probabilities of aliens actually existing in the universe it's a cool Easter egg for those of you who missed it and was our first in-game hint that something strange was about to happen but for me it's the poster near the front door that has me really intrigued as it almost looks like an indication of how the tide often may have arrived into our realm of existence and if that is what this painting is of could it be that the Typhon stem from some sort of alternate dimension of pure Darkness from which they Traverse to find us considering we have almost no idea where these aliens actually stem from this poster may be our best indication anyone that is beat prey should know that there are multiple endings to the game that can happen depending on the decisions you make throughout your entire playthrough but maybe one of the coolest endings that many players have missed is the early Escape pod you can unlock with the help of December you see by extending a bridge past Alex's suite and getting a key you can actually end the game much earlier than expected and what a lot of players might not know is you can actually end the game extremely early if you're smart enough and find a way to climb up to the Escape Pod without even extending the bridge with either your jetpack parkour or the glue Cannon if you do actually get this ending January will warn you of the mistake you are making and you will be met with a black screen ending where you will ominously hear Alex say that this isn't the one before the game sends you back to your last save this is actually the ending I got on my first playthrough super early and it really got me thinking as of what was going on and honestly I thought it was a great way to break expectations and give you a big hint as to what was going on on really throughout the entire game and the simulation prey is a game full of different powers many ways to play and a variety of locations to check out but just because the game has a lot to offer doesn't also mean there isn't a lot of fascinating lost or cut content that never made it into the game in the first place for example in the game's files we can actually find tons of references to a massive gun called The kazovore it would have been a talking gun that had a bloodthirsty yet polite demeanor and fired multiple homing explosive discs that could fly around the map and find Targets to discombobulate after killing enemies the gun would announce its own heroics and we can even find many of these voice lines in the files to this day as placeholders exiting slow wave sleep no selector found framing new neural imprint imprint complete linking kazaber hybridic munition system to selector mu kazaber is awake on top of this too the gun would have had an Associated questline where at one point after killing too many enemies the kasivore would have asked the player to recycle itself in shame after which you could either recycle glit fix it by installing an empathy override so it would kill again or simply installing it into the core of a medical operator instead it honestly sounds like it would have been an awesome quest in game but sadly it was cut Midway through development due to the team's feeling like it didn't really add much to the story another example of this is the concept and the storyboard art we can see for players dual wielding wrenches which also was later determined to not be a worthwhile feature to work on on the enemy's side there were multiple ideas that were never used like an etheric nightmare or cannibal typhons which were supposedly mimics that would consume one another in order to create a greater Phantom who was resistant to all damage types and had to be hit from behind these cannibal type-ins too were involved with cut neuromod content that would have given players the cannibal ability which allowed them to eat type of material or potentially even human corpses to regain Health another interesting cut neuromod was called Smoke form which would have allowed players to transform into a black mist that could fly around the space station at Breakneck speeds but was cut because it just didn't fit the gameplay style well enough and was too op like say the fast-paced teleporting in the Dishonored series but on steroids overall prey is a type of game that excels in large part because of all the options and freedom it gives you and all the unexpected ways you can use your powers and abilities and I hope one day if a sequel is made to this underrated gem these ideas can be pushed even for further one of the main plot points throughout the story of prey is the personality drift Morgan has aboard his time on Talos one you see every time you install a neuromodded game if those neuro mods are later ever removed in the future then the host will forget all of their memories during the time of having the augmentation and wake up only remembering their life before on top of this extensive use of neuromods seems to have a drastic effect on human beings and their personalities with multiple entries we find around terminals on Talus 1 not only talking about how Morgan has changed over time but also how some subjects became completely different people entirely we know that on March 15 2032 Morgan first left his apartment to head to Telos one and we also know from recordings Alex shows us when we first got to the station that we agreed to undergo extensive neuromod testing to help Alex and Transtar with their research but over time it seems that Morgan's priorities change we know this because during the game we actually meet three different operators that were originally created by Morgan at three separate times the first being Jan January who was created in January 2033 and the following two being December and then October who correspond to their names months in the previous year 2032 the year Morgan boarded talos1 where this gets really interesting though is even though each of these three operators was originally created by Morgan each also has a very different goal that they're trying to help Morgan achieve the first operator constructed October would have been Ford seven months after Morgan injected his first neuromod and this would have given ample time for personality drift to take shape and this first operator tells Morgan that he should use the null wave device Alex constructed as a backup contingency in order to kill the Typhon on board and save humanity and more importantly the research but December the next operator that Morgan created after having his memory wiped even more times stresses that Morgan instead needs to escape and return to Earth to tell everyone of the horrible testing and research going on aboard Talos one that way can be stopped and it's the last operator that Morgan created and the first we meet in game that tells us that the only way to stop the Typhon is to blow up Talos one completely so it's clear that over months of harsh testing and personality drift Morgan has begun to believe more and more that what was happening aboard Talus one was Pure Evil and that the only way to stop it was to end everything where this Theory starts to get super interesting though is that some in the community have begun to believe that January was actually the one that caused the Typhon Outbreak on Talos one in the first place you see in the beginning of the game we escaped from our prison simulation we have been living out every day for months now but the reason that is is because before that a Typhon Outbreak on Talus 1 happened and caused the entire station to go into chaos which means when we wake up there's no one to do testing and instead we break out but the even more peculiar thing is that when we first wake up post hyphen break the first person we talk to is January immediately after waking up we start getting calls from this mysterious figure telling us we need to talk to him and after we do he reveals that a previous version of ourselves instructed him to blow up the station it's almost too strong of a coincidence and makes us begin to wonder if January may actually be behind everything happening after all January seems hell-bent on this goal of taking down the Typhon and it's clear it is hiding some of the truth from us in order to get that done so could it be that January was actually the one that caused the Typhon to escape and kill everyone on board Talos one after all if January's main directive was to destroy the station he would know he would need Morgan and his arming key in order to initiate the self-destruct sequence but in order to actually get to Morgan he would need a way to break him out of the grass of the other scientists and what better way to do that than causing an outbreak on the station and then leading Morgan to his safety away from the simulation this may even imply that Morgan intended for January to do this and would mean that we as the player are the ones that are responsible for the original type and outbreak in an attempt to make sure we could escape and blow it all up in a future version of ourselves disregarding the fact that this is just awesome sci-fi Concepts all around this Theory gets absolutely insane when we start to take into account that everything we are seeing is actually just memories being fed to us from Alex at some point even further into the future which means there may have been even more operators and versions of Morgan that we never saw and were hidden from us because remember we learn at the end of the base game