Lore'd to Death
Join me, your host, as I dig deep into the lore of your favourite games, movies, and more to find answers to the questions that you didn't know you had!
If you have any suggestions, want to be a guest, or just want to say hello, send me a message at loredtodeath@gmail.com or @LoredtoDeath on social media.
Lore'd to Death
The Lore of Prey (2017) Explained
This week, we dive into one of my favourite games which is Prey (2017) to uncover the lore behind TranStar Industries and how they came to acquire the Talos I station. We talk about everything from the space race of the 50's to the not-so-distance future of 2035 to fully explain everything about this game.
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Space stations, aliens, and psychic powers– Prey (2017) has it all, including a vast swathe of lore dispersed throughout the game ranging from the not-so distant space race of the 1960’s to the not-so-distant future of 2035. If you’ve ever been curious about the complete lore of the game, this is the episode for you.
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Hey there, welcome to the Lore’d to Death podcast– a deep dive into the lore of your favourite games, movies, shows, and more! My name is Brett, and today I wanted to talk about one of my favourite games of all time– 2017’s Prey made by Arkane Studios, the same people who made the Dishonoured games. Surprisingly, this game has no relation to 2006’s Prey, which has the same name and, interestingly enough, it seems like the title was forced upon the studio when they would have preferred to name it Typhon or Starseed. But enough about the semantics; what I want to talk about today is the entire lore of the game. I want to go through the timeline of events in the game to figure out how the Talos I space station came to be, how it ended up infested with a hostile alien lifeform, and what their goals were.
Before we started I just wanted to ask that you rate this podcast 5 stars wherever you’re listening to it, or like and subscribe if you’re on Youtube. The only way I know that you’re enjoying the content I’m making is if you let me know! So rate the show, leave a comment, or send an email to loredtodeath@gmail.com to suggest an episode, or just say hi! So with that out of the way, let’s get on with the episode.
Prey takes place in the year 2035 onboard the Talos I space station where we follow the protagonist, Morgan Yu, and their brother, Alex Yu, as they wrestle with the fact that the TranStar station has been overtaken by a hostile alien life form known as the Typhon. These are all of the keywords that we’re going to focus on here: The Yu family, who work for the company TranStar which owns the Talos I space station which happens to be infested with the Typhon. And you might be saying, “Brett, you just explained 60% of the plot of the game, what’s going on?” and to that I would say, there’s a lot going on in this game, and I’m merely setting the stage for the information overload that’s about to happen. But to understand why there’s a space station that’s been overrun by aliens in the year 2035, we’re going to have to go back in time 80 years to the infamous space race that led to humans venturing into outer space for the first time.
In the year 1955, we had the Space Race in which the United States and the Soviet Union were both eager to one-up the other and be the first to launch an object into space. This year, they both made announcements to the public that this was their intention– to get a satellite into orbit around the Earth. And it was two short years later in 1957 that the Soviet Union won the initial race and were able to launch a beach ball-sized satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. The next year, in 1958, the United States managed to launch their own satellite into orbit which was called Explorer I. So both nations had successfully launched an object into space; that means that the space race is over, no?
No.
Later in the same year, the Soviet Union secretly launched another object– a deep space probe called Vorona I (which, fun fact, means crow in Russian) to let themselves know that their first launch wasn’t a fluke and that they were still in first place. The Vorona I settled into a secure orbit around the Earth-moon Lagrange Point-2 and began transmitting deep-space telemetry back to the Soviet Union on Earth.
Now, hold up a minute– what is the Earth-moon Lagrange Point-2? And, I’m glad you asked because this episode’s script was delayed an entire day because I couldn’t just leave this term alone and I had to research everything about it. I don’t want to get too into it because, with any physics equation, there’s a lot of information there and I’m more of a history teacher, not a science teacher. So, for the sake of understanding where Vorona I is, here’s the broad strokes:
The Lagrange points are points of equilibrium for small-mass objects under the gravitational influence of two massive orbiting bodies, of which there are five points which are typically notated as L1 to L5. For the Earth-Moon-Sun system, the Sun is seen as treated as a fixed object and the Earth-Moon system is treated as a two-body system that is orbiting the sun. Between these three celestial bodies, there are five points, the Lagrange points, where a gravitational equilibrium can be maintained. Long story short, if an object is placed at any of these Lagrange points, it would effectively stay fixed in place on that point because of the opposing gravitational fields from all three bodies.
