Prey

• Platform: PC, Xbox 360
• Published by: 2K Games
• Developed by: Human Head Studios
• Release Date: When it's done
• Genre: Action
• Multiplayer: Yes
• Online: Yes

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Trailers and Footage

 

Prey Preview

-- February 6, 2006 by: Chris Remo

Think back to the the late 90s, in the heyday of the burgeoning first person shooter segment that sprung up in the years following id's seminal Doom. Even if you weren't gaming back then, you've probably heard enough about that golden era to follow along. Duke Nukem 3D is released in 1996, ushering in new levels of interactivity and general unmitigated badassery to the genre. It's not too long before developer 3D Realms starts talking up a new project, an alien-abduction action yarn which will make use of revolutionary new technology and blow away the gaming population.

The game is due in 1998, but slips past that date. It seems that it is being shuffled around internally and undergoing some major fundamental changes throughout development, only to eventually disappear from the public eye completely. It remains fondly remembered on forums internetwide, in part based on impressive early footage from E3.

I think we all know the game I'm talking about.

Prey.

What, you had something else in mind?

Okay, Cut the Shenanigans

At the time, Prey was getting a lot of attention. I certainly remember eagerly anticipating its release. The game's unique "portal" technology was incredibly impressive, the Native American main character was an interesting hook, and, well, it was from the Duke Nukem guys. All these years later, it really felt like a blast from the past when it was revealed in the runup to E3 2005 that Prey was once again in development. Not only that, it had actually been in closely guarded development since 2001 by Human Head Studios, the team behind Rune. The long teaser video shown at E3 evoked the cancelled project but was clearly its own beast.

I recently had the chance to check out Prey and speak a bit with Human Head co-founder Chris Rhinehart, the game's current project lead. It turns out 3D Realms' George Broussard got his hands on Rune and liked it enough to propose a collaboration between the two dev houses. Human Head happened to be looking for a new project at the time. "Then George said, 'What do you think about resurrecting Prey?'" recalled Rhinehart. "We really liked the idea of it, so we bounced some ideas back and forth." Though the basic concept of the game already being in place, Rhinehart noted that "we kind of had carte blanche with it" after the development agreement was made.

So What's It All About?

To some extent, Prey's protagonist was born out of a desire to create a strong contrast to Duke Nukem, the archetypal gung-ho buck-stops-here video game character. That's a goal that has carried through the various stage's of Prey's life, despite a few name changes along the way. Tommy Tawodi is indeed an archetypal antihero. Indifferent to his Cherokee heritage, he works as a garage mechanic on his tribe's reservation. Both his grandfather and his girlfriend are very much in tune with their Native American traditions, but he remains disillusioned, willfully cut off from his spiritual side.

This is the backdrop when the videogamey stuff starts happening and they, along with plenty of other humans, are abducted onto an enormous alien spacecraft. Fortunately for the player, Tommy manages to free himself, but unfortunately for Tommy, his girlfriend and grandfather remain the prisoners of the alien invaders. It's not long before he starts building up an arsenal and gets a badly needed de facto crash course in self-assertiveness. Over the course of the game with the guidance of his grandfather, he will also become more attuned with his Cherokee culture. This confers a variety of eventual gameplay mechanics as well.

The ship itself seems to be one of the main antagonists in the game. It is itself a living organism, a giant sphere surrounding a burning sun at its core. This leads to a muscle-meets-metal kind of visual design (a particularly fleshy door was excitedly described to me as a "sphinctdoor"), as well as some interesting impact on the gameplay. "We're trying to set up the whole game world as a hazard itself," explained Rhinehart. This takes various forms. For example, the ship produces aggressive "antibodies" when a hostile foreign entity--ie, you--is detected. These huge sluglike creatures will actually come out of the ship and attempt to do you in.

