Who Are Yu?: Prey and The Power of Self-Determination

by C. C. Rayne | Nov 3, 2025 | Essays, Opinion, Video Games

Note: This article contains spoilers for Prey (2017). 

I vividly remember the first time I beat Prey. I finished it at two in the morning the night before a college exam. Holding my controller in shaking hands, I watched as Talos 1, the space station I’d spent hours exploring, exploded in a flash of light—along with my player character, the brilliantly ambitious neuroscientist Morgan Yu. I cried myself to sleep that night over the death, but it was a good kind of crying. I had just experienced a story that changed something fundamental inside me, though I wouldn’t understand exactly why until a few years later.

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C. C. Rayne

C. C. Rayne is an author of speculative fiction, who specializes in all things weird, wonderful, and queer. C. C.’s stories can be read in such places as The Razor, HAD, Demons & Death Drops, TRANS RITES, and The Deeps. C. C.’s poetry can be read in such places as Strange Horizons, Rough Cut Press, Eye To The Telescope, and moth eaten mag. You can find C. C.’s work and writing here. 

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