I would urge you to look up a reference photo for this, because it’s quite interesting and these next couple of sentences aren’t going to make much sense if you don’t have a reference open. Basically, points 4 and 5 are effectively the most stable points, and they sit on either side of the moon at about a 40 degree angle on Earth’s orbit from the moon. However, points 1, 2 and 3 are the least stable options being on the opposite side of the moon, between the Earth and moon, and on the other side of the earth in line with the celestial bodies. There’s one article that states the equilibrium at these points is similar to trying to balance a pencil on its point and that, while theoretically possible, any small perturbing influence would cause the object on that point to be driven out of equilibrium but that these points are still useful for a small spacecraft that can maintain an orbit around these points without expending too much energy– a la, Vorona I.
So, the Vorona I spacecraft is in orbit on the Earth-moon Lagrange Point-2 which, if you’re following along in your textbook, is the point on the opposite side of the moon from the Earth. That was a lot of research and effort for the simple sake of saying that this spacecraft is hiding on the other side of the moon and telling the Soviets about deep space secrets. Now, if there are any physics nerds listening to this episode, I know that this isn’t the full story of the Lagrange points, and there are plenty of other things that come into play when talking about them, but after some careful consideration and plenty of rewrites, this is the best way that I can attempt to describe them in a couple short minutes. Please don’t be angry at me for my layman's explanation.
In 1960, two years after the launch of the Vorona I spacecraft, there was a sudden total communications failure. The Soviets couldn’t talk to their spacecraft about the deep dark secrets of space, and they couldn’t cope with being ghosted by their own creation. So they sent out a team of cosmonauts to investigate the disturbance. When the team arrived at the spacecraft, however, they were not prepared to deal with the cause of the disturbance. What they found was an alien lifeform, a shimmering grey-black substance that seemed to display the characteristics of solids, liquids and gasses all at once. It was truly an anomaly, and they could seemingly change shape at will and use their appendages as weapons. And so they did as they were extremely hostile, and all members of the mission were lost, and footage of the event was classified as a state secret by the Soviets. This is probably why Yuri Gagarin was noted as the first man in space rather than this team of cosmonauts because no one was supposed to know that they were up there, and of course the need to cover up the story was a necessity.
The Vorona I remained at the Lagrange point 2, still infested with the alien lifeforms which we would come to know later as the Typhon. This could not be kept a secret forever, though, and two years later in 1962 the Soviets were forced to ask the Americans for help in containing the threat. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev publicly agreed to terms and the two nations announced that they were going to make a joint agreement to the moon. This initiative was called the Kletka Program; Kletka meaning cage in Russian, although it seems like in-game it’s noted as meaning cell which is probably just a weird translation referring more to a prison cell.
The Kletka program was to build a permanent installation to contain and study the Typhon and would be launched in 1963. It was a small space station which contained a laboratory so that they could experiment and see if they could harness the power of these organisms. However, this mutual agreement would not last for long, as is typically the case for American-Russian relations. Later in 1963, the Soviets would rally an attempt to assassinate JFK which would bring a swift end to their relations, and the Americans wrestled control of the Kletka space station from the Soviets and launched their own initiative which they dubbed Project Axiom.
Project Axiom had the same goals as Project Kletka, in essence, but now the US had full control over the project which meant that they could get as weird as they wanted to with it. The main goal of the project was to generate new technology based on researching the Typhon organisms. And you might be wondering, what kind of technology can they possibly hope to make from studying aliens? I think to understand that, we’ll need to take a brief break from our history lesson and dive into what makes the Typhon worth researching and not eradicating.
Like I mentioned before, they were composed of a shimmering grey-black substance that was able to mimic solid, liquid, and gaseous forms. This meant that they could change the viscosity and shape of their form, making them very versatile and unpredictable. You might think that being squishy, or at the very least malleable, would make them weaker but it was actually quite the opposite. They were very highly durable, and even the weakest of them took quite a bit of force to take down. I think that this was in part due to the fact that they were able to change their shape. If they were able to change the solidity of part of their body at the time of impact from an attack, I would imagine that it would absorb the impact of the weapon and therefore reduce the damage done to their body, if you can even call it that. However, we don’t know what it is that makes them able to change their shape at will. There’s not much explained about their anatomy or genetic makeup, so they remain somewhat of an anomaly.
And because they could change their shape, there were plenty of different classifications of Typhon ranging from small to large depending on what shape they took.
The smallest of them is probably the Cystoid, which was basically just a circular mass and acted as a sort of floating mine that could sense movement and explode. The next largest would be the mimic, which earns its name by being able to change its shape to mimic that of an inanimate object. This is a really interesting form because it means that not only can they change their shape, but they can actually physically disguise themselves and change their outer appearance to match the material of a nearby object. This could be anything from a mug to a desk and more. The purpose of this was likely a defence mechanism; being able to change their form at will to blend in with their environments would slow down enemy attacks and give way for sneak attacks from their end. Very tricky fellows the mimics are, and there are four different sub states of mimics which were greater mimics– a larger, more dangerous version, and then etheric, thermal, and voltaic, which were mimics that were infused with different elements.