of prey that everything we just experienced is a simulation in a simulation and we are actually a phantom being fed human neuromods to bridge the gap between humanity and aliens and this means that who Morgan really is and what his true intentions are have been completely lost to the memories of the past and the hellish Madness wrought by the neuromod tech infecting us with the minds of other Consciousness Alex is feeding us a real memory is of the real Morgan's past but only the ones he wants us to see and all interpreted through the mind of an alien whose mind is bending to extensive neuromod use from a species it has never encountered and whose molecular structure is completely different it's funny because to be honest when I first beat prey I thought the ending if anything was a little bit of a letdown it was all just a dream a lazy excuse for an ending in my book but after learning more and more lore behind it all it honestly might be one of the coolest science fiction twists I have seen in any medium ever just because of how deep it goes and how interesting the implications of it are when you start to look at everything more closely Arcane studios are known for putting a lot of fun Easter eggs and secrets all over their games but probably one of my favorites is one from prey where we can find this adorable fella found in the offices next to the atrium in the hardware labs this lovable glue snowman can be found hidden in a back corner behind an assortment of office white boards and stacks of boxes and on him he has a simple note that reads hello my name is Mr gluey mcglooface oh bro we're putting this in the iceberg you guys were asking why everyone had gloves this is why look boys they're making little Mr gloomy glue faces probably the best character I've met so far besides myself obviously I'm awesome it looks like nothing more than a funny nod from the developers and it was likely something constructed by the scientists on Talos one at some point as a fun gag using some of the tech they were developing one interesting thing I noticed though is that Mr blueface's hands are actually baseball gloves one of the trash items we find on dozens of dead bodies around the space station and this makes me wonder if Mr gluey mcglooface may actually be hiding an army of Offspring we just haven't found yet either way he is my vote for best character in the game prey has what I think is one of the best introductions to a video game I have ever played and at the very start of that it takes us on a helicopter ride across a sprawling and futuristic city where we get to see a happy glimpse into what is about to become a horrible nightmare but what a lot of players probably missed while on this helicopter ride is a one frame glitch near the start of the Endeavor where most players probably wrote it off as a technical issue if they did happen to even see it at all however if we freeze frame on that one frame we can actually see this which is not a glitch in the game but actually a very purposeful moment as you can see the helicopter is still perfectly in frame unaltered with only the view outside becoming a blue sea of nothingness you see this is what happens when the Looking Glass which is a piece of tech and game that projects anything onto a piece of glass making it look real happens to glitch out and as we learn only moments after this helicopter ride ends the entire thing was fake and instead you were in this room here surrounded by this Looking Glass Tech being tricked into thinking you were still on Earth so it's crazy to think that even before the big reveal happened at the start of prey we were being given these small hints as to what was really going on and if you go back and start to play this intro with this new knowledge you will start to also notice other things as well like why the helipad is a specific size with the walls too high to climb that aren't made of real Stone but actually glass as is common with games that don't reach astounding amounts of financial success Arcane Studios was never able to develop all of the post-launch content they wanted to for prey luckily for us though the one big piece of DLC content we did get moon crash ended up being quite literally the best and most underrated DLC for any game of all time at least in my opinion what a lot of players don't know though is that there are some very strong indications there was a second DLC originally planned and it sounds amazing you see in the game's files there are two books that have in their unique identifiers a reference to DLC hooks with one being named DLC underscore hook 4 underscore moon base and the other being named DLC underscore hook one underscore secret space station one of these books titled in-game pioneers of space industry tells the story of researchers on a moon-based code named pythius and this turned out to be exactly what the moon crash DLC was about but what about that other book title build flight log Scott Parker it details what would have likely been the other planned prey DLC we never got and boy does it sound cool Earth liftoff was at 0.900 conditions nominal pre-check certified for executive passengers male cargo light was uneventful until 11 33 when radar detected an unidentified shuttle approximately 30 degrees off flight path at 9 000 kilometers its drift and rotation indicated malfunctioning maneuvering thrusters there was no answer to Radio Calls Captain Cooper ordered a course adjustment to bring us alongside as we maneuvered within 60 kilometers a second shuttle appeared on radar in the vicinity of the drifting vessel transponders identified it as a military vessel we received a radio message to resume our original heading immediately Captain Cooper asked if assistance was required and the order from the military shuttle was repeated all highly unusual but then it got really strange the captain spotted it first there was a facility out there and it was running absolutely dark no lights radar transparent we were too far to to see any details but it was big Cooper snapped into action punched in a course to Talos and fired the engines we moved out as quickly as possible our passengers were clueless to the entire encounter our arrival at Talus went by smoothly in the passengers and cargo were delivered safely so what exactly was this supposed military ship that the Earth flight came into contact with and even more hauntingly why were there no signals of Life on board especially considering that they did in fact receive a transmission that would imply that other humans were captaining the vessel but the whole ordeal just sounds terrifying and even more so interesting potentially this could have been a horror DLC planned for prey that would have taken us to an abandoned space station full of zombified humans and potentially some new typhoon organisms that had caused the chaos or maybe it would have just expanded the prey lower more after all why is there a military vessel coming into contact with the ships headed to Talos one in the first place could it be that the governments on Earth are trying to spy on Transtar either way it's sad that this DLC and the ideas that devs had for it will likely never see the lighter day with our only hope being that a sequel to prey eventually gets announced and this abandoned and scary military ship idea can maybe make a comeback and hey I won't complain considering just how good Moon crash is even on its own we already talked about the passwords to Morgan's personal computer and office and why they are special but potentially the best password of all relating to Morgan comes from his secretary you see if you take a short detour on your way to Morgan's office and game right outside the front door is a computer and desk set up for his secretary if you actually try to use the computer though it's password protected and at this point in the game you likely don't have the necessary hacking skill to get in luckily for us though there happens to be a sticky note right on the side of the monitor with the password to the computer and if we open it up we are met with the now Infamous OMG hot boss if it wasn't clear already Morgan gets [ __ ] I'm sure that our secretary isn't the only person on Telus one with an eye for transtar's youngest son God we're hot praise the game all about freedom and creating your own story and gameplay it's what makes it one of the best games ever and because of that there's a lot of cool and interesting little quirks in terms of what you can do in the story and how it changes dialogues and moments around you and one of of my personal favorite examples of this is breaking into Alex's office early you see near the end of the main story you make your way to your older brother's offices in an attempt to talk to him and finally hear out everything he has to say about what is going on but especially ingenuitive players may have actually found a way into the office beforehand this can be done with parkour the glue gun hacking grab shifts or just finding some undiscovered path to the office at the top of the Arboretum but if you do in fact break in you are met with some hidden dialogue from Alex you an even more interestingly if you actually break his prize statue in his room you hear this that statue was worth a lot of money Morgan I'm going to be charitable and assume you're scuffled with a Typhon and didn't just break it out of spite it's cool that the game can react to the player going off the