I have a guilty admission: I actually kind of dug the Prey demo. What can I say? I'm a sucker for drunken Injun chiefs blithering into their cups about the prophecy of the mountains, not to mention cute Native-American bartenders with amazing polygonal asses and Dyson spheres fueled off the juice of human bean gelatinators. And even their gimmicky Portal Technology? Hell, I thought that was pretty cool too.

Still, I didn't much notice Jeremy Soule's soundtrack, which is interesting, because Soundtrack.net is directly comparing it to the music of the spheres.

Prey is destined to effect industry-wide change: from defining a new standard by which music commissions for flagship interactive titles can be judged, to sounding a welcome death knell for the use of through-composed material. It is a key milestone and one that is the culmination of a decade's work spent to bring the true sound of Hollywood into the home. The result: a soundtrack which breathes color into a monochrome landscape. Indeed, nothing quite like this has come before in the games industry and, when Prey ships, the dust is going to take a long time to settle. So, reload and pack some stims because if you want an answer to where video game music goes from here... it's arrived.

Heavy. Don't expect to understand what they are on about unless you went to Juliard. To be fair, Joel Johnson and I did have an IM discussion about the soundtrack, but it mostly centered about how 'Barracuda' was playing in the bar at the beginning of the game and how awesome it was that Art Bell was finally branching out into video games. Florian Eckhardt

Inside Prey [Soundtrack.net]