Then you start getting to larger Typhon like the phantoms, which were humanoid in shape because another kind of Typhon, the weavers, were able to reanimate the corpses of humans in order to create them. Phantoms, while being the size of a human, were incredibly agile and strong, which made them a fearsome foe. And the fact that there was at least one phantom for every human killed meant that the more people who died on a battlefield, the stronger the Typhon got. Phantoms also come in the same elemental varieties that the mimics can assume and also have the ability to almost teleport by phase shifting. This isn’t true teleportation, as they can’t just disappear somewhere and appear in another place, but is more like they are able to rearrange their cells and almost throw them at another location to very quickly move over short distances.
The weavers, on the other hand, were a variety of the mimics. Some of them seemed to randomly be selected to transform into a weaver, which was a large floating mass, even in areas where there was gravity. This is likely because they are using some kind of telekinetic or other psychic ability to keep themselves afloat. They are called weavers because they weaved what was known as coral which was a luminescent yellow substance that held a neural network that Typhon used to communicate and hold the neurological functions of those who are killed by the Typhon. Weavers, along with being able to create phantoms from dead bodies, are also able to create a variety of other Typhon types like cystoids, nightmares, poltergeists, and technopaths to defend themselves.
Technopaths are easily described as a typhon organism that took over a human machine like a robot such as an operator or a turret. Poltergeists are created out of a weaver’s attempt to make a phantom that failed for some reason or another. Poltergeists are given their name because they can disguise themselves in plain sight, sort of like the mimics, and can use telekinetic powers to hurl objects towards their foes. So, similar to the mimics, they are very much ambush predators.
Nightmares are the largest and strongest Typhon by far aside from the Apex. They are sort of like an advanced version of phantoms, but I cannot overstate how large they are. Fighting them is almost impossible for even a seasoned fighter, and the preferable option to dealing with a nightmare is to simply evade it until it loses interest and fades away. Their purpose seems to be to deal with aberrant Typhon who don’t share the hive mind, but the exact reason they exist is unclear to me beyond that.
Then, finally, there’s the apex. This seems to be the final form of the Typhon, and is born of the coral that is spread around by weavers. It seems like if enough coral is created, or perhaps if enough neural information is stored within the coral, that an apex can be summoned to essentially consume everything in the vicinity.
With all of that being said, I’m sure there are plenty of questions. Namely, how can I just gloss over the fact that they have physic powers? And that right there is the answer to why the scientists seem so interested in researching them rather than just eradicating them. I’m sure that, if they wanted to, they could have just blown up the Vorona I and been done with the Typhon from second contact, but the fact that they exhibit powers that are literally out of this world is too intriguing to let go. And so, to answer this very long-winded answer, they wanted to study the Typhon so that they could break down their neural patterns and implant them into technology so that humans could harness their psychic powers whether that was phase shifting, or telekinesis, or being able to somehow change your form like the mimics could.
And so, the United States expanded upon the Kletka Program with Project Axiom by expanding the space station and creating a supply hub on the moon to provide raw materials, storage, and support to the space primary research station. And, while the initial space program born out of the Soviet-American truce was built up very quickly, the scale of this project took a considerable amount of time. Over the next 14 years they would work on building up the station and moonbase and were heavily invested in studying the Typhon while keeping its true nature a secret from the general public and even plenty of the staff aboard the station with plenty of the goings-on being on a need-to-know basis.
In that time, the first weaver was seen on the station in 1965 before primary construction of the research station was completed over a decade later in 1978. Two years later in 1980, there was an incident aboard the research platform which led to containment breach and subsequent outbreak known as the Pobeg Incident that led to the death of a research team. Over the next few years with the danger of this project growing every day with the recent deaths and a lack of concrete results coming from their research, Project Axiom would be shut down in 1984– 20 years after it started. A tertiary reasoning as to why the project was shut down is that there was a lack of funding from budget cuts in the space program under the Reagan administration, and I’m sure that was a large contributor as well. All staff were recalled from their posts both on the research station and on the moonbase and brought back home and the station was closed.
But, a mere 10 years later, the government hold on Project Axiom was lifted and the research station started to see some activity after a decade of being left floating in space. However, it doesn’t seem like anything notable happens for the next 30 years or so. That may be because of the classified nature of the project, and there simply wasn’t much information coming out of the research station, or perhaps there just weren’t any major breakthroughs during this period. I’m not exactly sure which side of that this falls under, but we’re making another large time jump to the year 2025.
