Primordia was first released on PC in 2012 and later ported to iOS in 2016. A decade later the title is landing on Nintendo’s Switch and seeks to find a new audience. It is developed by a small team named Wormwood Studios and Published by Wadjet Eye Games. While the main story is only about seven and a half hours, there’s a lot of polish that comes through the writing, art direction, and sound design. Furthermore, the setting and lore of the game are intriguing and have a way of hooking you early which is essential to pull you through the times when the puzzle design stumbles. If you’re looking for a nice pallet cleanser from all the mammoth open-world games that are flooding Q1 of 2022, then read on.
You play as Horatio Nullbuilt a jaded robot seeking a power core to fix his ship in this point-and-click adventure. You’re accompanied by Crispin, your plucky sidekick who lightens your dower mood. After initially being raided by a big-bad who breaks in and steals your life-giving power-core, the duo decides to repair the backup-generator, rather than travel to Metropol and hunt this thief. Horatio seems hardwired to hate that city and it takes a good while until your curiosity about this city of “light and glass” is satiated by a visit.
As you’d expect from a point-and-click adventure game, you’ll spend your time listening to dialogue hints from Crispin to find, combine, and apply items to broken machines in order to progress. I’m very grateful for voiced characters in this game, as the slower pace needed some liveliness to pull me along. Solving the puzzles was either satisfyingly quick or arduously obtuse. I didn’t have too many epiphany moments but instead found myself retreading old spaces looking for what had I missed. It’s certainly a difficult balance to strike, but if you don’t enjoy scratching your head and looking at the same room for the 10th time in an hour, you won’t find any relief here.
The star of the show is the overall art design and lore. While humans are long gone, their robot-successors are left to make sense of the world. They even have a revamped religion based on Judeo-Christian scripture. At times, I wanted to just sit and look at the pixel art of the level and try to piece together how that duct-taped engine got plugged into the derelict spaceship and still worked. I enjoyed the dialogue exchanges between Crispin and Horatio and looked forward to each time I got to visit a new location.
It’s not all beautiful post-post-apocalyptic eye candy though. My two gripes are the interface and display aspect ratio. I’m of the mind that, I paid for all the pixels, and I want to use all the pixels. The game uses an aspect ratio that is slightly thinner than the widescreen. It appears a little bigger than 4:3 but not quite 16:9. I thought maybe this was just a pre-release quirk, but it seems intentional as no update on day-one has fixed it. I have tested this in both handheld and the dock, and both have bars on the left and right of the screen. To be fair, nobody is buying this game because of the graphical fidelity; it’s a pixel-art game. However, it makes a bad impression off the bat for a game that is asking $15.
My second complaint is the interface. This is a game intended for a mouse. While many adventure games have tried to bridge this gap to a controller, others have done so with less clunkiness. This is compounded by trying to decipher what an item is in my inventory is or could be combined with. Due to the nature of the graphics, when you have a component that is labeled as “rag” but looks like “smudge”, it’s hard to put together that I should combine it with something else in the world to solve a problem. When you are in-sync with the intended game design of the puzzles, the controls and interface aren’t an issue, but when some of the logical leaps to solve a problem are more obtuse, it feels like the game is holding you back from trying to iterate on a solution.
If you’re on the go and appreciate the slower adventure game, then this is a great recommendation. Just be aware that you’re in for some head-scratchers and a few clunky controls. The voice actors and art direction make some truly interesting characters and worlds. I would eagerly pick up a book set in this universe. All too often I found myself giving up and looking online to figure out what had I missed. All that said, I think $15 is a fair asking price, and if you have a long flight ahead of you, this is a solid choice.
