Over the last three months, I’ve been chipping away at Prey, with the added twist that I’m not allowed to kill anything Odirectly. I’ve been broadly successful thus far, using traps, environmental hazards and remote equipment like turrets to Wile E Coyote my way through the beleaguered space station Talos 1. But now I’m faced with the ultimate test, my personal Road Runner. Down in the station’s reactor room, I narrowly avoided being squished by the Nightmare, the biggest, toughest and nastiest member of the hostile alien race known as the Typhon, and in a fit of rageinduced stupidity, I vowed to exact revenge on it.
This will be tricky, given how I originally swore a vow of—if not quite pacifism, then diminished responsibility. My tactics work well enough for basic enemies like Mimics and Phantoms. But even taking down a moderately tough enemy like a Telepath is challenging when you can’t just shoot it out of the air. I doubt whether it’s possible to kill the Nightmare without using shotguns or aggressive psychic powers like Psychoshock.
Nonetheless, I swore a vow, and it would be dishonorable (and boring) of me to not at least try. But I’m not