Enter TranStar Industries– a powerful and influential company that is central to the events of Prey. While there isn’t much history surrounding TranStar and where they got their footing, it seems to be a conglomerate of wealthy individuals who created a company with near unlimited funding to operate in various sectors like aerospace, biotechnology, and military technology. This company was founded in 2025, and in that same year they made a bid to privatise the Kletka station and its neighbouring moonbase. Much to KASMA Corp’s chagrin, who made a bid on the company a year before in 2024, TranStar won the bid and aimed to modernize the stations. They dubbed the moonbase Pytheas and gave it a much needed tune-up so that it was up to the task of completely redesigning and upgrading the Kletka station, which they renamed to Talos I. A member of the Yu Family (the seniors of which are on the board of directors), Alex, is appointed CEO of TranStar aboard the Talos I space station.
And it’s at this point that I wanted to pause and gather our footing, because it’s all new information from here on out… well it might have all been new information but you know what I mean. Way back in my preamble at the beginning of this episode, I mentioned the Yu Family, TranStar, Talos I, and the Typhon. And now, we’ve been introduced to them all with plenty of much-needed context. Right now we know that the Typhon are a hostile alien life form that have psychic and shape changing abilities that were found aboard a space-faring vessel in the 1960s. Since then, the Soviets and Americans have been trying to engineer a way to capitalize on those abilities by harnessing the Typhon’s neural pathways into what are going to be known as Neuromods to transfer those abilities over to humans. 65 years later, after the program had shifted hands and been both shut down and booted back up, the research station built around the moon was bought out and privatized by a conglomerate known as TranStar. TranStar’s board of directors was a collective of the world’s wealthiest people, and they had a vested interest in a research station in the depths of space where they could fund projects that might not get the green light on Earth. Among those investors were the parents of the Yu family, William and Catherine, who supplanted their children and relatives into positions of authority within TranStar. William was a neuroscientist and his wife Catherine was a businesswoman, so it makes sense that they would have an interest in the Neuromods that were being created from the Typhon. Their children, Alex and Morgan, were respectively the CEO and Director of Research on the Talos I station, while their cousin, Riley, was the Chief Administrator of the Pytheas moonbase. And know that we’re all caught back up with that summary, let’s move on.
Over the next several years after the acquisition of the Kletka station, TranStar modernized it into a state-of-the-art research station. To the public eye, it was just a corporate center and general research laboratory for various military and aerotech applications. But the goal all along, as mentioned before, was to continue the Neuromod research and quote, “redefine what it means to be human.”
A quick point of order here, I’m not sure how TranStar knew about the Typhon and the previous research into Neuromods. I did mention that the board of directors at TranStar were some of the wealthiest people on Earth, which in itself is an answer albeit not a great one. The worlds’ wealthiest people would surely have good connections in the government and just about every sector that you can think of, so at the very least someone had some insider information– potentially even William Yu who was a neuroscientist himself. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s very convenient that TranStar just happened to buy the Kletka station which was coincidentally in-line with their interests when, to the public, the station was nothing more than a place for deep-space research. I wish that we had a bit more information about this point, but I guess I’m going to have to settle for, “the rich see all”.
And, having their main priority being the development of Neuromods, which are implants that change a person’s neural pathways, you can imagine that testing these Neuromods might have come into the territory of unethical testing. It did, and TranStar was no stranger to unethical practices for the sake of furthering their goals. In 2029, four years after their acquisition of the Kletka station, they started a volunteer program which allowed criminals a second life aboard the Talos I. This might sound like it’s not all that bad, and rehabilitating criminals from gulags and labour camps could be a good thing… but not when those volunteers are internally referred to as test subjects. There’s rarely anything good that comes out of referring to someone as a test subject. These tests could be anything from being implanted with a Neuromod to see how it reacts with the human body to simply being put in a room with a mimic to be sacrificed for the sake of harvesting exotic materials from the Typhon afterwards. TranStar was able to get away with this for several reasons. One, they were volunteers sent into space for rehabilitation through science. Two, those volunteers were mostly Russian criminals from gulags, and they had already been forgotten by most and assumed dead or worse. And three, the station is on the other side of the moon where literally no one else can hear you scream. Just awful stuff.
In 2030, the construction of Talos I was officially completed, and I’m genuinely impressed that they managed to acquire the station and rebuild it basically from the ground up into a modern facility in just a short five years. Because the station was finished, operations on Pytheas, the moonbase, were dramatically scaled back because they weren’t needed for much else other than resupplying at this point. It was also in this year that the first Neuromod was officially created and was available for implementation. I wish that I knew which Neuromod it was that was first created, but it hardly matters. I just want to know whether it was a Typhon ability, or if it was one of the ones that was created from a human. See, Neuromods weren’t just for psychic abilities, even though I know I’ve focussed pretty hard on that point, but they were also generally for learning and enhancing human abilities. One such example could be taking the neural patterns of a world-class pianist and mapping them to a Neuromod. Then, the person who implants that Neuromod would have all of the neural pathways of the pianist, and would be able to play at a professional level even if they had never touched a piano. On top of getting psychic powers, I think that this was the real, more practical, use of Neuromods.
