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Preview

Prey

Format PC

Developer Human Head

Publisher 2K Games

Genre First Person Shooter

27-Jan-2006 Are all our prayers going to be answered by Human Head's first-person shooter?

2 Comments

Our friends from PC Zone take an exhaustive look at Human Head's incredible news FPS which appeared in January, issue 165.

Hang on, rewind. Did you just say that was called a 'sphinctdoor'? "Yes, that's right." So called because it's a door with an uncanny similarity to a puckered-up sphincter? Because it looks like an arse? "Exactly." Really? "Yup." Really, really?

Creating a game that features doors that look like bums has clearly long since lost its novelty value on Timothy Gerritsen, the human head of Human Head Studios, but he at least seems aware that it'll be something for the grandkids to be proud of. He even manages to keep a relatively straight face as he takes Prey's hero Tommy past a series of gashes in an alien wall that look suspiciously like lady-bits. A straight face that refuses to crack even when a malformed creature flops onto the floor out of one of them, gets shot about a bit and then attempts to fold back its previous home's meaty curtains with an avowed intent of nestling inside its moist innards to regenerate. Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls (of ages of 18 and over)! Welcome to the wacky world of Prey!

As you're no doubt fully aware, Prey is the reincarnated bedfellow of one Duke Nukem over at the formidable (if perpetually tardy) towers of 3D Realms. Once canned, now revived in vamped-up Doom-3-Engine-ovision, it's yet another FPS treatment of an extremely familiar question. The question in hand being: 'What exactly happens if a Native American mechanic is beamed aboard the mothership of an alien invasion with a bird of prey (who's actually a ghost), while supernatural ancestral powers are kicking off inside him at the behest of the spirit of his grandfather?' The answer? Easily the most intriguing and original single-player experience of the year. And the first game to have arseholes as corridor furniture.

HOOVER MOVER
Here comes the science part: Prey takes place within a Dyson Sphere. Which is a mass of collated material that hangs around a moving star due to gravity, physics, science and complicated things. For purposes of non-massiveness, Human Head has made its sphere as big as a substantial asteroid, which in Borg fashion drifts through space as an amalgam of technology and living biological matter (hence the fannies), with mischief and bloody sustenance on its mind.

"The Sphere goes from planet to planet, sucking people up and turning them either into food, workers or experiments that attempt to create a better breed of worker," explains Gerritsen, about ten minutes postsphinct-door hilarity. "You meet survivors from these different worlds as well as creatures who've become parasites - some things will attack anything, some things will come to you for aid, some things are just automatons working in the Sphere, while other creatures are actively working for the sphere."

So essentially, the Sphere is presented as a dynamic ecosystem, with its own foodchains, parasites, workers and hunters - yet also with a sentient voice (a Shodan-style female cut-glass Brit accent) who reacts to you as you progress through the game and go from one of many, many stranded
abductees all the way through to a fullyfledged, fully-armed nuisance.

Turn a corner and you may come across Fodder, small turtle-like creatures who creep out of the walls and maintain the endless bio-corridors of the Sphere, following interesting AI routines that might lead them to do things like scrap over a human limb that's been left littering a corridor. Alternatively, you might come across Hunters (essentially the antibodies of the system), blasting away above their heads at one of the jellyfish-like creatures who float around the sphere - gnawing at it with their acidic gastric juices. It's a lot like being inside the giant world-eating Unicron (as voiced by Orson Welles, fact-fans) in The Transformers: The Movie. The Human Head mission is to make you believe that you're one insignificant soul lost in a mammoth organism - although of course, you won't be entirely alone.

CAN YOU SEE ME?
As well as the humans and aliens being farmed Strogg/Borg-style for batteries and new careers as ceaselessly working, wordless automatons (who, like the Star Trek residents of techno-beehive cubes will often ignore you unless you've made your presence known), there will be several races of creatures, whose planets have previously met unhappy ends, attempting to eke out a living in the Sphere. One group are called Hiders (because they're hiding - Human Head says what it sees) and will become a key part of Tommy's somewhat reluctant foray into world-saving and girlfriend-rescuing.

