T w e n t y S i d e d

I played the demo of this game way back in August of last year. Last weekend I saw the extra-special collector’s edition with various knicknacks of dubious value and an art book, all packaged in a felt-lined tin for $20. Oh yeah, there was a game in there too. Really I was just happy to find the game for cheap, so the collection of collector’s collectables hold about the same value to me as a stick of baseball card gum or a Bazooka Joe comic. Eh. That’s nice. Whatever.

I stand by most of my initial comments on the game: The Native American spirit warrior is as good an excuse as any to give the player super powers, and it works well here because those powers translate so well into compelling gameplay.

You can run around on the glowing paths. This might feel a little strange.

This game really does have a lot of new tricks up its sleeve. Half-Life 2 had the gravity gun, and they more or less built the game around the thing. It was brilliant, but looking back it seems like a one-trick pony. (This isn’t really fair. I did play through the game three times.) But Prey has several of these sorts of tricks, and all of them give me a “why hasn’t anyone ever done this before?” feeling.

The game has catwalks which go up walls, across ceilings, sideways, and back down to “right side up” again. The game never explains how they work. You just stick to them. Gravity retains the familiar orientation, but some alien technology prevents you from falling. (Unless you jump) This can be strange as you fight enemies who are on different catwalks with different orientations, and neither one of you is right-side up. Sometimes when objects fall or get knocked around you get a sense of which way gravity is “really” going, and the effect is dizzying.

Speaking of gravity… if the catwalks aren’t enough to baffle you, the game has shifting gravity. The whole thing takes place on a gigantic sphere-shaped spaceship, and within the ship there are areas with gravity pointing in all sorts of different directions. There are even areas where you can control gravity yourself, which you must do to navigate around various obstacles. It starts out letting you “flip” a room to get over a high wall, but eventually you’ll be able to aim gravity in all six directions in order to tumble through a three-dimensional maze, with the added complexity that you need to keep from going splat by falling too far.

Although Prey uses a different engine, it still looks a LOT like Doom 3. It has a similar bio-industrial style and the metal surfaces give off the same low-polish shine. The advantage here is that the game is much more brightly lit, so you rarely have that feeling of bumbling about in the dark that was all too common in Doom.

Another great trick the game has is allowing the player to “spirit walk”. You can leave your body and navigate around as a spirit, which can pass thought force fields, fire, and other environmental hazards. You can use this trick to reach control panels and gather hints from otherwise unreachable locations. An interesting limitation of this is that physical doors won’t open for your spirit, and your spirit won’t “stick” to the inverting catwalks. This means that getting through areas is often a process of coordinating movements between your spirit and body. This makes for some really interesting puzzles.

And finally there are portals. These two-dimensional doors into other areas add another layer of insanity to the game. Keeping in mind that portals connect two different locations, but they are usually not at the same orientation. So, if you step through one door-like portal, you may find yourself falling out of the ceiling in another room. Some portals simply take you to a different side of the same room, which might not be apparent at first and results in a forehead-slapping “duh” when you realize the confusing maze you’ve been running is just one room from many different angles. You know, not that this happened to me or anything. I’m just saying it could happen.

Things get really interesting when Prey starts to blend these concepts together, and you are navigating a catwalk in a room with shifting gravity in an attempt to reach a portal in the “ceiling”. It really is brain tickling. I like the puzzles a lot more than the combat, but so far this is turning out to be a really amusing title.

UPDATE: My bad. The game does indeed use the Doom 3 engine (modified) which explains why the lighting looks so similar. I remember hearing about the “Prey Engine” years ago while the game was in development, and I just assumed they were still using it. The Prey entry at Wikipedia explains that they jumped engines a couple of times.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.