beaten path and whenever people ask me why prey is one of my favorite games of all time explaining situations like this is the perfect way to put it if you are ever watching a playthrough of prey and want to immediately get an idea of where someone's at in the game look for how much Coral there is everywhere the more there is the closer towards the end they are for those that don't know Coral is a strange orange-like structure produced by the Weaver typhons that based on all the research on Talus 1 seems to be a neural network of sorts from which they all communicate it's actually this massive amount of coral that is the result of the summoning of the Apex Typhon at the end of the game which we get to watch completely take over the station and send the Arboretum into zero g but as to what exactly this Coral substance is and how it works we still aren't exactly sure we do have this picture from a recent prey art book collection though which describes the entire process that typhen used to take over other species but even here we don't get any super in-depth explanations of coral itself rather we just learned that the mimics kill and multiply those mimics create new Weavers which create Coral Phantoms telepaths and technopass all of which then defend the coral after which the coral summons the Apex to bring about chaos we also know from events in game that the null wave device Alex you was working on was meant to stop this signal from the coral from ever reaching outside Typhon like the Apex but it seemingly fails to do so in the end or it was used too late the coral though what seems to be the center of the Typhon nervous system is never explained in depth and it makes us begin to wonder how exactly this floating ball of energy leads to such powerful means of communication some in the community have even begun to speculate that Coral is opening the actual space-time fabric of her Universe to allow other beings to come through or it could even be a conduit for some sort of faster than light travel that can send things forward or back in time either way it's just another mystery there's so much to learn about one of the rarest achievements in prey and moon crash alike is the starbender books collection series it has players with finding 12 separate novels in both prey and moon crash that contain in the stories of a man named Trevor Pulsar who is on a journey to find a mysterious and Powerful prism the reason this set of books is so interesting though is that they seem to be an analogy in many ways to the story of prey itself and maybe hiding some of the answers to the game's Biggest Secrets the Dark Star anomaly one of the first books in the series reads Empress two malane gaze past her Stern reflection into the inky black her angular features circum her angular feature circumscribed by the prime viewing Dome of the capital ship shatterthraks the Royal ashraunmer cleared his throat furthermore your majesty the Dark Star anomaly will gain momentum once it begins devouring systems within a matter of months the entire galaxy will be consumed from that point it will have enough Mass to pull other galaxies into its maw I suppose you want to fund an expedition to find this starbender prism the way you prattle on about this thing if it exists it might be the key to saving our galaxy your majesty there's only one man I know mad enough to take this on you can't mean Trevor pulsar and as a set of books goes on we learn more and more about Trevor and his adventures fighting aliens and making friends the more we read on though the more we start to wonder if some of these characters may actually be related to praise possibly Would Trevor Pulsar being an analogy to Morgan you the rebellious protagonist but nonetheless as The Story Goes On we eventually reach a point in book six Dark Star Rising which says the following the three sons of bell kalar were melting into one another in the sky Twisted in their death throws as a dark star anomaly devoured them with disconcerting alacrity Trevor had managed to navigate The Deadly debris whirling around the anomaly and crash-landed Empress tourmaline's Royal Raptor Cruiser at the base of Mount mul a synthetic geo-pyramid which they were now surmounting they stood panting beside a synth Stone altar its receptacle pulsing with Crimson light one Minor Detail I left out Trevor the emperor said between labored breaths we put this into the alternate devours the anomaly taking us with it in the process Trevor replied with a wink in his grim smile you knew the whole time Trevor wrapped his fingers around hers both of them now holding the starbender prism I was born for this Trevor replied and he pushed the prism into the altar could this be a clue that Morgan you and Alex you who in this story May refer to the empress were actually always aware of the dangers they were working on and that their plan May in fact be to devour not only the Typhon but Humanity with them in the process using an altar or in our case the research into human type and hybrids maybe Morgan and Alex from the very beginning plotted the downfall of humanity in order to begin a new age because they saw it as our only salvation from Extinction and we only forgot about it when we play as Morgan in game because of the extensive neuromod testing regardless I will have a lot more to say on this topic later on this list and I highly encourage any of you interested in prey to read the full set of starbender novels as it could be a full video even in and of themselves located in the guts are gravity utility transportation system of prey one of my personal favorite places in the whole game is a cool little Easter egg a lot of people may have missed under one of the fan Ducks is a set of containers that have red blood linking lights but if you actually look at the Engravings on these structures you can see corvo canister company established 1798. this is an obvious reference to corvo who is the main character from Dishonored 1 and a playable character in the sequel Arcane Studios other big game series so it looks like both likely take place in the same universe which could totally work considering how far apart both are but this would also mean that death Loop takes place in the prey universe as well since it has been confirmed by Arcane recently that both deathloop and Arcane are in the same universe could the tragedies of Dunwall or the experiments of time Loops in Black Reef have anything to do with the tech and lore we see in prey that happens decades and centuries later only time and more sequels will tell probably one of the most riveting choices in all of prey is deciding the fate of Aaron Ingram he's a captive aboard Talus one who is a convicted criminal and a Russian Gulag on death row who was taken from his captivity to instead be held aboard the space station as one of many volunteers who are used in heinous experiments when we find Aaron we can read his rap sheet to see that he's been convicted of human trafficking kidnapping solicitation of a minor amongst other many offenses and it's here we get to decide whether to let Aaron go from his containment cell or if we should instead release a mimic into the cage and allow it to tear Aaron's body apart and turn him into an alien host the decision can have drastic consequences on the ending of the game and is an analogy to the myers-brigg tests at the beginning but regardless of what you pick this event with Aaron gives us a good insight into the research that was happening aboard Talos one you see Transtar would take convicted felons and volunteers of people in jail on Earth and place him into holding facilities on board the station after which they would be fed to hyphen organisms in order to allow them to multiply and create more versions of themselves which could then be harvested in a recycler in order to help with the creation of neuromods and this means that all those neuromods we are using in game that were created before over 8 000 as we hear in some dialogue lines from Alex you are created off the backs of tortured and sacrificed humans a haunting Revelation for sure [Music] one of the most horrifying stories in the entirety of prey has to be that of Luca go Luca you see Luca was originally one of the hundreds of Russian convicts in the talos1 volunteer program where heinous criminals and sometimes Innocents with forage convictions volunteered themselves to become guinea pigs for top secret research conducted via the mega Corporation Transtar but in Luca's case he was an especially violent and evil individual on Earth he would jerry-rig entire explosive devices and commit terrorist acts and when first moved aboard Talus 1 it was said that he immediately bit the finger of one of the researchers off and swallowed it whole in fact in one early experiment a telepath Typhon implant was put into his brain and showed massive aversion to his mind considering it pure evil meaning one of the most wicked alien forces in the entire galaxy couldn't even stand him but as if it couldn't get any worse during his time on Telos 1 luku was given extensive neuromod testing and experimentation that over time just like Morgan began to cause significant personality drift at one point a neuromod of the award-winning Chef on board Telus one named William Mitchell was given to Luca and after the operation Luca awoke not only with impressive culinary skills but also a deep deep hatred for the real Chef it's because of this that