Primordia

I really enjoyed the adventure game with such a dark setting and theme. Overall I enjoyed the story, but it was rather short and I wish they had more locations to explore. One of my frustrations in the game was where to use a certian object or some part on the screen that you would never have thought to click actually contained an item that you needed in order to progress. Other than that the characters really draw you in and you want to find out what happens next.

Quite a good adventure with an original setting. Only drawback is that it's rather short. A sequel would be great!

As per the headline this is a good but not great Point n Click adventure game. If you are not sure what that means then this is essentially a relaxed type of game with no pressure which is essentially a story on rails which progresses as you solve puzzles. The bread and butter is move your mouse pointer around the screen and click whenever you see a text pop-up - some things are items you can pick up and use to solve puzzles, others are non-collectable items you can use items on (or with) and then some others serve no real purpose. These type of games rely on atmosphere and storytelling mixed with logical puzzles. Primordia has atmosphere, certainly. The visuals look dated/retro by modern standards but are nevertheless well drawn and have a definite 'dark graphic novel' style. Animations are functional rather than fluid but that doesn't spoil the mood. The voice acting is of a good standard but overall lacking a bit of sparkle. Your role as the brooding protagonist Horatio Nullbuilt is contrasted by your constant sidekick, Crispin Horatiobuilt (you made him), who cracks jokes which unfortunately I thought were cliched rather than actually funny but you may love him - a bit of a 'Marmite' character like Jar Jar Binks character. The music is pretty good and fits well with the game's slightly dark ambience and it's good enough to leave playing all through the game though you could of course mute it if it's not quite your taste and play something more to your taste. The story is a pretty solid tale of robots on a post-war world (I won't say more than that) that kicks off well but doesn't reveal all that smoothly and is thin in places. It's a bit disjointed at times - not hard to understand, not at all, but lacking in steadily building. Quite early on Horatio learns something significant about himself, seems to accept it but struggles with it towards the end of the story - 2 steps forward and 1 back. The puzzles are pretty standard fare - collect objects, use objects on a part of the screen (or NPC) or combine objects first then use them on the screen. The ability to also 'use' Crispin at times (he can fly/hover) is a neat touch but underused - it would have been great to have puzzles where both Horatio and Crispin have to do things in tandem to solve a puzzle. About half of the puzzles I found to be reasonably obvious and straightforward with the other half being a pain in the neck due to having little or no logic involved and ultimately led to trail and error with items and researching rooms in cased I'd missed an object while mouse-scanning the screen. To be fair plenty of point n click games have at least some puzzles which leave you thinking "there's no way I could logically come to that conclusion" so Primordia is perhaps not the worst but not the best where puzzles are concerned. The interface is OK. The game uses an 'engine' called AGS which is not great when it comes to screen resolutions. Run the setup program from within the game folder odr GOG Galaxy before you run the game. I ended up having to run in a window because whenever I tried full screen I just got a blank screen (Windows 10, Geforce 770, latest Nvidia drivers as of 30/07/17) so I made my desktop black and hid the taskbar. I opted for anti-aliasing rather than nearest pixel as I preferred the smoother look to the 'jaggies' although that smoothing does mean less edge sharpness of course. The in-game interface hides at the top of the screen and drops down when you move your pointer up there - not a great one as regularly I did bring up the interface when not intended, but not awful, I've played with worse interfaces. There did not seem to be an option for just voice acting without onscreen text which is a shame as this can lead to skipping quickly through conversations because it's hard to to ignore the text on the screen and once you've read it you don't always want to wait for the characters to finish their voice sentences. Again, not the only game to do this. You can have just onscreen text and no voices if you wish. In conclusion I enjoyed the game enough to play it through to the end which took about half of a lazy rainy day and I did refer to a walkthrough when I got completely stuck - maybe 10 times. If you like Point n Click games in general and the genre (robots) works for you then yes, consider this, or if it's on offer with a good discount then definitely recommended. It does not have the quality of the best in this genre (such as the Monkey Island games for example) but then Primordia is not from a big name studio with huge budgets. It's 3/5 from me but that's not bad on a 5-star scale where 0 = awful, 1 = poor, 2 = mediocre, 3 = good, 4 = great, 5 = superb.

But doesn't hold up to the storytelling of its forefathers. The level design and art style is very good if you like 90s era SCUMM games. The story will be quite engaging unless you have read at least a bit of Gibson/Asimov/Lem, if you have you may be a bit bored, as the plot is standard fare, nothing groundbreaking, quite predictable. The puzzles for the most part are well designed, but there were two in particular that were needlessly obtuse, to the point that there was no way to figure them out other than using a walkthrough or random chance. The latter half of the game is padded by a lot of unlocking doors. I mean a ridiculous amount of the last half of the game is spent not advancing the story or learning new lore, but trying to figure out how to unlock some door or other. Also hampering the story is the fact that all the characters are nearly emotionless (they have sarcasm chips) robots which are hard to connect to or sympathize with.

While the story is good the puzzles are usually non-obvious and its *very* easy to have no clue where to go next.