Primordia Game Review

Wadjet Eye Games has quietly established itself as one of, if not the most, exciting independent publishers of adventure games around. Their latest, Primordia, has landed at the end of what has been something of a banner year for adventure games. Yet this traditional point-and-clicker, set in a world in which man has long since (seemingly) vanished and sentient robots have grown to question the very existence of their presumed creators, manages to rise right up alongside the cream of this year's crop.

This isn't the sort of game that hopes to change the genre, or present any sort of grand innovation. At all times, it exhibits a reverence for the older philosophies of the adventure games of the 90s. You collect items, you combine items, you talk to everyone, and you use things in ways that occasionally seem a bit illogical. There's nothing wrong with this sort of design if you know what you're doing with it, and Primordia does, for the most part. With a few silly exceptions (at one point you need to shove an oil-soaked rag up a giant robot's nostril, then cut off one of his fingers and shove that up the other), the puzzles are mostly fairly smart, and there's a decent sense of diversity to them. There's a lot of showing item A to character B, naturally, but quite often the steps in-between are well thought-out, and many of the puzzles tie together well with others, so that jumping between locations will generally reveal clues or items required to solve puzzles in other areas.

The game drops hints without explicitly telling you what you need to do, and objectives are outlined in ways that mean you're unlikely to forget what you ought to be trying to do next. A few sections require you to write down number sequences - which can be annoying, because the importance of these numbers isn't necessarily made explicitly clear when you first encounter them, and on one occasion it's possible to get into a position where you have to guess a code's prefix - but for the most part Primordia doesn't irritate in the way so many of these games do.

It helps, that the world established during the scant playtime is so damn interesting. The main characters, Horatio Nullbuilt and his floating companion Crispin Horatiobuilt (all robots are named after their creators) have the sort of partnership that so often becomes annoying in games like this, but while they never quite reach the point of hilarious camaraderie enjoyed by the likes of Sam and Max, Crispin emerges as a fairly amusing side character. Although the reasoning behind the quest being undertaken is fairly benign,
involving the theft of a power core that the two need to retrieve to get their ship operational, the motivation for all your pointing and clicking takes a backseat to establishing backstory and character development. Depending on how you play the game (several puzzles have multiple solutions or even fail states), you can end up learning quite a bit about the pasts of both Horatio (who, as with all videogame characters, is a tad amnesic) and the city of Metropol, the promised paradise that the two characters spend the majority of the game exploring.

The relationship between man and machine is build up through fairly simple religious allegories; Horatio is a firm believer in the 'Gospel of Man', a text banned in Metropol. From the omnipresent position as a player, the discussion around the distinction between human and 'man', creator and forebearer, is interesting; Primordia kicks off at a point where few machines refer to themselves as 'Manbuilt, the majority having been built by other robots. This never quite factors in to the story or puzzles as much as would have been ideal, bar one interesting early encounter with an extremely pious robot guarding a bomb that Horatio must inspect. Here the puzzles come together perfectly with the story, as progress requires the player to go and learn more about themselves.

Not every scenario in Prirnordia is super satisfying, but there are moments that work so well that it's hard not to be captivated. The voice acting is excellent across the board too, imbuing the robots you meet along the way with full personalities. For such a modest release, it's surprising how much genuine acting talent the project has attracted.

Prirnordia was made in Adventure Game Studio, which means that the visual style is fairly simple. Graphically, it's an odd mix of beautiful design principles, cool robot designs, and an overabundance of brown. As much as it makes sense that the game would be so damn brown - dispelling the notion of Metropol as a 'city of glass and light' is important - it can still feel a bit suffocating after a few hours of play. Still, at least it's an intentional ugliness, rather than one born out of laziness.

There is, in fact, nothing lazy about Primordia. It's crammed full of neat touches and ideas alongside its simple take on how the genre operates. Above all else, it's reverent to the idea that adventure games need to feature great stories and characters, and that puzzles don't need to be impossible or obtuse to be enjoyable. It's further evidence that the second coming of the adventure game is well and truly upon us.

Developer: Wormwood Studios
Publisher: Wadjet Eye Games
Web: http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/primordia.html