during the Typhon Outbreak on the space station that Luca's first order of business was heading to the cafeteria and slaughtering William Mitchell In Cold Blood after which he took his name tag in uniform and assumed the role of the now murdered man and that leads us to meeting with him in game where we can find him in the cafeteria where he claims he is in fact William Mitchell and that he needs us to find a water valve regulator in order to fix his kitchen if we do help him out though he tells us to go grab something in the freezer after which he swiftly locks the door and tries to kill us and after we awake barely alive he calls and taunts us throughout the rest of the game leading to one of the most memorable side quests in the entire story where this tale starts to get absolutely crazy though is how many insane stories and theories revolve around this man Luca first of all in that freezer that we get locked in many players searched around and noticed lots of weird looking and unidentified meat all over the counters that certainly didn't look like eels which is the main source of food on Talos one another interesting thing we'll dive into later and this weird Discovery only becomes more horrifying if we actually go to a computer terminal on the station and try to locate William Mitchell's real tracking bracelet because if we do it leads us right into one of these pieces of suspicious and mysterious meat in the freezer strongly implying that Luca has been killing people aboard Talos one and storing their remains in the freezer to eat at a later date a cannibal amongst our mitts but Luca being a canimal might be the least of our worries because during his extensive side quests throughout the game we learn a lot more about him first of all he is in fact a very violent man and sets up recycler charger booby traps all over the station in order to try and kill us and stop us from finding him however even more interestingly we also get a lot of peculiar dialogue and speeches from him like this one if we're still here when it arrives it's it's just far away but it is coming closer it will eat your prison every person on board and it will still be hungry this scene strongly implies that will or really Luca is somehow communicating with Typhon and seems to have some sort of connection with them and a sense of a looming threat which for anyone who has played the Final Act of prey knows is coming very shortly in the form of the Apex Typhon another Super Unknown example of this is if you actually first meet Luca in the cafeteria already having the water valve regulator he will remark about how Morgan's mind seems to quote unquote transcend the future already knowing that he would need the item for a fix so it seems clear then that Luca threw all of his torture and neuromod testing has had his mind connect with the Typhon themselves hearing their call through the coral which gives him a greater sense of the impending doom and after all this would make a lot of sense considering in game if we take enough typhon-based neuroma odds on our playthrough as upgrades we will start to hear the Typhon on the station speak to us and warn us about impending doom 2. by far the most Haunting of these Luca Revelations though only comes if we allow Luca to survive until the very ending sequences of the game where if he is alive he will call us and provide us with this haunting monologue that most players never see him screams are coming from the future and you screams of people on Earth screams an animal makes one caught in a hunter's jaw so this proves that Luca does in fact see the future but if that's the case could it imply that the Typhon themselves have a special relation to space and time that we don't fully understand yet and only by completely changing your mind and becoming one with the Typhon yourself can a human understand this maybe that's exactly why Alex you was doing all the research in the first place maybe that's why a human Phantom hybrid is so important for the future of humanity but that's ethereal safer later on this list because the more interesting theories for now still revolve around our man Luca first of all is Luca really the bad man we've been led to believe after all with all this neuromod testing and personality drift it's hard to say whether or not Luca was actually bad or if it was just what the scientists on Talos once said in order to clear their conscience that they had created a human born of Pure Evil maybe those Original Stories are actually just the scientists coping with the fact that they've made a monster next up is Luca actually another example of the meta narrative in pray for those of you who don't know if you do the Escape shuttle ending the version of the Looking Glass simulation that comes up in the cut scene is actually a much lower version than the true ending implying that the simulation we are going through is just one of many tests that Alex is putting Typhon through with Morgan neuromods as we learn at the end of the base game maybe this Luca we meet in game is nothing more than a fabrication put into the simulation by Alex that is meant to test us and our new Humanity as an alien but potentially the more interesting theory is that Luca is actually a manifestation of our Typhon mind in the simulation itself what if the things we hear Lucas say aren't actually him at all but instead our real mind in the real world considering we are an alien in a simulation of a human mind when we hear Luca talk about this future Armageddon and the evil Deeds he has done maybe it's actually our type in mind trying to break through the simulation and alert us to something strange going on this could even imply that the reason the cook runs away and tries stop us is that he's afraid of us because he sees us as an alien and a quest that's about chasing a man down who tried to kill you is actually truly a quest about a man running for his life from a bloodthirsty monster that eventually chases him down to an escape pod and murders him and even more crazy this idea that Luca May in fact not be such a bad man and that it's all in our head for whatever reason may actually be answered in one of the cut transcribes from the game which some in the community were able to date a mine in the hidden game files and would have been the final transcribe you find on Luca's dead body in this Escape pod this is for Mu so you don't forget Transtar asks for volunteers for experiments in space promises to let us go from prison if we come to this one a life sentence over in a day like all Transtar deals it's false they take us up and shuttle like cattle take us to your prison feed us run tests but something is wrong I think they put us back on shuttle say the tests are over we are free they drug us heard us like cattle and then they bring us back here you bring us back here and kill us one by one feed us to your beasts while you watch and take notes I see it there m you on your uniform you watch as you open my cage let me see the beasts you keep here it is not evil I think it is an animal it is hungry but the hunger it is everywhere is hungry for thought it enters my brain leaves hunger there like an egg it grows cracks it's hunger inside of me it's almost all I can think about but it does not eat me maybe it does not like how I think or sees my brain as wrong or maybe you decide to stop when I scream I go back to my cell and doctors come with needles and tests and questions I bite their fingers swallow them whole and they beat me take me to Security Alarms guards try and move me and I kill them but their uniforms do not fit I am still hungry go find crew to blend in find the kitchen find an idiot man who lets me in and I look at him his suit size fits me I kill him and now I am him I do this again and again help people come to the kitchen see what they have kill them they are just trans star it's just yet another amazing example of how well constructed The Narrative and meta-narrative of prey is and just how many connections you can start to make when looking deeper into this story I can't stress enough how underrated everything about this game is and how much more love it truly deserves one of the worst feelings you can get in prey is accidentally stumbling upon the Escape pod room thinking you found a way out only to discover that none of the pods actually work in fact the only one that works in game that you can in fact escape from is none other than Alex Yu's personal Escape Route located in the Arboretum but what at first glance just seems like a problem born of the alien Typhon outbreak may actually be much more Sinister you see in an email exchange in game sent from Frank Jones a shuttle Bay engineer to Emmanuel Mendes he accidentally sends confidential information to Emmanuel when he meant to send it to his lover emmanuella emmanuella I'm not supposed to tell anyone this but I want you to know since there's someone I really care about the Escape pods don't work if there's ever an emergency on the station don't try to use them however I'm working on rigging one of them to work don't tell anyone this email thread proves that the Escape pods on the station were never actually meant to work but now the question becomes why well we may get our answer during the ending of the game when a man named Walter Dahl is sent to the station with an army of military-class operators in order to shut everything down and get information on Project Cobalt out in game