Imagine, if you please, that you are stranded in town; I don’t know a blizzard or something has blocked off all the convenient routes to your home. (By the way I won NaNoWriMo 2009, thanks for asking…) You’re stuck in a consumerist minefield with nought but minimum clothing and your own instincts (oh dear). In your hand you hold exactly £1.99 in change. And now you’re hungry; famished even.
Also vaginas.
You could crawl into Subway and demand one of those delightful ‘Sub de jours’. Or you could weakly step into your local games retail outlet and purchase a second-hand copy of Prey for a laughable £1.98. Pros and cons of both I feel. For the record I opted for the latter. Which probably explains my malnourished presence. But I got a cheeky 1p bonus out of it at least.
Published by 3D Realms most notably famous for all four…sorry three Duke Nukem games, Prey follows the rippling action of Domasi Tawodi AKA ‘Tommy’. A rather spiteful and cynical character (and therefore somewhat unlikeable from the offset) Tommy rejects his Cherokee ancestry in spite of his stereotype-adhering, wise-talking and possible gambling-obsessed Grandfather’s nay saying.
Tommy is also in love with equally Native American barmaid Jen with whom he struggles to have an open and honest relationship with. So when all three become abducted by aliens in what looks like a knock-off homage to various cheesy invasion films from the fifties, Tommy embarks on an intergalactic mission to save the two people who can actually stand his company. That and people on Earth are being harvested for food and the entire human species is based on lies. But…whatever, save the hot girl.
Prey makes it very obvious from the start that despite it being a run-of-the-mill first-person shooter there are subversive gameplay elements not fully utilised until now. It brings together close encounter violence with bizarre beings that look as though an eight year-old with learning difficulties played Spore for the first time (even though it has yet to be created for another couple of years), gravity puzzles and portal technology.
It is not uncommon to be fighting an entourage of alien beasts while stood on a ceiling, or to venture out into a room only to have immense bastards appear through a portal at one end. There are walkways which allow you to traverse walls and mystical platforms that when shot at will alter the gravity and hurl you and anything not bolted down around like an outer space washing machine. Puzzles are thinly-veiled rather than mind-melting but they can cause headaches.
Often when a game is trying pathetically hard to impress the player with unique experiences it thinks it has often it will lose track of what it was trying to show off in later levels. Prey seems to keep coming back to what it believes is the most impressive aspect of the game, which to be fair just shows that they are at least focused in what they are doing.
And speaking of focus: Tommy’s one-track mind in rescuing Jen is something that we aren’t meant to forget any time soon. It’s understandable that the protagonist would clamber and fight in desperation to save the woman he regrets not confessing his love to, but it seems to serve as a meagre incentive and is a little too expositional. The bulk of the story, which tiptoes around the extinction of the human race and of Tommy’s being our only hope (there’s a unique angle!), is more of an inconvenience to him. So is Prey a tale of invasion and destruction or is it a love story?
The game also introduces a mode which allows the player to detach from Tommy’s physical being and walk around in soul-form. The purpose of this: more puzzles. Although they aren’t puzzles in any hardcore sense. In fact they’re less like puzzles and more like crescendos that try to add a little more depth to an already overly-franchised gaming genre. There are instances in which Tommy will use his soul counterpart to bypass forcefields and traverse pathways invisible to his physical being which, for some unknown reason, resemble strung out webs of sticky…well you can guess.
This whole soul business also means that there is no death in the game. Upon depletion of Tommy’s health he will transport to an ancient land where demonic spirits flutter by. Before you are placed back in the game you use your bow to attack as many spirits as possible with each successful kill replenishing a little of your physical health or spiritual health, depending on which colour you attack. This also aims to keep the whole Cherokee mythos alive and relevant.
It does seem that Prey is having ideas above its station. It’s a game with more ideas than it can handle but it seems to sporadically feature them rather well. Obviously not actually being able to die in-game takes away any challenge or tension. This is a game, after all, with some fairly brutish monsters and it can’t help but test their patience when every time you disappear into the spirit world for a minute they have to twiddle their alien thumbs before you reappear with more health.
The story creates this immense juxtaposition between a huge conflict involving alien and human and the hero’s personal struggle to rescue the woman he loves. This big-to-small ration of storytelling is matched quite eloquently with level designs that range from small, winding and dark corridors to immense (and in one instance gargantuan) landscapes in deep space. The game is broken up by visits to the protagonist’s ancestor’s spirit land in which his grandfather tries in vain to penetrate Tommy’s stubbornness and teach him about his heritage and how the human species is in peril. Which is only met by Tommy’s insistence on rescuing Jen. (aww isn’t it sweet!)
Okay so it’s a little dated graphically and the voice acting is sub-par to say the least but it’s a game that can still impress on some levels. The action is fast-paced and frequent with interspersed boss fights and the use of portals and gravity puzzles make a nice safety mat for what is essentially a fairly weak storyline. But if I’m honest it’s actually a pretty good all round game. It doesn’t smack of effort and it’s at least good at what it does. And as it’s nearly four years old and game technology has moved out of its ex-lover’s flat and into its mistresses’ Penthouse that either says something about the quality of contemporary games, or something about my standards in ‘quality’. As a side note I got Daniel O’Donnell’s new CD this Christmas.
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