Output Stream of Consciousness

Link: http://www.2kgames.com/index.php?p=games&title=prey

This is a profoundly bizarre game. Cherokee plus science fiction. It's entertaining, but it will totally mess with you, at least for a while.

Alright, the stars of the show are admittedly a little stereotypical, but it does square with the occasional bit I've caught on APTN and with Dena's teaching experience up on a fly-in reservation. I must admit to an almost guilty guffaw when I wandered around the bar at the introduction, poked my head into the women's bathroom and as the character, Tommy, contemplates this bathroom rivaling the squalor of the men's room, he remarks "sugar and spice my ass".

Now combine this with a full-scale rather horrid alien invasion, somewhat Doom 3-like in the way it feels. The alien technology is the seemingly standard technology plus disgusting biology.

One of the fun but utterly disorienting things about this game is the fact that you're not always on the floor, and portals, even in boxes, don't have to lead to a sensible spot. There are activated floors that let you walk up walls and on ceilings (as long as they're powered) as well as gravity direction generators and the like.

Add in the almost Soul Reaver spectral-realm type ability to Spirit Walk (though you can pop in and out of spirit walking much more easily, and you always return to your body), which lets you through some force fields, walk over some spectral bridges, and even retrieve ammo and press consoles, but generally not trigger events, open doors, or walk on walls or ceilings... then add in some slightly off-kilter weapons and the biomechadisgusting array of enemies and you have the makings of an odd but fairly engaging game.

The temptation to reload is vastly reduced. You don't die per se, you enter a deathwalk where you can kill spirit wraiths to get your body back in a semblance of non-death.

I've been relatively taken in by the game. Some of it is fairly rote, but the occasional glimpses of outside, the oddities of Cherokees in Space (the typical fight against tradition and grandfather in particular), the tendency of Tommy to occasionally say just what you're thinking (except with a few more swear words), steady progress and a good, occasional "wow, what the hell is that?!" has grown on me somewhat.

Great fun if you like a sort of a Doom/Half-Life/System Shock genre :)