Publisher: Wadjet Eye
Developer: Wormwood Studios
Year: 2012
Platform: Windows, Mac Linux, Switch, iOS

Rating: 6

I get a bit nervous playing narrative games where none of the characters are humans, even when they’re heavily anthropomorphized. When there’s no human character, it can be difficult to ground the story into something relatable. Primordia, the first adventure by Wormwood Studios, mostly succeeds in overcoming this potential pitfall despite every character being a robot. Some dastardly puzzles do get in the way, as well as some uneven characterizations , but it’s still a worthy play for those who like steampunk sci-fi.

A highly polished steampunk adventure (not surprising with Wadjet Eye publishing it), Primordia is a story about a post-apocalyptic world where robots are all that’s left on a world where humans are considered ancestral gods, at least to our hero Horatio Nullbuilt. As the game begins, his airship has crashed in a desert and while trying to repair it with his floating robot sidekick Crispin, a giant robot breaks in and steals their power core and nearly kills Horatio. Crispin would like to go to Metropol, the bustling city, to find a core, whereas Horatio wants to stay the hell away, searching the vast wasteland for spare parts.

While the game begins in the desert as you search junk areas for parts and run across the occasional robot, of course you eventually wind up in Metropol, a towering city of glass where the robots have lost faith, most insisting that humans never existed, a fabrication just to control the robot way of life.

Gameplay is intuitive, using the mouse to left-click to interact or right-click to examine. You can use Crispin as well to interact with any object. Most of the time he’ll decline, offering some defensive or pithy comment. But sometimes his help is required to solve a puzzle, thanks to his ability to hover (not fly) over the ground. Many games have a human ordering their robot creation around; this is the first I can remember where the owner is also a robot. Inventory is easy to manipulate, and items can be combined. You can also access a map as well as what is essentially a PDA where you keep relevant info you come across, making the need for note taking minimal.

The hand-drawn graphics, brooding with the sepia tones of the apocalypse, are meticulous and imaginative. The game’s low-resolution doesn’t quite do them justice, but they’re still a sight to see. Occasionally, necessary items are too-blended in with the background; half of the hints I needed to look up were due to pixel-hunting issues. Occasional close-up shots are also are very well done. The synthesizer heavy soundtrack heavily promotes a mysterious and somber atmosphere. While I didn’t find it particularly moving, this was perhaps more due to the story itself.

That’s not to say the story is bad by any stretch of the imagination. I was invested in learning more about this world and how different factions of robots came to be and interact with each other. One robot acts a religious gatekeeper. Another is a shameless street vendor. Two highfalutin robots argue over the name of their child, asking you to help them arbitrate. The endgame, where you confront the artificial intelligence that rules Metropol, comes together quite nicely, with seven possible endings, most of them satisfying in their own ways.

Yet part of my issue with the game is that you can lock yourself out of a couple of endings early on by making mistakes. While the mistakes are not that subtle, they also don’t seem like that big a deal. Thus, it’s difficult to understand why those decisions impact the endgame in the way they do. I appreciate that many puzzles have multiple solutions; I just wish they all felt fair.

Luckily, I reached one of the best endings on my first try, and the “big reveal” is quite satisfying, at least intellectually. In reality, I had a difficult time caring much about Horatio or Crispin’s fates, and I don’t think it was because they were robots. The voice acting is solid, but Horatio’s personality is quite stiff and he doesn’t offer much in the way of pathos. Crispin is voiced by the talented Abe Goldfarb, and unfortunately his mannerisms and wisecracks sound almost exactly like his character Joey Malone (another sidekick) in the Blackwell series. And I feel like the personality fits better with Joey anyhow.

It sounds like I disliked the game more than I did. Primordia is still a very good game, especially for those who like sci-fi point and clicks. It certainly had the potential to be an all-time great, but even though it didn’t quite make it, I still quite enjoyed the journey and would recommend to fans of the genre.