Other environmental obstacles are less straightforward. The game takes a more lax approach to gravity than you may be accustomed to. In most games, as in our comparatively mundane world, down is down; whichever way points to the center of our celestial rock is the way we're going to be pulled. In Prey, however, the direction of gravitational force can be changed on the fly. Scattered throughout many areas of the game are switches that will reorient gravity to the surface on which the switch is placed. So if there's a hole in the ceiling, there's a good chance you'll be able to go through it by flipping gravity around and turning that ceiling into the floor. This can be done with walls as well, rotating everything by ninety degrees. Many puzzles make use of this mechanic, ranging from obvious "bypass the obstacle" affairs to more intricate manipulations of the world.

Gravity is cheapened even more with wall walking, essentially a climbing mechanism that makes the ladder obsolete. The game is littered with glowing paths that start on the floor and climb up walls and ceilings; when traversing on these paths, you are able to simply walk along the surfaces they scale. Wherever your happen to be stepping at any given moment is "down" for gravitational purposes, meaning the entire game world appears to be orienting itself around you. I asked Rhinehart if he'd played the Milkman Conspiracy level in Double Fine's Psychonauts, which makes use of similar hijinks. "Yeah!" he replied enthusiastically, "Yeah, that was great. It was very similar to this, I thought it was very cool." It's a little more startling than the Psychonauts example, because it takes place largely indoors (meaning that the entire screen is full of rotating geometry) and because the angles are so extreme. The first time you step onto one of these things is a rather unique feeling. Combined with the way the levels are designed, the overall effect can be disorienting, in a good way.

This really wouldn't be Prey without crazy interspatial portals, the technology featured prominently in the original E3 videos. Basically, portals are 2D windows that open up in space, through which another area is visible. They can be shot through or walked through, as well. There seems to be a large degree of versatility in the portals' use. One room daisy chains a whole string of invisible portals at all sorts of angles, resulting in something like a crazy house of mirrors maze. It's possible not only to see yourself in the interconnected portals (from varying angles) but to follow yourself, and even shoot yourself through the portals as well (pro tip from the devs: "If you end up following yourself, you're going the wrong way."). Think of Halo's Chiron TL-34 multiplayer map, but much less stupid. And also on acid.

It's hard to get a full grasp on all of the way portals will be used in the full game, and it's even harder to explain it in text, but Human Head seems to be doing a good job of tying all of these tricks together without succumbing to what must be the tempting route of going balls out and throwing crazy crap all over the place. The team is hoping for a game that is well balanced and integrated in terms of its puzzles and its running and gunning, integrating the two elements in as natural a fashion as possible without letting it get too overwhelming. "We're trying to go for a real density of experience here," said Rhinehart. "There's always something new in the game; I'm very excited about that."

Don't You Shoot Stuff?

Of course, you also shoot stuff. The arsenal of Prey carries on the biologically-infused aesthetic of the game's environments, with many of the guns breathing or dripping with organic matter. Each weapon has both an alternate fire mode and a melee attack; for the record, I am practically militant about the necessity of including melee attacks on weapons in modern first person shooters, so chalk one up for the team there. In the vein of organic systems rather than magazine-loaded ones, there is no reloading in the game, though some weapons overheat after constant use in order to create an artificial reload time.

Besides those bits of thematic design, many of the weapons operate basically as you'd expect them to operate. There's a rapid fire rifle whose alternate fire is a sniper rifle with a zooming eye-mounted scope. There's a gun which fires quick bursts of energy, whose secondary fire is a lobbed concussive blast. On the slightly less orthadox side, the grenades come in the form of squirming three-legged alien creatures called crawlers. Rather than pulling off a triggering pin, you pull off the unfortunate being's legs and toss it at your soon to be exploded target. The alternate fire only pulls off two of the legs, which turns the thing into a sticky proximity mine. A separate weapon, the crawler launcher, has a primary fire of--what else--launching crawlers. The secondary fire grinds up the little beasts into a dust that temporarily blocks all fire, friendly or hostile. The last weapon I got to see is the leech gun, which can make use of a variety of different kinds of scarce ammo found in wall-mounted nodes.

Oh, and you've always got a light if you need it, Doom 3 engine notwithstanding.

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