The Beginning

As I mentioned, Prey pretty much follows the plotline of the original incarnation of the game. You play Tommy, a Cherokee Native American who isn’t very happy. At the start of the game you see him in an unusual opening scene for an epic first person shooter - in the bathroom of a run down bar that’s about to close for the night. Tommy leaves the bathroom and encounters his grandfather just before entering the bar. Grandfather tells him he cannot resist his heritage any longer. Tommy doesn’t want to hear any of it. He wants to leave the Oklahoma reservation and pronto. The only thing that’s holding him back is Jen, the barkeeper. He finally enters the bar and tries to talk Jen to leaving with him but she refuses. She is a Cherokee and proud of it, and has no intention of leaving her home.

You might want to wander around the bar in the first level. As 3D Realms did in Duke Nukem 3D and later in Shadow Warrior the bar has a bunch of interactive elements, from a working jukebox that cranks out rock tunes from Ted Nugent and Heart among other bands, through a TV that has a couple of odd looking black and white films, to bar games like poker that you can actually play. There’s even an arcade game with a subject that is sure to please fans of Human Head’s first game.

Things get dicey when the last two people in the bar get fresh with Jen and Tommy (that’s you) breaks out the pipe wrench (Prey’s default weapon) to do some seriously bloody work on the offensive bar patrons. That’s nothing, however, compared to what’s about to happen next. An alien spaceship hovers over the bar and begins to fire green beams of light that teleport pieces of the bar and finally Jen, Grandfather and yourself up to the ship itself. That’s where the first level ends.


The second level begins as you find yourself locked in a conveyance on the vast alien ship, along with Jen and Grandfather. You are moved around to several locations in the conveyance and see some members of the unnamed alien race, which are indeed some of the most detailed and perhaps grotesque (but in a good way) aliens ever seen in a first person shooter. It looks as if you and the other humans are toast, but while moving around someone on the ship seems to be an ally of your cause. He manages to sabotage your particular cart and you fall into the bowels of the ship, while Jen and Grandfather are taken to another location. Armed at this point with your wrench you begin your quest to free your extended family. As the demo goes on through the rest of the single player potion, you encounter not just various types of aliens (both intelligent and animal) but also some weird space time warps, switching gravity in the ship itself and discover that maybe your Grandfather had it right all along and that your heritage may be the way to not just saving Jen but the entire human race.