Primordia

Primordia is a dystopian point and click adventure published by Wadjet Eye games. Dave Gilbert would have sorted out the voice acting because you have returning names like Logan Cunningham, Sarah Elmaleh, and Abe Goldfarb.

Horatio (who has a human-like appearance; until you see a cut-scene of his face) is a robot scavenger, with his floating-orb robot companion Crispin. An aggressive robot takes his ship's powercore, leaving him stranded. His aim is to track down the thief and reclaim his powercore.

I know it's a dystopian world, but there's not many interesting scenes. Early on, the large ruined robot is the most interesting, but then you have a shrine with a bomb, a bomb shelter, Horatio’s ship “The U.N.N.I.I.C”, and a scrap yard. Later on, you reach the main city; but a few streets and an underground isn't an improvement, and still features the dull colour palette of brown, reds and blacks. The graphical style is heavily pixelated and doesn't look great.

I felt the story wasn't delivered well. There's some world-building like Horatio's bible which depicts a religion worshipping human creators, whereas other robots have robot creators. Their surnames reflect this. Horatio has a mysterious past so is known as "Null built", whereas Crispin is "Horatio Built". Some robots seem to not believe in the human creators. I feel like I didn't quite understand some of the revelations near the end, even if there's exposition to try and tell you. I felt like there wasn’t enough emphasis on certain aspects to lead up to it. So often, you are told something basic, hours pass, then you are given a twist on something that you had little knowledge of to begin with.

The game has multiple endings, most depending on how you act in the final encounter. There are some variations based on some earlier events.

Crispin can be used as an inventory item to tell him to interact with objects in the scene. You can also talk to Crispin to give hints if you want them. A running joke is how Crispin desires arms but Horatio never gave him them. Early on you send him in a tube to drag out an item for you. Later on, you give him a cable to take to the floor above to tie it and create a rope that you can climb up. How does he take it up there? How does he tie it securely?

Aspects like that mean some puzzles aren't obvious but I felt like they weren’t the much maligned "moon logic" style puzzles. It's more like your interpretation of the world is not quite aligned with the developers. There is one commentary from the developer where he remarks that the grease is sticky, but the play-testers thought the grease should be slippery. So when you had to find something to hold a grenade in place, the testers tried to place the grenade in the nearby corpse's pocket to hold it, rather than dip it in grease. He didn’t change it though.

The game suffers from this more frequently towards the end, where some of the puzzles are a bit cryptic or not enough reminders. Like you find a medal and should give it to the owner, but if he told you he had lost a medal, it would have been a few hours prior and never mentioned again - so I had long forgotten. It's not mandatory, unless you want him to solve a number puzzle for you, but understanding how to go about solving the number puzzle yourself seems a bit of a leap, even if you ask Crispin for advice multiple times to give you the hint.

There are some dialogue puzzles where you can fail and it won't let you try them again - so you cannot just trail-and-error your way through. Sure, you could just save and reload, or go with the game and go do the alternate task instead.

The datapad item tracks objectives, as well as some other useless info. There's quite a few puzzles involving entering numbers (co-ordinates, door codes, launch codes), so the datapad stores these once you learn them.

Travelling between areas is fast since you can quick-travel with the map at any point, rather than moving to the edge of the screen and clicking a prompt. This is a welcome feature.

I feel like the best point-and-clicks have interesting and memorable lead and supporting characters. They also either have a strong plot, or sub-plots to keep the story moving forward. I feel like I won't remember any of these characters, and felt the plot wasn't well-paced to keep me intrigued. It's not a terrible game but I feel it misses the mark.

I also hope you like the dulcet tones of Logan Cunningham, best known for strumming your strings as the narrator of Bastion and Transistor. I hope you like that he's in good company when it comes to the other voices and the words that they say.

I hope you like not hunting for pixels in a graphic adventure, not dealing with moon logic, multiple endings, choices that matter. I hope you like having more than one way to solve a puzzle, a sardonic sidekick that isn't obnoxious, gentle hints when you're stuck. I also hope you don't hate this writing schtick I quite genuinely stumbled into and am now struggling to escape.

Graphic adventures are hard to get right. Moon logic sneaks in when designers are familiar with puzzles. Trite mechanical obstacles are easy to sprinkle in. Dialogue can be grating instead of clever, self-aware satire can devolve into shallow reference. Tracking information can be a chore, travel can become an interminable timesink. Primordia dodges all of these bullets. It's smartly constructed, engaging and well-paced, and a striking reminder that Wadjet Eye is the publisher when it comes to keeping the genre alive.

It is also very, very brown.