SEEN IT BEFORE
So that's the set up. Now you'll probably be wanting a few reasons to be excited. The prospect of a Doom 3 Engine game set in a quasi-space station with lots of drippy tentacles poking through metal grilles has perhaps set off a few alarm bells if you had disagreements with id's magnum opus. Well, fear not pilgrim. Since here, the wily developer is taking the dyed-in-the-wool and stretching the set-in-stone: bending the rubric of the FPS to make it a little less familiar.

A good example of this is Death Walk, an ancestral power of Tommy's that means you won't be presented with a 'Game Over' screen after death, but will instead be taken to the afterlife, a swirling plain above which (playing as your spirit) you can see your body slowly being sucked into the ether while you, armed with your trusty spirit bow, fight creatures whose demise will see you returned to the real world. No quicksave needed, no pressing urge to break up the gameplay, press Escape and create a savegame with a hastily tapped 'qweqytwr' masquerading as a file name. Even though both features will be included: the developer may be innovative, but it's not stupid.

Another good example of innovation could perhaps be the bird. After all, how many other games have a built-in hint provider disguised as a spectral hawk? Very few, as far as I can remember. However, Talon (your favourite dead falcon in the whole world) is an ingenious way of ensuring that stupid players always remember which way to go - pecking at things of interest, translating alien glyphs (she's surprisingly astute when dealing with aliens for a bird who died in the mid-80s on an Indian reservation), or swooping over the heads of enemies and providing a neat distraction. Prey just does stuff differently. Whereas lesser games just nick the buggies from Halo for vehicle sections, Human Head instead provides flying spheres dogfighting around an asteroid (that you can get out and walk around on if you so wish), plucking enemies from their personal gravitational pull with a tractor beam and chucking them into space.

WHAT GOES UP...
Gravity too, recently seen going downwards in the majority of recent releases, is being rethought. Massive barrier in the way? Simply approach a nearby console and invert gravity, or walk up one of the many Metroidstyle walkways that allow you to sprint up walls and start dancing on the ceiling in the manner of Lionel Richie. In practice, it may feel much like the (shit) Alien bits in the (good) Alien Vs Predator games, but here it creates all manner of (not shit) bizarre instances. You could be upside down, firing at a Hunter who's standing at 90- degrees to you on a nearby wall - after which you could invert gravity, but forget that while you're attached to a ceiling-based wallwalk panel, the large collection of heavy crates above your head on the floor certainly aren't. Perhaps leading to yet another exciting trip through the afterlife through the medium of crushed Indian.

Surprisingly, another game whose spirit this madness evokes is that of Descent - the much-loved 360-degree shooting-robots-ina- mine-game of yesteryear; a game whose greatness was only tempered by the times in which you'd spend hours circling in bafflement having become well and truly lost in its labyrinthine caverns. Any such fears for Prey?

"That was one of the biggest issues we had," explains Tim Gerritsen. "With all of the gravity puzzles and the fact that we do mess with your mind quite a bit in the game, we were afraid that people were going to get completely lost. So we spent quite a bit of time refining the look of the game - you never get so far off the track that you don't know where you're supposed to be. There'll be lighting, lay-out signs and we've also thrown in things like dripping water so you can say, 'hey, that water's falling up, so I must be walking on the ceiling right now'."

So it'll be fine and dandy for whoever's playing, but I assure you that any spectators will sport a worried expression usually reserved for dogs who're in trouble (yet are unsure of exactly what they've done wrong). This is because any attempt to follow the action on-screen when you're not playing yourself ends in befuddlement.

"We were thinking about putting in a spectator vomit bag," jokes Gerritsen as he enters a cavernous hall with enough mindbending wallwalks and three-dimensional antics to bring memories of David Bowie's Escher-styled halls in Labyrinth firmly home to roost.

SEE THE LIGHT
But it's not just all these shiny new spins on FPS-ery that have grabbed our magpie-like attention - the game is packed with little details that show a great deal of lateral thinking on behalf of the developer.

For example, the old chestnut of the self-extinguishing light source (as seen in F.E.A.R. and Doom 3 with torches that mysteriously have to recharge every 30 seconds despite being in the hands of a player so technologically marvellous that they have guns that can strip flesh from bone in under two) is tackled with ingenious aplomb. For instance, in Prey Tommy carries a lighter that may flicker beautifully in the many squelchy corridors he traverses, but also gets really hot and means that he can't hold it lit for too long. Simple stuff, but also clever and effective.

