Prey 2 sounds nothing like Prey, stubbornly maintains its sequel status regardless

It's nice when a ruggedly individualistic game manages to get a sequel. All too often, off-kilter ideas are eschewed by public and publisher alike, so it's heartening when an unsual game such as Prey gets a second chance to build upon experimental conceptssuch asmind-bending portals and gravitational shifts and, oh, er...

Yeah, all that stuff that made the first Prey what it was? Not in the sequel. Not in it at all. So what the hell is this new game, and why does it think it has the right to swing its balls around calling itself Prey 2?Read on and I'll tell you.

According to a recent interview between Chris Reinhart, Prey 2's lead designer at Human Head, and our beloved sister magazine PSM3, all the portal jumping and ceiling walking has been left out in a bid to make the game more action-driven and "shift away from making it too much of a puzzle game".

And obviously not in any way to avoid going up against Portal and Portal 2, both have which will have been released in the gap between Prey games. Not that. Oh definitely not.

The narrative reasoning? "Portals and gravity were the functions of The Sphere [the mothership in the original game]. And The Sphere’s gone".

Fair enough then. In replacement we'll be getting parkour-driven action (it is, after all, the new lens-flare), more open environments, and stealth kills based around use of shadows. Sounds like a tasty combination of Prince of Persia, Mirrors' Edge and Splinter Cell to me (I'm already looking forward to the idea of wall-running through shadows while gunning down some fool below me), but seriously, why is this called Prey 2? Did the first one even have a big enough name for brand-recognition to matter?

April 1st, 2011