there are many options on how to handle this including tricking doll into helping you by removing his neuromods killing him outright or many more but the question so looms of why doll was sent to kill everyone in the first place could it be that the heads of the Transtar organization never intended for anyone aboard Talus one to actually ever come home in one piece maybe the Escape pods never worked because they were never supposed to and all humans that were sent to the space station were secretly being sent on a one-way Journey from which they would never return no matter the outcome a harrowing Revelation for sure while in theory prey is a horror game of sorts there aren't actually that many traditionally scary things in the game sure the mimics and other monsters are terrifying at first but that feeling wears off quickly once you learn how to deal with them most places are well lit you have a lot of ways to fight the monsters and there's almost no jump scares as long as you take the time to check every room and by the way I actually really like that it adds suspense without being ridiculous like other games in the horror genre the gameplay speaks for itself without relying too much on the scare Factor however there is one moment in the game that most players on their first playthrough at least have never seen that for me was by far the scariest thing in the entire story if you head down into the director's office in psychotronics which is unlocked by revealing a secret door behind a wall and requires a specific key card you are met with a strange room that seems to have been for lounging it's simply a square area surrounded by a looking glass screen with Furniture in the middle and on the screen opposite the entry there's a small touch to calibrate button it's a button that hasn't shown up on any of the other screens in game so it catches your eye immediately sadly though for players that can't help themselves touching this button over and over again as it moves across the screen this eventually results in one of the worst jump scares of all time for followed by an attack from a phantom all right let's calibrate this screenshot you know bruh dude dude I knew that was coming and I still had a heart attack for those of you who are unlucky enough to have stumbled upon this without knowing what was about to happen I truly am sorry for the therapy you must be going through now mimics are not only the coolest and most interesting enemy in all of prey but also just one of the most fascinating in games in general and the reason for this is their signature ability to transform into any object in the environment they see and hide in plain sight only to pounce on the player once they get too close but one big question revolving around these little guys is how do they even do this and even more haunting are they able to turn into more advanced things like say humans first of all on the topic of how mimics even transform we can actually find a scientific research article in game that states the following time to place your bets on how this actually works my money is on number two obviously number one hallucinogenic field mimics project a field that causes observers to think they see the object number two pocket demand mentioned mimic swap places with the object in a parallel universe stays connected via Wormhole number three transmutation mimic reconfigures its atoms and molecules while maintaining its own subjective Consciousness as for why the scientists on Talus 1 thought the pocket Dimension theory was most likely it comes down to other research logs and entries we can find later in game that explains how during testing on mimics scientists found that objects and the mimics that turned into them themselves did not share any biological or cellular similarities meaning the mimics were not just rearranging their molecular structure to appear like another thing on top of this when taking space-time signatures of the object's mimics turned into the readings for the time movement and dilation did not match other objects that were real just beside them implying that the things a mimics were turning into actually came from a separate pocket dimension on a different space-time Continuum in fact some in the prey Community have even begun to speculate that the real reason the original aliens were able to travel through space so long to reach Earth's orbit was because they teleported into different pocket Dimensions to slow down the progression of time and not die regardless though as to how mimics actually changed the environment around them is still a complete mystery and they may be hiding even more secrets too because hidden in the datamine game files and released to some press agencies there was at one point a very gruesome and horrific animation in game that showed a mimic transforming into human beings and while this was never implemented in game it seems to imply that at one point in development this was an idea that was supposed to be added to the game and if mimics do actually have the ability to copy not just inanimate objects but humans too could this mean that some of the people we talked to in game were nothing more than aliens taking the form of a harmless human this idea ties very well into the ending of the game and alien human hybrids as well and adds just an extra layer of intrigue to a story already criminally under analyzed if it isn't already clear enough Arcane Studios loves to put hidden messages and meanings and even mundane in unassuming places and specifically in prey this happens a lot in the passwords and codes one of the coolest examples of this is a password to Alex used computer in his office which is chenguishen I probably butchered that for those of you that don't know chingua sen is the name of a Chinese deity that was said to be the god of the moat and walls or God of the boundary this God was said to protect Chinese citizens in specific cities Villages or towns from the dimensions of the afterlife that could wreak havoc and served as a sort of God protecting the boundaries between dimensions and all those that serve them this is a very specific analogy to use on Alex's password and game and may actually give us some Clues to his character could this in fact be a hint that Alex is some sort of god-like figure who has figured out how to bridge the gap between the typhon's dimension and ours remember that poster in Morgan's room that seemed to give us a hint about the Typhon and where they can came from well in that poster it looks a lot like they are Bridging the Gap between dimensions and breaking into ours or at least that's one way to interpret it and if that is the correct interpretation then maybe Alex somehow played a role in bringing the Typhon to Earth but how could that be the case if the Typhon are the ones that originally came to us well maybe Alex is simply the final key they needed in order to bring on the Advent of the coral and Apex Typhon and either way it seems clear that Alex has some hidden intentions we still aren't fully clear on to me at least this password is a further hint that Alex is pulling a lot of the strings behind the entire story of prey more than most people in the community think and he probably has a master plan to bridge the gap between dimensions and human alien hybrids alike that people seldom talk about in game instead only being left to small hints when walking around the talus one space station in prey or pythius moon base and moon crash you may have come across these weird machines often found in offices called reployers they sort of look like a printer you would find in a regular office but there's no real indication that they actually do anything of the sort modeled after the 1965 IBM 2540 card punch and read machines the reporter simply sits in offices in-game and does nothing and don't take my word for it even characters in game have no idea what they are used for in fact here's just one example of that from a note we confront from Sarah elizar chief of security remember it's The Eradicator fabrication plan we want not the reployer plan no one knows what the hell a reployer is so it's clear then that these strange devices aren't even understood by the people that have them but then what exactly is their purpose in the first place well some in the community think they may actually be some sort of secret monitoring device put in offices to watch employees While others speculate it could be some weird social experiment to see what people do with an unknown object after all corruption and weird experiments are commonplace aboard Talus 1. the real answer though May lie in our real world where in an interview Ricardo bear a senior game designer at Arcane Studios had some interesting things to say about repoers in game he explained that reporters originally started as a joke when one of the artists had made an asset in game that no one could figure out what it was so they asked them to remove it but somehow it seemed like the reployer kept ending up in the game every day even after multiple people were being told to remove it from the game entirely and over time the strange phenomenon became an inside joke at the studio until it was decided the reployer could in fact stay in game something it likely would have done regardless so what that really means though is that literally no one not us not the characters and not even the developers themselves know what this thing is one of the Lesser known