Video games and physics. Some games strive for realism and try their best to keep you grounded. Other games just don't care. Somewhere in the broad middle are games that have consistent, reliable physics, even if they are different from the values we're familiar with outside of video games.
So long as these predictable values stay the same, a game can make use of these 'strange' physics to give us a variety of experiences, from the wacky levels of Psychonauts to the mind-bending, portal-traversing, out-of-body moving Prey, a first-person shooter that will have you questioning what 'first-person' even means.
Tommy is dissatisfied with his life. He wants to venture out into the wider world. Unfortunately for him, higher powers have different plans...
Fun Times
I'm playing the PC release of Prey, picked up from a charity shop and thankfully complete with manual and CD key. You are Domasi "Tommy" Tawodi, a Cherokee trying to find the courage to move away from the reserve. If my story started in a grimy pub toilet, I'd think about moving on, too.
Given the freedom to roam around the place, we bump into our grandfather, Enisi, a stereotypical elder, wise beyond his years, who feels like he is going to be needed tonight. How ominous. What could possibly happen in a dive bar?
Using the same engine as Doom 3, Prey allows us to interact with screens in the same way. Changing the music and flicking through the TV channels, we can liven this place up considerably.
Ooh yeah. The coolest place to be. No wonder we're trying to leave. Jen, the bartender, is our girlfriend, but she seems rooted to the spot. There's no chance of getting her to leave.
Maybe some racism will get her to change her mind. The only other patrons are these two blokes, and they seem awfully sure of their status. Unfortunately for them, Tommy is an army-trained mechanic with a beefy wrench and a short fuse. I don't need to be asked twice to dish out some punishment.
The controls for Prey are nice and simple, and the movement feels slick. The only problem I had with dealing with these two was judging the distances between us. I thought I was closer than I actually was most of the time, but with a wrench in hand, I still had the advantage overall.
It was at this point that things got a little weird.
This whole introduction section was a little weird, to be honest. It was slow-paced, and you were never quite sure what to do, so you just waited for something to happen. You waited for a conversation, you waited for a fight, and you waited for a giant spaceship to loom large over the bar and engage its sci-fi space hoover.
In any other game, grand orchestral music would kick in to denote how important this moment is to the character's lives. No shit, right? Being abducted by aliens tends to be important. In Prey, I was listening to characters shouting to each other as aliens swept them away to the sounds of '(Don't Fear) The Reaper' by Blue Oyster Cult blaring out of the speaker system. If that was planned, it was genius. If that was the next song on the playlist after the one I switched to finish, them I'm a genius. At the end of the day, after a bit of a strange intro, Prey had my attention.
It is in this Half-Life train-like ride through the ship that we really see the id Tech 4 engine at work. The last time I saw lighting like this was Doom 3. It was great then and it's just as good here. A little less so, if I were to directly compare the two, but on account of Doom 3 being the more horrific game.
We don't have much to do but look around, but we do manage to spot a humanoid appearing to sabotage some machinery, ad it's not long before our suspicions are confirmed.
We're the lucky soul who benefitted the most, breaking free of our conveyor-belt shackles and seeing the nature of this place up close and personal - some kind of disgusting half-living, half-constructed space ship. The walls and floors are lined with ooze, and that's putting it nicely. This place is nightmarish for sure.
But it's not enough for it to have come from a nightmare. No, Prey wants to do something different, and Doom 3 with more flesh isn't different enough. How about Doom 3 with changeable gravity?
People - things - walking on the walls and ceiling while you're walking on the floor? That's pretty weird. That's pretty interesting too. But Prey isn't happy yet. What about portals that fold spaces together into impossible geometry?
You can't really see it very well, sorry about that, but whenever you meet a dead end in Prey, you've just got to look at the level differently. More on that later...
As we explore the corridors - it's hard to get lost here - we see more monstrous devices. I don't know what these aliens are investigating with such large probes, but it sure does the job of killing the subject. Gruesome.
Oh boy, that's a problem. We're meant to be saving you two, aren't we? That's not going to happen for Enisi here. You can watch it if you want. I can guess what happens.
But I couldn't guess the next bit.
An ally in the form of 'Hider' clears a path for us, or perhaps creates a path for us would be a better description, as a blue portal shimmers into view before our eyes. Prey isn't mind-bending enough, it seems. Time to hop through some portals.
Aware of our presence, the aliens now start to hunt us down, emerging from portals of their own to try and gun us down. They fail and fall to the floor quickly, the first victim to my wrench, and everyone else to their own alien weaponry, this one acting like a rifle. Blood spurts are about as grizzly as the combat gets, surprisingly, and there's not much to think about other than 'shoot them before they shoot you'.
As the level progresses, though, there is more to think about. Namely how to navigate these places. It's time to walk up the walls.
I forget what the game calls these walls, but they're clearly marked as ways to move forward when more conventional, gravity-based traversal doesn't lead anywhere. With a slightly awkward camera transition, the level rotates around you, or you rotate within it, and you walk as normal but along a different axis. Get into a fight and you might see which way gravity is supposed to point, as enemies fall to the ceiling.
