The last thing I checked out before leaving E3 for good, or at least a year, was the 12 minute demonstration of Prey.

First thing I have to mention is that the freshly minuted full title is Prey: Earth s Savior Didn t Want the Job. The video showed actual gameplay, but was all pre-recorded.

In Prey you take on the role of a Native American out to save the world from aliens. Of course the whole thing looked and sounded just beautiful. Most of the scenes the game showed took place on a spacecraft and the Headhunter and 3D Realms people really did a lot with the gameplay to give Prey a very alien feel. The environments had a sort of techno-organic feel to them.

The biggest thing I saw that wowed me was your character s ability to leave his body and assume a sort of spirit form that can interact with the real world, but also drift through force fields and over empty spaces. While in this mode most bad guys don t seem to see you, though I saw at least one creature that could spot you. Although you can t access your normal weapons while in spirit form, you do have access to a spirit bow, which is very cool. The video showed that while in spirit form you can actually drift around and check out your floating de-spirited body. It s a very cool effect.

Another major innovation appears to be the ability to resurrect your fallen body by fending off evil spirits in the spirit world. It was hard to tell how this would work exactly, since there was no one talking me through the video, but it looks pretty innovative.

One of the least noticeable gameplay tweaks in Prey was that the developers were constantly screwing around with different gravities and forms of transportation. If you stay to the steel path that wound it s way through many of the maps, you can walk up walls and onto ceilings, which makes the game so much more robust, especially while you are trying to track and sneak up and bad guys. Other scenes in the game showed the main character on a small moon where he had a sort of float to his step and in a personal spacecraft that let you move through the vacuum of space.

The game looks like it will be using a lot of teleportation, but instead of just using the typical effects, Prey s teleportation is more of a burned hole in the fabric of space. It just appears and you can look, walk and shoot right through it.

The creatures in the game appear to be of both the corporeal and incorporeal realms. Most of the bad guys looked like your typical evil aliens with a few abomination type hybrids thrown in the mix for good measure. But one scene in the game showed these two children locked in a cell. Suddenly a spirit-like demon drifts into one of them and that child kills the other kid and then looked at you with glowing yellow eyes. It was very creepy.

I have high hopes for this game, it looks like it doesn t just present another first-person shooter with better graphics and sound and a kind of different main plot. The twist in Prey isn t that the main character is a Native American, it s that the game seems to weave some of the cultural ideas of Native Americans into the gameplay mechanics. That s something I d love to see more of.

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