It's not just that though: the aiming reticule that nips up from your sniper rifle and attaches itself directly to your retina; the lumps of processed flesh that you and your enemies use as cover until disintegrating into fleshy chunks; the distinct lack of ladders; the gooey pustules that bounce around levels and act as organic explosive barrels...

Everything does a familiar FPS job, but has a wonderfully organic tinge - the template is what we've seen a thousand times before, but Human Head has gone to massive lengths to blur the edges and make everything feel alien and mysterious. As 50 February 06 mentioned earlier, Freud would have lots to say about whoever designed the doors.

AND VIOLENCE TOO
It's also remarkably grim. As you potter around the Sphere, you come across little lumps of human influence - a discarded poker machine here, a flaming passenger jet flying through space there, a busload of eight-year-olds going nuts and impaling each other on spikes... You know the drill.

"There's already quite a bit of discussion on the Internet about the scene we released in the demo, of the kid being impaled on the spike," nods Gerritsen sagely. "But the thing is that it's all contextual, you're not impaling a kid on a spike yourself. They've all been sucked up with you and there are these parasite creatures called wraiths that live on a ship and they possess people and turn them bad. So, in that particular scene, one of the kids gets possessed and starts doing damage to the other kids. You come across this horrific scene and you're powerless to aid her. We want to reinforce the fact to the player that there's bad things going on onboard this ship, and that you as a hero need to act or you'll end up like them." Or indeed like the automatons keeping the Sphere ticking over, or 'the bondage borg' as we like to think of them...

This is a Human Head game, but we don't doubt the importance of this being a 3D Realms project either, who may be victim to many a savage witticism over the perennial non-appearance of Mr Nukem, but still remain the godfather of interactivity on the PC. Prey bears all such hallmarks: a chatty lead character with a booming voice, a sense of the need for variety, an array of intricate and well-thought out weapons and the ability to flush any toilet that happens to come your way. In the second level, the famed bar scene that has you strut around your girlfriend's pub before it all gets sucked up into the vacuum of space, you can fiddle with everything and anything: the jukebox has licensed music, the taps work, the arcade machines can be played, there's even a goddamn condom machine in there. It's a pub so realistic that you fully expect all the locks of the toilet doors to have been kicked off and there to be cigarette butts in the urinal that you can chase to the drain should you need to relieve yourself.

In key with the off-kilter approach to the ever self-replicating art form of the shooter, the weapons don't quite fit the usual 'melee, pistol, shotgun, little machine gun, big machine gun, grenade launcher, repeat to fade' mentality either. Sure, it's not far off the mark - but the alien overtones provides bugs that can be thrown as grenades (or flipped over and used as sticky mines), guns that fire the gastric bug-goo over friend or foe, rocket launchers that can also use their invertebrate ammo to create protective shields of gas and a gun that can be charged up with electricity or other such destructive power from terminals you find dotted about the innards of the Dyson Sphere. In short, no-one will be complaining about Prey being yet another unoriginal machine-gun foray into offices, warehouses and Hong Kong docklands.

OUT ON ITS OWN
In fact, towards the end of my time with Prey, I realised something. In my line of work I get to see a lot of games, and they invariably lay all their cards out on the table. All the Unique Selling Points in a pretty little marketable row. On the several occasions I saw Quake 4, it was always balls-out: "Look, vehicles! Look, Strogg! Wow, gun emplacement sections! Man, how cool!". And it was. It was all there on the table for me to see and recount. But with Prey... Well, Prey is acting remarkably coy. I've seen a great deal of its manifold innovations, but I can't delineate more clearly the absolutely whacking amount of it that's intended to be shrouded in 3D Realms mystery (ever the masters of secrecy) until the day you play it.

And that's the beauty of it - its real joy will be in discovery, in working out its nuances and clever riffs on the genre on your tod, without the hype machine having filled you up to the brim with prior knowledge first. This, for me, was what made the 3D Realms masterpiece Duke Nukem 3D such a truly wonderful game - and is what I believe will put Prey (and, for that matter, Duke Nukem Forever) in such good stead when its time comes. There's nothing in a game quite like being surprised, and if it isn't a surprise, then Prey doesn't seem to be interested.

PC Zone staff