Prey
July 17,2006 - Can Duke Nukem Forever be far behind? Prey was stuck in development limbo for years, but it’s proof that a game on an eight-year hiatus can still turn out pretty good. At its best, Prey is remarkable, thanks to the topsy-turvy use of gravity and a successful mix of typical science fiction and Native American spirituality. It’s the smattering of extraordinary moments that make Human Head’s first-person shooter well worth playing. Prey’s biggest problem, however, is that these moments are scattered throughout an over-familiar corridor crawl that doesn’t meet the standard of excitement that its legitimately great story promises. Yet for the weaknesses in the action itself, the good ideas are executed well enough to make the game feel fresh despite its shortcomings.

Prey introduces you to its main characters quickly, but does a good job helping the player identify with them and establishing their relationships. As Tommy, a disillusioned Cherokee mechanic, you want more than anything to escape your heritage with girlfriend Jen and seek greener pastures in urban America. Both Jen and your grandfather are less willing to leave the spiritual trappings behind, and Tommy comes across as both desperate for a needed change and ungrateful to the legacy of his ancestors.

Tommy doesn’t spend long contemplating this predicament in the game, since he and his loved ones are soon sucked into an enormous organic spaceship and subjected to bizarre procedures in an incident overly reminiscent of a similarly gruesome scene in Quake IV. Tommy escapes and sets out to rescue Jen and Grandfather, although as the game wears on, his objectives radically change, and while he may begin the game as prey, he eventually becomes the predator, tasked with saving innumerable planets and cultures from future harm at the whim of the Sphere and its malignant overlord.

What keeps Prey’s archetypal story absorbing is its use of Native American spirituality as both a plot device and gameplay contrivance. We’d rather not give away the circumstances at the risk of spoiling anything, but early in the game, Tommy visits the afterworld, where he learns how to spirit walk. He also earns both a mystical bow and an ethereal raven, which joins you as a sidekick for the remainder of the single-player campaign. When spirit walking, you leave your physical body behind and can pass through various barriers as well as use your powerful bow to attack enemies. While occasionally handy as a combat mechanism, spirit walking is more of a puzzle-solving device. For example, one puzzle requires you to stand on a moving platform, then spirit walk to the control panel, where you can move the platform to the other side with your physical body still on it. The body you leave behind is defenseless, though, and if it is attacked while you are in ghostly form, you’re immediately transported back to it.

There are more surprises in store, although anyone that’s heard about Prey is already familiar with its gravity-defying walkways and seamless wormholes. Ceilings and walls are floors too, and the Sphere is full of walkways that allow you to defy gravity by walking up and down them, at which time the entire scene shifts around you as what was the wall a moment ago is now firmly beneath your feet. The walkways provide most of the memorable moments, such as when mutants attack you from the walls and ceilings that function as their floor. As you can imagine, you’ll often be plagued with a sense of vertigo. It’s pleasantly disconcerting to have your entire perspective change, only to be faced with the same environments from completely different angles. Usually it’s pleasant, anyway: there were moments where the dizzying shift in viewpoint made us a little seasick.

The wormholes connect various sections of the ship together, and what makes them most impressive is that traveling through one seamlessly connects you to the destination. You can even shoot through them at the enemies on the other side, and in a few circumstances, you will see yourself through the wormhole from a different perspective, such as in an unusual incident inside the bar from the opening scene, now usurped by the ravenous organic Sphere. It makes Prey sound open-ended, although the wormholes are just part of the linear progression, so while they’re fun and cool to look at and play around with, they don’t have a whole lot of impact on the game.

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