I was pretty close to the end anyway, so I finished off Prey this morning.

Picking up where I left off, I finally found a rocket-lancher-like weapon, which would come in handy later on. The levels also continued to get weirder, with one big gravity-based cube puzzle, and an area with portals arranged in a maze-like way, where I took aim at an obscured enemy at the end of a long hallway and wound up shooting myself in the head…

I had to ascend an extremely large tower, leading to another long shuttle sequence that involved landing on asteroids (with their own gravity), more enemies, and some timing puzzles. The voice in my head continued to pester me, telling me that it was letting me live so that it could give me a glorious future soon, but first I had to prove myself in a large room with a puzzle involving getting to the right platform by flipping switches in spirit form.

Endgame spoilers:

After solving that puzzle, I found Jen again. Well, what was left of Jen — she had been fused with alien parts that she could not control, and a battle ensued in which I had to kill her. Bummer. I then got whisked back to the Land of the Ancients, where I got a health upgrade, but then the spirit realm was invaded by the aliens and I had to hold waves of them off until a portal out opened. Back in the real world, Tommy took out his frustrations on a constant stream of spawning enemies with constant swearing.

Soon after, I finally found The Keeper, and fought through a few waves of guardians before he became vulnerable and I could finally beat him. The fight was fairly straightforward, though. And then I wound up having to battle through a whole bunch of other keepers through a series of rooms, though fortunately there was plenty of ammo.

And then, finally, I faced the “Sphere”, the voice that had been haunting me all of the way, which turned out to be a female human within, well, a sphere-like structure. She talked about how she had come to take over from the previous Sphere when it got tired, and it was now my turn to take over, but Tommy wasn’t having any of that and the final boss fight started. This was about the only boss battle in the game with any trickiness to it, as it took place in two parts. The first one involved shooting out the windows of the Sphere, and this was actually the tougher part since I kept getting killed by bodyguards that would portal in. After that, the second phase took place on some kind of rocky plateau, against just “Mother”, and was much easier.

And thus ended Prey, after a little less than 10 hours, according to Steam. Some others say they did it in only 6 hours, but I guess I like to snoop around at a bit of a slower pace. Overall, the level design was pretty good throughout the game, but its weakness was the combat. The vast majority of the enemies are the same grunt type that aren’t very interesting to fight and get repetitive, and against the tougher ones you could just die and come back, so there was no need to develop good tactics.