Prey 2017: GLOO Cannon Secrets and the Nightmare Difficulty Mind

Arkane’s Prey uses a physics sandbox to reward player creativity in ways most players never discover because the game presents itself as a shooter and its best moments are engineering problems. The GLOO Cannon — a foam hardener gun — is the most versatile non-combat tool in the game, enabling access to areas above the intended path, blocking environments, and creating platforms from nothing.

The secret content accessible through GLOO Canon physics: multiple story-critical areas have alternate entrances visible from the main path but unreachable without building a foam staircase. These alternate entrances bypass locked doors, avoid ambush placements, and in two cases provide access to rooms that contain notes resolving mysteries the main questline never explains explicitly.

The Nightmare difficulty’s most significant mechanical change is not enemy health or damage — it is that the Typhon enemies develop new behaviors triggered by the player’s abilities. The more Typhon abilities Morgan Yu learns, the more dangerous certain enemy types become. The progression system and the difficulty system are adversarial at the highest difficulty, meaning optimising your character makes the game harder in specific ways.

The simulation revelation — that Morgan has been in a training simulation the entire game, with every Typhon encounter being a controlled test — recontextualises every environmental detail. The inconsistencies in Talos I’s layout, the impossible rooms, the NPCs whose stories do not quite fit together: all of it becomes evidence of simulation seams rather than worldbuilding gaps.