the horror tone didn’t work for me and didn’t appeal to me, so I saw mid-game increased traversal ability and the trivialization of threats to be a huge boon to play rather than a tedium. The appeal of the hub-and-spoke model was uncovering secrets, for me.
Agreed that the lack of persistent + present npcs is a drawback of Prey but I attribute that to their system shock lone-person-stuck-on-space-station design.