In an alternate reality where people actually play point-and-click games, Primordia is a fondly remembered classic of the genre, spawning countless imitators and inspiring generations of game designers with its gorgeous visual direction, idea of a fascinating post-human world and memorable characters. While it is indeed a tough challenge to objectively quantify how popular an artwork actually is, I feel safe assigning Primordia a recognition level of not nearly enough

Primordia is engrossing, endearing and entertaining. It starts with a short introductory cutscene where the two main characters are introduced - the deadpan, stoic protagonist Horatio and his charming comic-relief sidekick Crispin. They live a reclusive, quiet life, until a hostile machine invades their home and steals the power core - retrieval of which remains the guiding objective throughout the entire game. Forced to leave their secluded desert shelter, they soon find themselves in the city of Metropol, delving deeper and deeper into the history and intrigues that shaped the dystopia they reluctantly explore.

The relationship between the two is with no doubt one of the game's strongest selling points. On one side, it's a reliable, instantly recognisable goofy-guy-deadpan-guy pairing, functioning especially well here as a contrast to the grim reality. Ever since the Wasteland game, moments of comic relief accompany bleak postapocalyptic landscapes to prevent the atmosphere becoming too oppressive to enjoy. On the other side, Horacio is by all means and purposes a father of Crispin, having built him according to his own design. While not shying away from challenging his ideas, Crispin lets his mask of tease slide down sometimes, revealing a deep affection and respect to Horacio, his father figure. One of the funniest and most heartfelt moments when this aspect of the relationship comes to the light is an optional puzzle where Horacio helps Crispin get over his timidness and speak to another robot he likes. It's an interesting twist on the formula by itself, expanded on by the tension arising from the fact that Horacio had the opportunity to shape Crispin in whatever way he desired. Was creating a companion that questions him a purposeful act, or did he leave in the design a space of freedom for Crispin to develop a personality on his own? I feel this fragment from the short story on the game's official site is the best way to sum up this train of thought - Horatio pre-loaded a lot of data when he built me. For example, all these words, our core logic, how to field-strip a screw (is that right?) and tie seventeen kinds of knots. You would think he would have filled us up with this nonsense in his Gospel. But, no. "You can always ask, Crispin."

The internal struggle between the predestined identity devised by one's creator and the freedom of continuous development is probably the main theme shaping the narrative of the game, along with its extension in form of characters whose purposes are either fulfilled or no longer valid, forcing them to find new guiding principles and values. The writers did not stop there however, delving into questions concerning the nature of law along with the problem of unjust law, problematic nature of established knowledge (understood in this case as a collection of facts about the world) and its interaction with the threats of censorship or malicious interventions, the role of imagined visions of the past in shaping the identity of a person or a society, struggle between a chase for an utopia and respect for personal freedom and many, many more. Multitude of themes and ideas at play in Primordia shows just how much love and heart the devs have poured into their work.

Setting of the game, being not just a delivery vector for the inquires and questions concerning general ideas shaping the world, is also genuinely interesting as an imagined world with an expansive history and lore. That exploration is somehow constrained by the game's relatively short playtime. Still, almost every encounter is not just an obstacle to overcome or a plot device, but brings with itself revelations concerning the broader background of the setting. My favorite example of this would probably be the alien robot who might be communicated with only through the radio, their surname created with a different rule than the one player is used to at this point.

One cannot forget to mention the game's gorgeous, distinctive and imaginative artstyle. Drawing inspirations not just from the classic postapocalyptic visages of Mad Max 2's ramshackle, improvised bricolages, added to the mix have been features of H.R.Giger's skeletal, oppressive sharp forms and Art Nouveau sleek architecture, (the latter mostly in the design of Metropol) creating a truly distinctive and fascinating vision. It's a shame how the low resolution of the game does not do the style justice, sometimes turning the characters and objects into featureless brownish-grayish pixel blobs with a hint of blue.

With the game being as great as it is, there are some grievances that stopped me from giving the game a full 5/5 rating. Apart from clunky interface and already mentioned low resolution, the design of some of the riddles leaves a lot to be desired. There is some pixel hunting, not helped by the points of interest blending with background sometimes. The biggest offender here would probably be the hatch on a car in the sewers. Some may find the puzzles to be obtuse, especially with how many of them presuppose either some knowledge, or intuition, concerning the programming principles and formal logic. However, the toughest puzzles usually have some kind of alternative skip solution and the Crispin is always there with optional tips prodding the player in the right direction, so I believe this problem to be alleviated somehow (except for the Primer's puzzle, where a critical clue for the "right" solution is hidden in an unrepeatable piece of dialogue. Ugh).

Still, Primordia remains to me one of the most original and inventive worlds ever created. With witty dialogue, interesting setting and charming characters, it manages to present one of the best post-human (and yet still very humanistic) narratives in gaming, and perhaps among even cultural works in their entirety.