If you've been following the blog, you'll know that from time to time some games, especially first-person shooters, can lead to some motion sickness. Prey might just be heading that way. I'm not sure yet, but I have my suspicions.
It is, however, a joy to play. It looks great, and I want to see what other things it can throw at me.
Walking into a room, I spot a... thing... in a glass cabinet. It's bullet-proof glass, or at least isn't affected by my weapon. It looks out of place, to be honest. Thinking little of it, I wander around and stumble into a portal which leads me here:
I've been transported to somewhere where there's a giant, great. And it's aware of me. Doubly great. And then the giant disappears, which is strange, and then spawns in where I am, and it's only now that I realise we're inside that glass cabinet. The alien wasn't giant, we were teeny tiny. Mind-bending.
And of course, we can find a place to see ourselves walking through portals. Can Prey get any more confusing? Generally speaking, you don't get lost when playing. The route before you might have a small puzzle where you need to roll an explosive egg ball thing towards a gloop covered door, but there's nothing too taxing to deal with. The confusion comes in the form of nowhere where you are.
After a level or two of navigating through this gravity-defying spaceship, you might think you've seen all the gimmicks that Prey has to offer. Not so fast, player. Here's another...
In what I can only imagine is some kind of near-death experience as a result of falling from a great height, we're transported to the land of the ancients, a place Tommy doesn't actually believe in, and makes sure to remind his grandfather's spirit, who is clearly taking his recent death rather well.
He has some skills to teach us which may prove useful, as well as reuniting us with Talon, a bird we had as a child, long since dead and now living on in spirit. Talon will guide us, flying to points of interest and distracting enemies. But the skill we're about to learn will let us walk through yet another plane.
Spirit walking allows us to detach from our own body, walk through obstacles, interact with the environment and its inhabitants before zipping back into our body to progress. It's yet another mechanic to aid in - and outright introduce more - puzzle-solving into Prey. It's also another mechanic to warp your now fragile little mind.
Is it the last mechanic? Oh, no, no. That'd be silly. Dying to an enemy while trying to walk up a wall, we're introduced to another one: regaining another chance at life.
You've got a short window of time to shoot flying thingamabobs to refill your health and spirit meters before the ground swallows you up and dumps you back into your body. Something doesn't want us to die on this spaceship, and with Jen's life still hanging in the balance somewhere, we've all the incentive we need to cut through this Hell and get out safely.
Frustrations
After a spooky encounter with some kids and a disembodied voice taking an interest in me (plot, I'm sure), Prey continues doing what it does best - utterly confusing my sense of direction, pushing my motion sickness to the limits.
Shoot these green pads and whatever surface they are on becomes the floor. You can imagine the puzzles that can be made with that mechanic. Hopefully, you can imagine how awful it might be to try and play if you're susceptible to motion sickness. Walls whizzing past you, falling upwards, levels looking completely different from your new vantage point... I wasn't spewing everywhere, don't get me wrong, but I was starting to not like Prey.
Further Fun Times
Hearing a jukebox and some aliens desperate to shut it off, though, I started to like Prey once again. The entire bar has been absorbed into this space ship, and we get to fight in it once more, to the sounds of whatever we can find on the playlist. It's a dumb thing to enjoy, but a sense of the familiar is welcoming when the rest of the game looks like this:
I had no idea how long I had been playing for, and with a mechanic that literally brings me back from the dead, I wasn't sure when I was going to get a chance to stop playing. I always want a nice place to leave it, although 'nice' in a place like this doesn't make a lot of sense.
When you're not sure how to progress, it's often a case of looking around for a gravity pad or a portal. Prey seems fairly linear so far, and the route it took me on lead to an arena of some sort and a ghostly child we'd seen before.
I must admit defeat at this point. I wasn't sure how to progress. It has occurred to me since giving up that the weapon I'm holding can shoot either a red laser bolt of some description or a white frost ray to freeze enemies in place. It does one or the other, though, and I'd need to find somewhere to change its effect before or during the fight - and that's assuming it is the right thing to do.
After an hour of screwing with my brain, though, I had seen enough to know a lot more about Prey than I knew going on. Which was nothing, as always.
Final Word
Prey was in development for a long time. A decade. You kind of get a sense of that in a game that chucks every weird idea the developers had together, but it does somehow work. The physics mess with your head but are reliable, and therefore keep the game flowing, rather than bogging it down with broken or fiddly puzzles.
The story is nonsense and nothing remarkable, as you'd expect from a Cherokee getting abducted by aliens, but it might develop into something a little more, I don't know. There's a lot of swearing, seemingly for the sake of it, rather than to add anything to the script. Not that that fucking bothers me. Just feels a little too noticeable.
Anyway, the writing is but a teeny tiny piece of Prey as a whole, and it's not the piece you're going to remember. All the portals, and the gravity-defying, and then walking up the walls, and through doors as a ghost. That's what you'll remember Prey for. Like Portal decorated by Doom.
What a combination.
Fun Facts
Both Tommy and Jen are voiced by Native Americans, with actor Michael Greyeyes praising the characters as people, and not stereotypes.
Prey, developed by Human Head Studios, first released in 2006.
Version played: PC, 2006.