“Let your spirit carry you where your body cannot pass.”

Prey might very well be a giant pile of ideas abandoned in a heap on the floor, but its particular jumble of Native American spiritualism, variable gravity, portals, and homicidal aliens—all lathered up with a campy storytelling tone exemplified by bountiful voice cameos from paranormal conspiracy theorist Art Bell—is the stuff that cult games are made of. Where else do you get the chance to take potshots at the ghosts of dead children, get shrunk down to the size of a tic-tac and fall into orbit around a basketball-sized planetary mass, or duel with six-legged aliens who sequester themselves in little hidey-holes that tend to look like a certain bodily orifice?

Beginning on an Indian reservation before quickly launching the player into the bowels of a gargantuan alien vessel while Blue Öyster Cult’s ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ blasts from the bar’s jukebox—a phenomenal opening—the game proceeds to offer a low-stakes blend of gunplay and puzzle-solving. Critics of the time were enamored with the opening segment (and thus, the game as a whole, because that’s just how that profession works), and it’s easy to see why. Portals subtly appear, the ceiling becomes the floor and vice versa, beautifully animated organic alien weapons fall into the player’s hands, player-character Domasi discovers he can project his spirit through physical barriers. Plus, the game runs on id Tech 4—the engine built by John Carmack for Doom 3—so it looks like a million bucks (adjusted for inflation).

First impressions can be hard to shake, but—and it truly pains me that there must be a but—Prey falters because it moves through its twenty or so levels without ever really iterating on its initial ideas in a satisfying way. The player quickly discovers a few rudimentary tricks to perform with their newfound abilities, but these are the same basic maneuvers they’ll continue to employ for the duration of the game. When set next to the creative puzzle-solving in a game like Portal (2007), the lack of sophisticated level design in Prey really pales in comparison. (Thought experiment: would Prey be viewed in a better light if Valve hadn’t tacked their pocket-sized puzzle game onto The Orange Box [2007] a year later?) Further, despite the somewhat playful tone, it lacks the distinct personality of a Duke Nukem 3D (1996) or the immersive qualities of a Half-Life (1998)—the former a recent success from 3D Realms at the time Prey was initially envisioned; the latter an obvious inspiration on the game’s presentation.

Even so, it’s hard to argue that Prey is derivative, which at least makes it more interesting to play than a solid, I don’t know, 90% of games on the market? There are hundreds of competently made, wholly unoriginal shooters that quickly grow stale. Prey eventually runs out of steam too, but it’s an inventive and memorable little title; less an outright failure than a case of half-fulfilled potential, which nevertheless would have been considered transcendent had it come out in the mid ‘90s when it was originally envisioned.