There's a lot more in the Prey demo than first meets the eye

Prey demo explorers have found a great deal more game than Bethesda and Arkane advertised.

The Prey demo presents players with a small, self-contained area of the game to explore, restricting them to this starter area so they don't spoil too much of the full experience. Or does it?

After completing the story sequence presented in the demo, players are free to roam the starting area, and more than one has found a way to circumvent the security on Talos-1 and explore more of Prey than the demo seems to make available to you.

In one case, this is due to to glitching - Twitch streamer hdfyeg35 managed to climb an elevator shaft in a way Arkane almost certainly didn't intend. You can watch this in the video above from 2:54.

In another, it looks to be a completely legitimate path through the level; Redditor Karma_Kurva used the Nerf crossbow and Gloo Gun in combination to ricochet a bullet onto a switch and open up a new path most Prey players will have considered inaccessible. Here's how to get to it:

While the first example here probably just demonstrates that the Prey demo is not entirely perfect, the second is almost certainly not a bug; Arkane loves it when players combine abilities in clever ways to find unusual routes through its intricate level design.

Prey releases this week on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. A demo is available now on consoles, although mysteriously not on PC, despite originally being announced as an all platforms taster.

We've said before that Prey feels a bit like Deus Ex, but System Shock and BioShock are also fair comparisons; it's definitely a product of the same immersive sim, Looking Glass lineage. The crossbow thing here probably gave that away.