And it was around this time that Morgan Yu was appointed as Director of Research aboard the Talos I, and Riley Yu the Director of Pytheas which was being converted into a secondary research facility. In the March of 2032, Morgan Yu set out from their apartment in San Francisco to accept their position among the stars. After accepting their position and being on Talos I, Morgan went on to be instrumental in the invention of the Psychoscope, which was a device that could basically map the Typhon’s neural patterns, upload them to the cloud, and have them ready for use with Neuromods. I’m guessing it’s because of their help in creating the Psychoscope that they accepted to be a test patient for their Typhon-based Neuromods. And, who doesn’t want telekinesis, I mean come on?
There was one huge problem with being a test subject for neuromods, though, and one that Morgan was well aware of, despite accepting to be a test subject. That was the fact that they would have to be constantly adding and removing various neuromods during these experiments, and it was in the removal where the issue lay. When a neuromod is removed, the person’s memory was reset up to the point where they had that neuromod installed. Meaning that if he had a neuromod installed and then removed a month later, their memory would reset back one month to when they had it installed. You can see why this was dangerous and why it meant so much that Morgan was essentially willing to give up their life for the sake of testing neuromods, because it meant that they would lose a lot of time and a lot of memories.
There was also another side effect that wasn’t well documented at the time, and that was the personality shift that was associated with having their memory reset so often. Eventually, the patient’s personality would start to drift and they would become less and less like themselves. Morgan started getting erratic over time, resulting in being mentally unstable and prone to fits of violent outbursts on top of having drastic changes in their own personality to the point where values and opinions that they held no longer seemed to matter to them and they became almost an entirely different person.
This meant that there had to be special precautions in place when dealing with Morgan, and that they needed to be kept in the loop about what their condition was, where they were, what date it was, and what they did in previous experiments that led them to this point. But, here’s where things start to get a little muddy and here’s where we need to remember that Morgan did this voluntarily. It is on record that Morgan accepted being the test subject for the Typhon-based neuromods of their own will and it may have been their idea to begin with. It’s very important to understand that it was voluntary, because the following events are going to paint certain people in a very bad light, but I think that it’s worth taking everything with a grain of salt.
Morgan would wake up every time that they had a neuromod removed in a simulation of their apartment in San Francisco. This was so that they were in a familiar environment where they could relax and wake up as if it was just any other day in their life. They would wake up and receive a call that they were running some tests before heading out on their trip to the Talos I station. Assumedly after the tests, which were designed to be extremely simple to test for basic cognitive function, they would be briefed on everything that happened. Their volunteering to be part of the program, the tests that they had done, and what needs to happen next. This was all set up in a way that an understandable distressed Morgan was put in an environment where they could be eased into the reality of having large chunks of their memory permanently gone.
Initially, this seemed to have worked well, but over time Morgan’s sense of self started to deteriorate. They started to forget their passwords and request things to be done that had been done months ago, and this was all due to the constant wiping of their memory. And, as I mentioned before, it eventually deteriorated into a genuine mental instability. They believed that the work being done in psychotronics– their work– was abhorrent and that the very idea of neuromods was something that was evil. They began to deny their voluntary involvement in testing them, and started to think that everyone was against them, including their brother Alex who they believed was keeping them against their will. We see this in logs with Dr. Kohl, who acted as their counselor.
In an attempt to mitigate the effects of memory loss and the clear drift in their personality, Morgan initially recorded several logs for their future self to let them know that this was their decision and that any negative thoughts towards the project, like the feeling that this was all involuntary and evil, was a byproduct of their constant memory wipes. These logs were meant to help in the grounding process and bring Morgan back up to speed, but the longer this went on the less Morgan thought that the person in the recordings were themselves. They thought of them as a different person, and assumed that it was all a scheme devised by their brother to keep them in a constant state of sedation and memory loss. It got to a point where it seemed like Morgan wasn’t allowed to make any major decisions without their brother, Alex, present, because they were no longer in the right state of mind to be making any decisions. After all, the pride and joy of TranStar were the neuromods, and if it were up to Morgan they would have it all stopped immediately, the work destroyed, and have everyone sent back to Earth.