side quests and prey called drunk tank tells the story of a man caught down on his luck if you find a specific transcribe from Emily Carter in the Escape pod bay she explains how she is worried about a co-worker who didn't show up for work who just so happens to have a severe problem with alcohol if you go and track this co-worker's tracking bracelet on the talus one personal computers you're led to the water treatment facility where lo and behold you can in fact find the person trapped within a giant cage of eels drunkenly falling into a hazardous fat filled to the brim with hungry eels is for sure a gruesome death but to me the more interesting part of this Quest is all the implications around it first of all eels are something we see all over Talos one but we never get a complete answer as to why we know they are used for sewage treatment as they love to eat waste and we also know that most of these eels are converted into food aboard tell us one as we learn from our endeavors in the kitchen but could the eels actually be holding more secrets too one idea is that they simply are something else that ties prey to Dishonored because in Dishonored as many of you know there are many eel connections but there's also some small references in games to eels having psychedelic-like properties and this could give us a clue as to what they're actually being used for aboard Talos one the main theory is that they're actually used for enhancing the power of neuromods on the station and as it's often said in many ancient religious cultures eels have psionic powers that enhance our understanding of the universe so maybe these little slimy guys are more than just water treatment and food the realization at the end of prey that everything was just a simulation is hard to grasp for sure and the follow-up Revelation that the Earth has already been invaded and overrun by Typhon only makes the situation worse but ever since this ending many in the prey Community have wondered about how typhen even got to Earth in the first place we know about many small stories in the base game of people trying to escape from the station or type in potentially escaping containment undetected but there was never any 100 conclusive proof on how it could have happened that was until Moon crash dropped and considering that almost no one in the world has actually played this DLC let alone even people that have played the base game of prey itself the ending is a huge Revelation that many people don't know about because you see at the end of prey Moon crash it's revealed that cosmocorp the people keeping you captive while you run through the simulation are going to let you die but your character manages to save themselves and crash land on the moon where they were able to then Escape presumably due to all of the knowledge they gained on their runs through the pythius moon base in simulation what some players may have missed though is that in the final seconds of the ending cut scene for prey Moon crash we get to see the space shuttle landing safely on Earth next to what looks like a beach but on the dashboard are two identical dolls this doll was one that the player character kept as a reminder of their daughter throughout the game but in our entire time playing we only ever see one doll not two this scene heavily implies that this event is how the Typhon originally got to Earth and considering Moon crash likely takes place before the end of the base game this would mean regardless of what Morgan did on the station Typhon would have invaded and doomed Earth in fact maybe Alex already knew about this during the time that the base game takes place as reports of things happening on Earth were already apparently going on now that I've made over 10 hours worth of content on video game theories and lore I know that some of the best and least well-known things seem to always come from little one-off books or texts that no one actually reads in the game and prey is no different because the three-part evacuation series of books tells a panic-inducing story about secret Advanced testing taking place on Earth Day One some Jets flew over very low and the sound was so loud it made me jump I don't know where they were from but they were bristling with bombs and Rockets everyone was looking up and the sounds of the Jets was echoing off the buildings but we could not see them anymore the sky was clear and I could see some pink smoke rising from the direction of the stadium then the sirens started I had not heard them since my childhood some people stood confused but my instinct told me to run run away from the stadium run away from al-zia some people were running with me but they didn't know where to go I saw a policeman directing people into a basement restaurant I think it was an old bomb shelter I looked up at the sky again and saw an airline it was not military I am certain I think it was going going to the airport while I watched it turned into glitter and without a sound it was gone a man near me began to curse I fell down and hit my head on the street day two I woke up still in the street an M35 truck was stopped near me and the driver was yelling at me to get in there were several people in the back already four or five soldiers and about a dozen civilians including children I got in the truck and someone gave me a bottle of water I asked what was happening and the soldier just Shrugged the pink smoke was now mixed with gray and swirled into the sky there was so much of it it seemed to cover the entire city we kept picking people up and the truck was full before we got to the highway we heard shooting the soldiers climbed down and ready their weapons the commander told me to drive the truck as far as possible to the west then they ran towards the shooting day three we had driven far enough that our fuel ran out more Jets flew over headed towards the city one circled back and made several passes over us but did not shoot that night in the desert we sat by the empty truck and listened to the booming of artillery flashes of bombs and lightning covered the Horizon in the morning our city was lost in what appeared to be a shimmering heat wave high overhead there were brilliant flashes of Lights some said it was an atomic bomb and others said it was God's Wrath today I know it was just an accident scientists that thought they knew everything but they did not the strange recounting of events is something not touched on at all during the main quests and prey and it seems to tell the story of Government testing that went extremely wrong most theories online speculate that this evacuation was actually the result of some early failed recycler technology accidentally being set off this line in particular stands out I looked up at the sky again and saw an airliner it was not military I am certain I think it was going to the airport while I watched it turned into glitter without a sound it was just gone that Glitter that this person saw was likely actually the output from a recycler charge going off as we know in game throwing a recycler grenade at anything causes it to explode into different colored balls of material something that could easily be mistaken for glitter but then there comes a question of what is all these giant white flashes and pink smoke extending into the sky to me that pink smoke almost sounds like the residue of a typhon-based ability going off and those white flashes could in fact be either recycler charges or nuclear bombs going off to me what is most interesting about all of it though is that it implies there were some alien testing going on on Earth as well not just a board Talis one which would make sense considering in game multiple high-power governments had their hands on this technology for decades before could it be that the United States government almost unleashed the Typhon onto Humanity much earlier than Transtar maybe all of those flashes smoke and weird glitter was the result of the United States actually setting off massive recycler grenade explosions all over in order to stop a type and threat that had just escaped or just an accidental mishap entirely either way the reach of the research going on at Talus one extends far beyond the walls of just the space station itself as we already discussed earlier on this list the mimics and how they function was one of the biggest points of research on all of Talos one with the main Theory being that they create portals to different dimensions and swap places with objects that they disguise themselves as in our real world but one very rare transcript in game might just reveal some very peculiar versions of these other dimensions titled a universe of shoes it's a short entry from two women on the pythius moon base we can find in Moon crash what's the emergency this mimic you brought me something is definitely wrong with it it keeps throwing various shoes at me are they nice shoes I'm serious it's like punching holes to somewhere a universe of shoes I don't know but my point is someone with sufficient type and abilities and a strong attachment to someplace else like like a place like Earth yes exactly I think you could open a door maybe even walk through it it would be more like getting sucked through a very tiny tiny straw I think I could tweak the containment Shield to stabilize the mimic we need Riley's permission to run this well what are you waiting for I'll be in the lab the idea of a mimic creating Quantum tunneling through