Two in a row for “there are no more humans” games, but Primordia takes a more traditional approach to the subject than Subserial did. A vast and incredibly brown wasteland is home to Horatio, a scrap-collector, and his wisecracking floating ball friend Crispin. Life sure is sweet as a desert robot, until one day a giant talking PS2 comes and nobbles Horatio before running off with his little power crystal majigger.
What follows is your fairly standard “interact X object with Y environmental feature” style puzzle adventure game. If you’ve played any of Wadjet Eye’s other titles you know what you’re getting into here (go play the Blackwell series if you haven’t!). Wadjet Eye usually manage to avoid the genre-typical problem of completely inscrtutable solutions that require multiple huge lateral leaps in logic to arrive at which I’m thankful for. Despite that, I still struggle with such things, but that’s not Primordia’s fault.
Wadjet Eye’s real strength comes from the storytelling and the characters, with the Blackwell series again being a personal fave. Adventure games never really get beyond “pretty ok” in terms of gameplay for me, but I’ll stick around for a ripper of a yarn.
Fin or Bin:
To that end- Primorda has a pretty slow start, but the stakes are already high as without their power crystal thingy, Horatio and Crispin only have a few days to live. The desert wasteland isn’t a particularly cheerful setting for the world, either. If I hadn’t played a WadjetEye game before, I might be on the fence here, but I trust Dave Gilbert to pull some real shenanigans with his stories as they develop, so on the power of back catalogue Primordia is going to be a Fin.
(Steam)