To this end, Morgan grew increasingly paranoid. And, it’s hard to blame them. They no longer knew what was real, and they were starting to have a real identity crisis on their hands. So they began placing contingencies around the station. They created back-up plans, stole and planted keycards, created stashes of equipment, and reprogrammed several operators to assist them and called them October, December, and January. However, it seems like these operators were created separate from each other, each holding a different ideology implanted by Morgan, and so none of the operators trusted each other and we see this later on with December and January constantly at odds with another with one acting as the hero and the other the villain in each other's' minds.
Here’s where things start to get confusing, as I mentioned before, as to who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong. Morgan’s state of mind was deteriorating, and they were no longer the person who they were before. They were paranoid, upset, and disoriented, but they initially agreed to the testing. Here’s where Alex comes into the story in a not so great light. If your family members was this upset about the work that was happening, and they didn’t want to be a part of it anymore, I think you might be inclined to listen to them and try to figure out a way that they could move on from this position and stop wiping their memory and making the situation worse.
Instead, Alex chooses to hold Morgan against their will in the simulation. Or, at least, that’s how it seems. I think a lot of this is up to interpretation, and the fact that we have an unreliable narrator really paints this in a way where Morgan is being abused and Alex is the abuser. Regardless if you think that Alex continuing to use Morgan to test the neuromods and keeping them in a constant simulation to achieve that end just because they agreed to it initially is inherently a bad thing, you could also see it from the point of view of the CEO who’s brother is now hellbent on taking down the company that you’ve been heading for several years.
Alex couldn’t realistically just let Morgan go, because Morgan knows too much. Sure, Alex could have moved Morgan to a different area of Talos I and tried to mitigate damages to both themselves and the rest of the station, but Morgan would have pushed back and caused physical damage to themselves and everyone around them. That much is clear. And they couldn’t send Morgan back to Earth because they knew about the Typhon and were directly in the know of the secret projects that TranStar was working on. So it comes down to, what’s more important– keeping everything that was classified on Talos I a secret, as they have been doing for decades, or giving Morgan the free will to make the choices that would make them feel at peace. You can’t have both, and so Alex’s only choice was to keep Morgan sedated and in a constant state of testing and memory wiping.
I’m not trying to justify Alex’s actions, which are inherently self-serving, but letting Morgan go means revealing the Typhon to the general public, and the knowledge that they had been lied to about this space station that had been on the other side of the moon since the 60’s. It’s a tough spot to be in, and I don’t think that either choice was the right one. I think that the choices were either to subjugate one person, or ruin the company and potentially the entire population of Earth’s worldview. It’s the trolley theory on a massive scale.
But, nothing lasts forever. The contingencies that Morgan put into place eventually all came together and the operator that he created called January sent an email as a wake-up call to Morgan to get them out of the simulation with the goal of destroying the Typhon and Talos I along with them. This was after one of Morgan’s memory wipes where something pretty odd happened. I mentioned how they would run Morgan through some tests when they brought them out of the simulation room before they told them it was a simulation. During this test the scientist that was running it, Dr. Bellamy, was attacked by a mimic typhon who had broken containment and disguised itself as his coffee mug. Morgan was then sedated and their memory was wiped once again, and when they woke up next is when they saw the email from January, grabbed a wrench off of a dead maintenance employee in the hallway, and broke out of the simulation room into the back rooms where they were able to gain access to the rest of Talos I despite Alex’s best efforts to keep them contained in the simulation.
Since a mimic broke containment and killed a host of scientists between Morgan having their memory wiped, Morgan explores a Talos I where all kinds of typhon are running rampant around the station and they have killed pretty well all of the staff aboard. Alex was unable to stop them from going wherever they wanted since the typhon were keeping him cornered in his office, so he just observed Morgan from a distance.
Morgan is then beckoned to their office by January, who says that there is a recording waiting for them that they should see. This is a self recording that Morgan made as a contingency to get their future self up to speed on the situation and on January’s side and they are given the rundown on how to destroy the station. The contrarian, December, warns Morgan that they should ignore what January is telling them to do and tells them that they should make their way to Alex’s emergency escape pod and leave Talos I. To do this, they would need to secure their access keycard which Alex had learned of the whereabouts of and took it as a means of forcing Morgan to confront him so he could offer a third option.
Morgan headed to the Neuromod foyer to meet with Alex where he suggests that instead of destroying the station and all of the work that had been put into it, or simply getting into an escape pod and heading back to Earth that there was another option. Create something called the Nullwave device which would kill all of the typhon aboard Talos I. And so Morgan had to choose between one of the three options laid before them. Which was the right one? It’s hard to say that for sure.