the universe into an entire realm of nothing but sentient shoes is obviously hilarious but it also makes us wonder what other kinds of universes are out there in the prey lore because in this entry it's implied that mimics can transform into things they haven't yet seen before in theory from other dimensions and if this is true could this power potentially be harnessed in order to travel to new and interesting space-time Dimensions themselves for me at least this gets my mind racing on a potential prey sequel where at some point in the game we could gain the ability to travel to new and super varied locations and New Dimensions that would provide a huge Variety in environmental design and allow us to use our powers in more interesting ways and more than anything it's just another example of how cool and deep the lore of prey goes when you dig more into it even if the lore here is probably just a joke it has a lot of potential one of the coolest Parts about prey is just how connected the world and its history are for example almost every single employee on talos1 had a tracking bracelet and in game even for the characters that aren't involved at all in the main story you can track them down and find a valuable loot or just some more deep dives into the lore one specific employee though left strangely out of this gameplay Loop is the employee Marco Simmons he's one of the scientists we see right at the start of the game during our testing before the outbreak specifically the one that leaves to grab Dr Bellamy a coffee before a mimic sneaks in and starts killing everyone so naturally some players in the community started searching for Dr Simmons to get some more background on him but his body and tracking bracelet are nowhere to be seen anywhere on the station in fact Marco Simmons doesn't even come up in the company roster charts but Shirley was part of the science research team right after all top researchers like Dr Bellamy referred to him by name and seem to have a story passed with him so what exactly is going on well it might go a lot deeper than most people think we know from some other side quests in game that not every employee on talos1 was happy for instance in the sidequest disgruntled employee we learn about a man named Grant Lockwood who was terminated by HR but never showed up on any shuttle records leaving the station we find a transcript from Sarah elizar asking for someone to track Grant's bracelet from Deep storage and lo and behold if we do we can find his body floating in space just outside the station with a briefcase full of his belongings which includes a high-tech neuromod it's clear that Grant was trying to escape the station and fail dying in orbit but the fact that he has top secret research in his traveling bag implies that he may have been up to something along with the title of the quest itself this is further backed up by some logs we can find in prey Moon crash that confirms some Cosmo Corporation spies had infiltrated not only the Transtar pythius moon base but also Talos one as well Claire Whitton being just one example of these types of operatives so maybe Grant Lockwood was actually one of these operatives after all from certain angles in game it could be argued that his trajectory leaving the station would have eventually taken him to the moon and even more interestingly this idea of spies on the station would also be a perfect explanation for Marco Simmons what if both Simmons and Grant were actually colluding with inside Talos one that would explain how both seemed to evade detection on the space station for so long and also the weird events surrounding both because remember in Simmons case the last time we ever see him is leaving a room just mere moments before a mimic appears out of nowhere and starts what is presumed to be the start of the outbreak why wasn't Simmons attacked by this same mimic and if he was right near the testing rooms right when everything started going downhill how could he have possibly survived with no trace of his body anywhere else and even more interestingly we learned from January that Marco worked in the neuromod division and was responsible for installing neuromods on subjects in the simulation testing like Morgan January says he switched the neuromods that Simmons was supposed to install into a blank one in order for us to remember the day before when when we do eventually break out but the whole conversation is very short and almost cagey as if January could be hiding something and could that something be that Marco Simmons was in on all of this maybe as part of a plan to help January break Morgan out and cause a typhen Containment Breach could it be that Marco Simmons and Grant Lockwood actually were both high-level chasma spies that maybe even played a role in the events of the game itself in fact in the now many Reddit amas of employees that are still working at or have worked at Arcane Studios multiple questions have been asked about this mystery and every single time the employees respond that some people's Mysteries and Fates will be forever unsolved which implies that Arcane did in fact know something was going on with Simmons and Lockwood and my guess is they were both spies that helped orchestrate the downfall of Talus one you may have noticed during your time on Telus one that everyone you come across as an adult there aren't any children and that's because children were never allowed on the space station which naturally makes sense considering its real purpose is for hyper Advanced and top secret testing on alien organisms however that doesn't mean we don't see anything relating to kids in the games at all like the doll for Moon crash or even more interestingly this note in the base game hi Mommy I've been having bad dreams since you left Dr Preston said I should draw it and that would help make them go away I hope you like my picture and come home soon I love you Corey next to this note we can find this picture which seems to clearly be a drawing of a phantom like we see in game but how could this be after all the note from this child would have come from Earth not Talos one yet lo and behold here it is we know that telepassing game have the ability to read people's minds and alter how we perceive the world but the issue with this is we still have the physical evidence of the mother having the note potentially she was mind controlled to write it herself potentially she was mind controlled to write it herself but we can't find any other instances of anything like this in game to corroborate this Theory could it then be that this child actually saw the Typhon on Earth maybe the Typhon had already gotten to Earth long before the escapes at Talos won and at the pythius moon base another explanation too would be that the telepath onboard Talos won somehow saw the connection between the mother and son and tapped into the sun's mind on Earth in order to make the drawing but in my opinion that would make no sense because I just don't see the motive for a telepath actually do this what benefit does that provide the type and race of aliens but that would mean that the most likely explanation here is that the child did in fact see some sort of alien monster like this meaning typhen would in fact already have been on Earth think about all of those scary stories of monsters hiding in the dark and mysterious sounds we hear about every new Millennia on Earth what if all these ghost stories and paranormal run-ins were actually just Humanity making first contact with a hostile alien force that would later be studied on Talos one far into the future honestly this Theory does seem pretty far-fetched so the real explanation is probably it's a telepath doing something but either way something is weird going on here with a strong and if it really is a child on Earth then this story goes much deeper than we originally thought depending on who you are the ending of prey is either your favorite part of the whole story or a cheap way to conclude what was otherwise an amazing game but I think it's all the deeper implications of this finale and what a lot of people didn't pick up on that make it so great you see in the ending of prey we find out that the entire story we just played was nothing but a simulation and that at some point in the future Alex you has been injecting Morgan used mirror neurons into Typhon organisms in order to make them feel empathy for Humanity presumably in an attempt to save earth now overrun with aliens what this really means though is that project Cobalt was in fact initiated and for those of you that don't know this was a top secret project devised between Alex Morgan and other scientists that would potentially test if instead of injecting Typhon neuromods into humans we could do it the other way around here's the project Cobalt transcribe we can find in game in light of what we now know the typhen are capable of and not capable of it seems pruned to re-vest in the project Cobalt material igue neuromods can all already adapt type of material to the human mind there's no reason in principle the reverse wouldn't work say you managed to insert human neurons into a Typhon how would you know it's successful the new neuron structures would need to mature over a series of actual experiences or simulated ones what simulate the experiences Calvino he has right okay look it's fascinating but let's focus on what we know is working I don't want anyone devoting resources to