Prey

Prey is an interesting game. It's one of the last mainstream FPSes to be made for PC with consoles as an afterthought. It's a 3D Realms game that took over a decade to make, but when it was released wasn't a complete trainwreck. It's a game that was one of the biggest releases of the year when it came out, but is now forgotten and obscure. While it's not exactly rare, it's a hard to get game for something that came out in 2006. It was de-listed from Steam when their serial generator ran out of unique cd keys and 2K Games apparently felt it was unnecessary to produce a new set of keys. Bethesda, the current owner of the franchise, is unlikely to touch the series with a ten foot pole considering the black eye that was Prey 2 and the alleged bad blood its cancellation caused between publisher Bethesda, who cited the sequel's poor quality, and developer Human Head, who say that it was sabotaged by its publisher in a hostile takeover attempt. The end result is a game that exists, nearly forgotten, inside a weird limbo.

The protagonist of the game, Tommy Preyman, is an anomaly among 3D Realms 'ego shooter' protagonists in that he's generally a sympathetic everyman character instead of a complete dickhead. He doesn't really stand out enough to be favorable, but aside from his tendency to say stuff like, "I don't believe in that mystical bullshit," while literally standing inside of a magical Cherokee realm, he doesn't detract much of anything, either. It's refreshing that he's a Native American character who is just a normal guy as opposed to Turok or Chief Thunder or some shit, at least, and his emotional arc is believable albeit not entirely inspired. His grandfather is a different story-- the cliche wise old chief character you may recognize from Dances with Wolves or any number of Steven Segal movies... although, to be honest, his brand of mystic junk seems more in line with Old Chinese Kung Fu Guy and/or Obi Wan Kenobi than anything specifically Native American. There's also Tommy's girlfriend who is half-Cherokee/half-elf and mostly just shouts, "Help me!" while being dragged off to places just beyond his reach.

The basic premise of the game, in which an alien race seeded the human species on Earth long ago and return every thousand or so years in order to harvest them as a food source (shouldn't the game be called Livestock?) is certainly interesting, but the game does absolutely nothing with it besides dryly explain it with labored exposition dumps. Missed opportunity, oh well.

Things start out strong enough. You can explore a bar filled with fully-interactive gambling and arcade game cabinets and this is followed up by an alien abduction sequence which remains cool even today. Immediately after Tommy escapes the game begins throwing gimmicks at you one after another. These gimmicks start out cool but once you find out that there are only three of them, repeated over and over with diminishing returns over the course of this ~8 hour campaign, they just become tiresome.

The gimmicks include:

Portals! Though Prey would be outdone entirely by Portal only a year later, Prey's use of Portals is a little bit more creative given that the reigns aren't given to the player. In Prey portals can change Tommy's size and relationship to the environment by placing him on surfaces that were previously walls or on a tiny model planet inside of a display case. All of these examples happen within the first 2 hours of the game, after which portals just become doors and enemy spawn points and little more.

Gravity! Walking up certain surfaces or hitting certain switches will allow you to walk on walls or on the ceiling. It's more consistent throughout than the portals, but before long it just becomes another gameplay element. One that made me disoriented and often motion sick. To cross this gap, you have to walk across the ceiling on an anti-gravity bridge! Can't there just be a regular bridge and we can cut the malarky? There's really no difference except in one case you're upside down.

Spirit Walk! Tommy leaves his body as a ghost. This ghost can cross ghost bridges and go through force fields, at which point it can press a switch. That's pretty much all the spirit walk does.

Aside from the gimmicks there is, of course, standard first-person shooting, but with a twist. The twist is: you cannot die. Instead, when your health reaches zero you go into a shooting gallery minigame before being dropped back exactly where you left off. It's a bit like the vita chambers from Bioshock, except in Bioshock the lack of death was fairly incidental to the rest of the game. You can turn vita chambers off in the options, or simply reload your quicksave upon death and it's almost like the chambers don't exist at all. While the PC version of Prey does have a quick save and it is technically possible to play this way, I would not recommend this playstyle to anyone. For Prey, immortality is holistic to the experience. And by that I mean it feels like the designers used it as a crutch to avoid having to balance a god damn thing.

See, it doesn't matter if one attack from an enemy takes off 50% of the player's health because you can't die! So what if monsters spawn in behind you and attack before you even know they are there? You can't die! Tommy moves so slowly that he cannot avoid a great number of enemy attacks? Yeah, but you can't die! Health doesn't regenerate, but why bother putting a sufficient amount of health pickups around the environment if you can't die?!

I've seen people say Prey has bad weapons. But really, it doesn't. They're pretty functional all around, but they just aren't balanced. The rocket launcher's splash damage isn't enough to kill even the basic grunt monster. And speaking of which, I could put the monster design to task. The aforementioned basic grunt, the most common enemy type in the game, is a hitscanner with quick reflexes and who doubles as a sniper. That kind of sucks in and of itself, but it would have been fine if the game wasn't so unfair about their placement, the amount of health they have, how much damage they do. The lackluster weapons and monsters are more symptomatic of the larger problem.

Even without the shooting, which is awful, Prey exhausts all of its aces in the hole almost immediately. The result is an experience that is just BORING. It's a pretty short game by any measure, but man does it feel long.