And here’s where things get a little bit dicey because there’s no canon ending, and here is really where the game diverges to being an open story that branches off of the decisions that you make henceforth. I don’t know if I would say that I believe any of them to be the right answer, but I don’t think that any of them are the wrong answer. The least likely to be the true ending would be to take the escape pod and cop out of the rest of the game, but even then I don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad ending, just the one that I think Morgan would have been the least likely to choose. Regardless of which ending you choose, there are a few things that would happen almost regardless of the choices made.
One, is that there are a few people who are still alive on the station aside from Morgan and Alex. Four, most notably, are Dr. Igwe, Sarah Salazar, Mikhaila Ilyushin, and Danielle Sho. Morgan can save all four of these people and they can give them further inside on the happenings on Talos I, and provide some much-needed help on their journey by giving them materials and items along the way.
Secondly is that TranStar learned of the containment breach on Talos I and realized the risk that came of leaving it unattended or, in the worst case scenario, having someone escape and come back to Earth with the knowledge of the typhon and all of the other criminal activity being committed on the station. This cleanup crew is led by Commander Dahl who leads his crew of private military contractors on a mission to kill anyone on the station and secure what is referred to as “every piece of Cobalt clearance level technology and research about Talos I”. These orders are given directly from William Yu, who is in so deep that he is seemingly perfectly okay with the idea of Dahl killing his children. You could argue that since his children were so close to the research that was being done, there was a high likelihood that they were already dead anyways, but there’s always the chance that both of them are still alive and you just sent a hitman to kill them, which happened to be the case.
Thirdly, upon investigating the coral that the weavers are… well… weaving, Morgan learns that the typhon are using it to build a large neural network to summon something. I kind of spoiled this point before, I suppose, but the goal of the coral was to summon the apex typhon, which would destroy and consume everything that it came across. This, of course, is not an ideal scenario so the two options to deal with it and potentially save the Earth from an incoming hoard of typhon would be to either use the nullwave device or blow up the station to kill all of the typhon.
Those are the three things that happen almost no matter what course Morgan takes. Of course, if they were to choose to simply jettison themselves back to Earth in an escape pod, then it’s entirely possible that none of this happens, but that also means that the station is intact and the typhon are left with a free pass to commandeer the station for themselves and ride it back to Earth so they can have the feast of a lifetime.
And that’s all I can really say on the main plot of the game. However, there is a post-credits scene which is… interesting to say the least. Morgan wakes up in a dark, mysterious room seemingly strapped to an operation table. Surrounded by Dr. Igwe, Sarah Elazar, Mikhaila Ilyushin, and Danielle Sho–the survivors that I mentioned before, except they are all operators instead of in their physical form, assuming that they are actually dead and these robots have their memories running through them– it is explained that all that Morgan just experienced was a simulation. And, yes, that does mean that we get a little bit of inception action with the simulation inside a simulation from the beginning.
But, why was it a simulation? Why would they want to simulate the entire station being overrun by typhon? And the answer is to see if they can exact empathy from a non-empathetic being. It turns out that Morgan was actually a typhon who was implanted with human neuromods in an attempt to create a hybrid that has all of Morgan’s memories… because Earth has already been overrun by the typhon.
The simulation was a very complex reconstruction of Morgan’s memories, and everyone in the room ran a typhon through those simulations to see what they would choose to do given the same knowledge and circumstances. They wanted to see if a typhon could learn empathy, because in all of the time that they had been researching the typhon, they were extremely aggressive beings that could not be reasoned with. The typhon could mimic and even potentially understand human speech through the neural pathways that they created with the coral, and yet not a single typhon ever stopped to consider that peace and coexistence was an option.
They wanted to see if a typhon was capable of empathy, because the learned empathy was something that they could potentially put into the neural network as a means to communicate with the typhon and potentially stop the onslaught of Earth. And so the decisions that Morgan made through the course of the game determine the ending at this point. If they were able to show empathy and save people, and not just kill them all and go full scorched earth, then Alex takes the typhon-Morgan’s hand and they go to see what they can do with this information. If they did just go full bad guy, then the typhon is killed and it is assumed that they start the experiment over again. The same thing happens if Morgan just escapes in the pod– the experiment is deemed a failure and they start over.
As for Morgan, it’s believed that they are long dead. Because the typhon-Morgan went through a complex scenario based on Morgan’s memories, we can assume that at least one of the options presented was what Morgan did and that Morgan was, indeed, presented all of the options that we saw. Which one of those options did Morgan choose? I would once again say that I don’t think there’s a wrong answer because none of the presented options really make a whole lot of sense over the others, but I would still say that the escape pod option was the least likely. The other endings don’t really matter in terms of which was more likely to have happened, but that begs the question of, “how did the typhon end up getting to Earth?” Especially if the two options presented to Morgan were to destroy the typhon or destroy the typhon along with the station. Both of those options end with the typhon aboard Talos I dying, so how exactly did they manage to get all the way to Earth?