this but from everything we can see in our time playing the game we never actually see any evidence of this project happening only vague Clues to it potentially being looked into with our best evidence being a small note on a whiteboard and Alex use bunker that reads backup project Cobalt in reference to the null wave weapon project itself this implies that project Cobalt was a contingency plan of sorts if the no wave device to stop the Typhon did not in fact work and judging by the end of prey it seems that very well may be exactly what happened after all think about it if the no wave device does does work when the humans on Earth be able to just use it after the Typhon made landfall to try and help on Earth as well so that's what the most likely case is then humanity and Alex or Morgan tried to use the no wave device in the real timeline and it didn't work which resulted in Earth falling and Alex you reopening project Cobalt in order to try and make a human alien hybrid that could speak to the aliens and broker a piece and that is what all the simulations are for for peace except I think it might be a lot crazier than that you see in Moon crash there's a character story we do while playing as Riley U where we learn that Alex you instructed her to upload her Consciousness into an operator in case she were to perish on the moon base that was now being thrown into disarray and right after uploading her Consciousness she immediately is killed due to a bug put into the operator from a chasma corporation spy there is no direct indication that Alex you intended for this to happen at all but looking at the end of prey again I start to wonder because it's at the end of prey that the only human we see is Alex himself with all the other voices we hear simply being characters from the main game who put their Consciousness into operators just like Riley you and that's where the horrifying realization sets in could it be that Alex you planned for all this to happen from the beginning we know from recordings of early conversations between Morgan and Alex that they were originally both hell-bent on doing deep Research into the Typhon and progressing Humanity forward no matter the cost and this is confirmed when we learn of all the horrible things Alex would do even to his little brother in order to achieve that goal so my theory is that Alex at some point while researching the Typhon could have decided that the only way for Humanity to progress forward was to sacrifice himself Alex knew that the Typhon were too strong and would eventually overrun Earth so instead in secret behind everyone he started to hatch a plan to figure out how to join the side of the Alien Invaders risking all of humanity in the process that's why everyone is an operator at the end of the game they all met the same fate as Riley u in Moon crash with Alex asking them to back up their Consciousness while knowing behind the scenes he would move the Pawns of other forces to have them murdered right after and it was at this point Alex would be able to use the collective brain power of all of his scientists to create a new kind of human being while earth falls while this is a crazy theory if it does have any truth to it that would mean that the eldris horror-like ending where we decide to trick Alex into thinking we are good only to slaughter him is actually the one ending that makes the most sense an alien who joins with the personality of Morgan and his past to figure out the biggest enemy we Face throughout the game was Alex you himself a man with a password on his computer that corresponds to the Chinese deity who was the gatekeeper for citizens from the beings of other dimensions a God that instructs the fall of humanity a man who creates false memories sacrifices all friends and family and in the process potentially transcends the entire human race into a new reality I'm not high I swear as we already know the entire story of prey spoiler alert turned out to be nothing more than a simulation but calling it only a simulation does a lot of disservice to the actual events that took place and also doesn't account for the fact that as far as we are aware most of what happens in Game is memories from Morgan's real life so it isn't exactly all just made up it would seem there is in fact a method to the madness but what if the simulation went even further after all if anything the final scene of the game where we find out we are an alien and can fight or play nice is the moment that seems most like a simulation out of everything so what if the entire story and world of prey all of the main plot and the finale where we learn everything was fake was fake when it makes sense to create simulations within simulations to simulate whether a Typhon would react in a good or bad manner towards Alex you in the first place and who is to say Alex Morgan or even the Typhon themselves are actually real maybe the only thing real about all of this is the Looking Glass Technology which is what can make anything no matter how fake it seems real maybe the entire game of prey and moon crash alike are nothing but top secret government programs to train people on what to do if we ever actually see an alien invasion I'm running out of ideas okay beyond the crazy and interesting theories about killer aliens evil personas and hitting meaning throughout all of Talos one the real biggest theory about prey is just Why this game never got the love it deserved you see when it first released the game came out to reviews including a 4 out of 10 from IGN and a 6 out of 10 from Gamespot and while I understand it considering the game did have some bugs on release and for some could become unplayable it actually in many ways reminds me of cyberpunk 2077 but without ever getting the Redemption story and love it always deserved it's tragic just how unappreciated this game really is and I mean it when I say praise quite literally the greatest immersive Sim ever made and one of the best games ever made full stop and that's not even to mention it also has the greatest DLC ever made that only an extremely small handful of people even gave a shot even amongst the prey player base sometimes in life things just don't work out no matter how much love you pour into a project no matter how great that end result is sometimes for whatever reason it just doesn't do well and while there are a lot of things we can look at and guess as to why prey didn't reach the audience it should have whether it be the bugs on release a game that was too complex and hard to get into or a lack of marketing that resonated none of that matters because in my mind this game was criminally robbed from the success it should have had it's the exact type of game I always see people online wishing would come out but instead of actually playing it everyone just complains that games aren't the same anymore but the truth is that so many games just like prey are amazing people just aren't giving them a shot take a look at this clip from Raphael colantonio in an interview with noclip talking about how he founded Arcane and how he led on the creation of prey and how those initial reviews and sentiment affected him it's this is a very hard world it's a rough world where people spend three four years on something for all their passion they make it frankly I mean we see the result creates a great game except that when it ships you might have some bugs and uh and that's it all it takes is one angry journalist ah sorry not pointing fingers of course and uh and they give you a 4 out of ten after having said oh I enjoyed this game so much for 30 to 30 hours and then there was this crash that could not could not allow me to keep playing four out of 10. you know that hurts you can see the pain in his eyes and feel the sadness in his voice Because deep down he knows this game is so much better than the credit it got and so underappreciated for what it should be but that's why this game more than any I can think of deserves a sequel something that now under the Xbox Banner could release day one on Game Pass and reach an audience the first could only dream of because I truly believe that if more people gave this game a shot a real one it would be not only amongst the pantheon of the greatest games of all time but damn near the very top of it and I mean that sincerely pray and even more Moon crash are games that should have revolutionized the gaming industry and inspired Millions Arcane studios please don't give up on this IP and the Amazing Ideas and world you have created there is something here that's so special and if a sequel does one day come out worthy to this predecessor I fully believe it will live on in people's Memories Forever but as always thank you guys so much for watching the support means the world to me and let me know down below what games and series you guys want to see next I really enjoy doing these and if you want to support me more make sure to check out the live streams I do right here on this channel every weekend or just share the content with friends and family it helps me out a lot until next time

Channel: FranklyGaming

Views: 189,169

Keywords: franklygaming, prey, prey iceberg, prey mooncrash, prey theories, prey explained, arkane studios, iceberg, gaming iceberg, prey theory, arkane studios theories, prey 2, prey sequel, prey game iceberg, iceberg explained

Id: eRmud76mMnw

Length: 84min 51sec (5091 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023