An Easter egg from Prey has appeared in Arkane's latest open-world FPS title Redfall. Having recently been released to mixed-to-poor reception, Redfall sees up to four players group up to take back a coastal Massachussets town that's been taken over by vampires and their violent cultist followers.
Arkane's sci-fi title Prey was released in the summer of 2017 and while it's highly praised by many today, it unfortunately flew under the radar commercially at launch, selling very little in a year that saw the releases of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, Assassin's Creed Origins, and Horizon Zero Dawn among others dominate the gaming zeitgeist. Despite this, attention has been brought to Arkane's sci-fi horror title in recent years with Xbox's acquisition of Bethesda seeing the latter's massive library of games landing on Xbox Game Pass permanently. Prey has managed to garner somewhat of a cult following since, with many gamers discovering the game for the first time and realizing what they had missed out on in 2017. While many people seemed to have forgotten about Prey at launch, it's clear that Arkane never did.
Reddit user Tsundereployer posted an image on the Redfall subreddit featuring a bottle of Green Beetle Gin from Prey appearing in Redfall. The bottle in the image looks to be sitting on a table in one of Redfall's safehouses which are safe spots in the town where players can take refuge while they refill ammo and health as well as accept safehouse missions. The Reddit user also pointed out that the back of the Green Beetle Gin bottle names Transtar as the bottler, the tech corporation responsible for building the Talos I space station and the Pytheas research facility in the Prey universe.
The appearance of a Green Beetle Gin bottle in Redfall could mean one of three things. It's possible this is merely a case of a reused asset, which is very common in the realm of AAA game development. However, a studio like Arkane has always, at least up to this point, acted with immense purpose and precision even in the most minute details of its games. With that, this could simply be an intentional Easter egg nodding to Arkane's beloved Talos I space station, or it could perhaps imply a larger connection between the Prey and Redfall universes. Since Deathloop director Dinga Bakaba confirmed last year that Dishonored and Deathloop exist within the same universe it's not outside the realm of possibility for Talos I and the quaint, nautical Massachussets town of Redfall to share the same universe as well.
Whether the Green Beetle Gin bottle in Redfall is hinting toward a shared universe with Prey is yet to be known for certain. At this point, with how poorly received Redfall has been at launch it's doubtful Arkane would want to marry it to any of their more highly praised and adored titles.
Redfall is available now on PC and Xbox Series X|S.