And we never really got back around to Pytheas, the moonbase, to find out what happened there after they were finished construction on Talos I and the moonbase’s operations were scaled back. But the events of Mooncrash and the fate of Pytheas actually happened the day after the outbreak on Talos I, February 23rd. Just like on the station, the typhon wiped out most of the employees on the moonbase.
Riley Yu, who was in charge of the operation at this point, was one of the survivors and she was concerned about the outbreak and wanted to make sure that someone knew about what had happened on the station. Riley tried to send the base’s data in a vault operator, which was then intercepted by an enemy spy named Peter who was working for KASMA Corp. Yes, the same KASMA that tried to bid for Talos I and lost to TranStar just could not let go of that grudge from all those years ago, and they were committing acts of espionage on TranStar in some sort of effort to bring them down.
Peter was in a satellite that was spying on Pytheas, and his mission was to retrieve the data that Riley had sent in an operator. But to get to that data, he had to go through a simulation that was a recreation of the moonbase’s last moments. However, once he had finished the job, KASMA decided that they didn’t need him anymore and double crossed him, stranding Peter in the satellite that he was spying from. So, he managed to crash land onto Pytheas and take control of the emergency shuttle that would make its way back to Earth… entirely unaware that he had brought a mimic back with him for the ride.
And that’s the official story of how the typhon got to Earth– through a single mimic that hitchhiked on the back of a spy. I think that the typhon getting to Earth was an inevitability, and they didn’t really need a direct way there, necessarily, just like they didn’t need a direct way to get aboard a satellite that was in the moon’s orbit. It seems like the typhon just drift through space aimlessly and latch on to whatever they manage to come across. I don’t think that they have any specific goals or malice attached to them– I just don’t think they really fully understand what it is they’re doing. It seems like they just happen upon planets with life on them, multiply in a surprise attack, and then continue to feed until eventually a coral network is built and the apex can finish the job, and then they move on to the next. It’s not like they specifically chose the moon or specifically wanted to get to Earth– I think they just kind of stumbled upon it.
I’m not trying to justify the actions of the typhon by any means, but what I’m trying to get at is that I think it’s all one big cosmic coincidence, and that this all just happened to happen without any particular malice behind their actions. I think that’s what makes the typhon such a great antagonist is that they don’t have this big, grand plan to take over the world… they just have the ability to and accidentally achieved those ends because the Soviets put a secret satellite into the moon’s orbit. If the Soviets never did that, who’s to say that the typhon would have ever ended up on Earth? Maybe they would have just kept floating on by.
And that’s really all that there is to say about Prey, I think. It’s a really great game, and one that I feel was overlooked when it first came out. I don’t think I would have played it if I wasn’t in love with the Dishonoured games, but I love pretty much everything that has come out of Arkane studios and I’m happy to try anything that they release. That being said, I would urge anyone who didn’t play it to pick it up next time it’s on sale and give it a whirl. There are a lot of choices to be made in the game and so many different ways to play because of the amount of weapons and abilities that you can choose, so it’s one of those experiences that truly feels different every time you play it. I would highly recommend it.
And that brings me to my favourite question which is, what did you think? What do you think that the overarching message of the game is? I would say that nationalist and corporate greed are two very prominent, if not overlooked, themes in the game because everything that happens is because of someone’s ego, whether it be Soviet Russia trying to keep the typhon a secret, or TranStar committing unethical crimes for the sake of research and money. Or, do you think that Alex was a bad guy, or do you think that he was just doing his best given the circumstances of his position? I think that it’s a bit of both, and it’s really hard to say. Sometimes, the hardest choices are the worst ones to make. Someone is going to get hurt regardless, and you have to weigh which is more important. I think that he made a very pragmatic choice, and it’s hard to fault him for it, but I still don’t agree with the methodology.
You can find us online @loredtodeath on your favourite social media apps, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’re also on Youtube, so if you head over there and hit subscribe I would really appreciate it. If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, please send me a message wherever you can find me or at loredtodeath@gmail.com. If you’re using the Spotify app, there’s a comment section attached to the episode where you can submit any questions or topics. If you’re on Youtube… you know what to do. I would love to hear from you!
And remember, we’re all aliens created from a cosmic nothingness by sheer coincidence and we somehow have 99% of the same genetic makeup as mushrooms and about 60% the same as bananas. I say, reject humanity and return to fungi. Catch me in the forest spreading spores and spitting lores… okay that one was particularly bad. And I’ll lore you to death in the next one. C’ya.
