Set in an eerie retro future space station that's already fallen to a race of menacing, shape-shifting aliens before you arrive, Prey is a systems-based role-playing game that tries hard to modernise the cerebral thrills of System Shock or Deus Ex, but only partly succeeds.

Involving dangerous psychological experiments and taking place against an alternate history backdrop that's resulted in very different 21st-century technology, the premise had me hooked from the start. The art-deco-meets-touchscreens aesthetic is lovely, the soundtrack rocks, the surprising existential plight of the main character Morgan (who can be either male or female, as you please) is immediately attractive, and if I had to judge from the first hour I would have said "Dishonored meets Bioshock? Sign me up!".

But the more I played the more my main issue with the game became apparent: for every interesting system, activity or action I was keen to dive into and explore, there seemed to be a frustrating or punishing one standing in my way.

On arriving in the space station Talos-I Morgan is confronted with the idea that they have been the victim of self-inflicted experiments that obliterated their own memory. An interesting take on the familiar amnesia plot, this kicks off the need for players to sneak, fight, hack and space-walk their way to answers as the station's administration — and the alien threat infesting the craft — stands in their way.

Talos-I really feels like a place that was once populated with working people getting on with their daily lives before disaster struck. While there are the requisite audio logs for you to find and listen to while you explore, there are also troves of emails and notes that criss-cross between dozens of background characters and fill in the narrative.

Optional little story threads litter the environment to give an extra bit of interest to everything from the Nerf-like dart gun you might find, to the existential questions posed by the main characters' brain-enhancing experiments.

On the odd occasion that you do encounter a real live human, there's an extra thrill in recognising them from an email exchange and knowing that if you hadn't snooped so diligently you would have missed this extra context.

Exploration is vital, as every piece of junk you find can be recycled into much-needed items. Space-age recyclers turn banana peels, tin cans and anything else into base materials that you can craft into something you need, assuming you have the right plans. The pull of the narrative and the need to collect shiny things like a space-faring magpie means you're constantly pilfering but, for better and for worse, this mechanic makes for a state of constant tension.

This is because any innocuous item could reveal itself to be murderous "mimic", the standard alien unit that hides in plain sight and attempts to kill you once it's disturbed. This makes for exciting jump scares the first few times it happens, but eventually it means your constant searching is just slowed down as you creep about with your weapon drawn ready to strike.

The game's bigger bad guys are similarly one-note, hulking about and shooting elemental beams at you. Early on they can kill you very quickly, discouraging you from exploring or even entering certain areas. Killing enemies is laborious and repetitive, to the point that even in the second half of the game when Morgan was strong enough to trick or disintegrate them and move on, I preferred to avoid them entirely where possible.

Acquiring equipment (like the GLOO Cannon that slows down enemies or lets you build cover or stairs) or mind-altering psychic upgrades adds new tools to your belt, but none of it can atone for the fact that the enemies are never fun or interesting, remaining dumb and predictable the entire time. Given Arkane's history with Dishonored, this is a shame.

The other major disconnect is in the way you choose which aspects of your character to strengthen through the use of superpower-giving "Neuromods". Prey explicitly claims to be an open, Deus-Ex-style systems-based game where players of different types will find different solutions in the world, but this is rarely the case.

The early game practically requires you to invest in engineer skills in order to repair recyclers and hack terminals, for example, something I only barely realised before I got stuck with no resources against an army of bullet-sponge aliens. It's entirely possibly to build a character with the wrong skills to survive this game's opening hours. Again, this ceases to be an issue later in the back half of the game, but only because Morgan's access to powerful abilities makes it a moot point.

Ultimately, Prey is a mixed bag. Its setting is derivative but pretty, with its emergent storytelling often making for an eerie and atmospheric good time. But I found myself frustrated by enemies that seemed to punish me for my curiosity early on and act only as temporary annoyances later. There's a lot I like about Prey, but the other parts consistently made returning to play feel a bit like a chore.

That, combined with an ultimate failure of the narrative to follow through on the psychological promises of the excellent opening, make for an experience that is, above everything else, conflicted.

Prey is out now for PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One and PC.