Primal

"The real definition of a mature game"

Primal might be described as a gothic adventure game, replete with exploration, physical combat, and puzzle solving. The easiest comparison would be to Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, , an earlier-generation game. This is only a superficial comparison, but it useful for talking about the game’s features.

First, the general flow of events during the game is the biggest similarity between the two. Most of your time is spent exploring and progressing through environments. Relatively frequently, you encounter one or more enemies and switch to combat mode, where you engage in hand-to-hand until your foes are dead, then explore some more. As you advance, many puzzles are placed in your path that must be solved in order to progress. In Soul Reaver, as anyone who has played it knows, these take the form of endless block flipping puzzles. In Primal, they make use of the main feature of the game: you control two characters in unison. Jen, the human, and Scree, the gargoyle, must journey together. The game’s puzzles involve obstacles to one or both of them advancing freely. For example, Jen might have to creep along a narrow ledge to get around a wall, so she can unlock a door from the inside and allow Scree in. Sound exciting? Of course not. This mechanic becomes a little tiresome as time goes on, and obstacles seem a little contrived, serving only to delay your reaching the next story event. In this respect, the puzzle aspect of the play mechanics is not much better than in Soul Reaver.

Another similarity is in the style of combat. Both games involve a switch into combat stances upon encountering enemies. You make use of combos to dispatch your enemies. The combat in Primal is far superior, however. One reason for this judgment is that you have a variety of fighting forms and styles throughout the game. As you achieve each of the 4 demon forms, you get a new combat style, complete with different energy-formed weapons and new sets of combos. This keeps combat fresh, something that gets lost from Soul Reaver. Combat in Primal is challenging much of the time, as you encounter larger and larger groups of increasingly deadly enemies. Fortunately, your demon forms get stronger as well. This is a bit of a disincentive to use earlier forms, but the creative player will get enjoyment of working them into their repertoire.

Both games are also very story-heavy, but Primal does a much better job of developing interesting characters and a solid storyline. For me, this was the highlight of the game. Jen and Scree are given full, well-rounded characterizations, and they develop a significant relationship over the course of the game. This is enhanced by the superb voice acting. I can’t recall the actor’s names, but the woman who played Calisto in the Xena TV series voices Jen, and an actor from Babylon 5 voices Scree. There are some genuinely touching and chuckle-inducing moments between the two main characters. This, and not violence and blood, is what marks a genuinely mature game.

The graphics are pretty good in Primal. The four realms, as well as the Nexus, each have very distinct architecture and color palettes, and each is shown as a huge worlds, with attractive buildings, terrain, and skies. Of course, much of your time is spent indoors, but the interiors are attractive, varied and highly detailed. This is most noticeable in the Wraith realm, inside a giant gothic castle. In the other realms, you spend a lot of time in cave dwellings, which are not quite so varied, but are still quite appealing. The character animations are quite smooth, and the designs are realistic and interesting. My only wish is that Jen’s demon forms differed more from each other, maybe diverging more from the standard humanoid dimensions. Overall, it does a good job avoiding, for the most part, the dull grey and brown environments that you tend to find in this type of game.

The game’s control is so-so. The camera, the bane of many games of this type, works mostly okay. You can control it manually using the right analog stick, and can place it directly behind you by a quick button press. However, in battles you’ll often find that you have to adjust it to give yourself the best view of the action, especially when faced by multiple enemies. As for the rest of the controls, most are assigned to the same button, and occur in context-dependent situations, simplifying the control scheme. Nevertheless, sometimes the characters do stuff you didn’t mean to, like Scree mounting or dismounting a wall, often because the camera swinging throws off the direction you’re trying to move him in. The combat controls are in the shoulder buttons, using a pressure-sensitive scheme. So, hard and soft button presses have different results. This takes some getting used to, especially as you try to find new combos in each demon form. It’s easy to press a button harder than you meant to, throwing your combo off. As a result, you may need to play the game a second time to discover all the variety that you can achieve in combat.

The game’s sound is where it really shines. Aside from the voice acting, which I already mentioned, the game soundtrack is fantastic. Hard rock/metal songs were written specially for the game by a band called 16Volt, and they are very fitting. They mesh extremely well with the game by the fact that Jen’s boyfriend, a key character in the game, is a singer in a metal band. This brings the music thematically into the story. Throughout the game, the score is mostly orchestral, but metal riffs come into play as you enter combat mode, boosting the fights’ excitement.

There are some programming problems with the game. For one thing, the editing around the cut scenes gets harsh at times, really interfering with the flow of the storytelling. This is especially so in the final battle, where as soon as you make the hit that depletes the last of the first enemy’s life bar, it cuts right away to another scene, not giving you any death animations or even a brief moment to actually see that you won the fight. This left me wondering what the heck had just happened. Some glitches can pop up in the game too. I managed to get Jen stuck in the ether outside of the game environment, and one time I couldn’t enter combat mode, even while an enemy was right in front of me taking shots at me while I wondered what the heck was going on. Other players have encountered other bizarre glitches from time to time, but these are rare enough that they don’t ruin the game experience. At worst, you might have to reload a recent saved game.

As you progress through the game, various bonus movies and features are unlocked in the game menu. These are mostly behind-the-scenes videos and featurettes that are actually produced well and interesting to watch. In-game, however, there are no bonuses to be unlocked. The only extra reason to replay, other than enjoying a good gaming experience, would be to locate all of the tarot cards that are hidden throughout the worlds. If you find them all, additional bonuses are unlocked in the game menu. There are also secret codes that can give you the usual gamut of gameplay enhancements, such as invulnerability and unlocking demon forms before their time. All of this gives the game medium replayability factor, in my opinion.

So overall, the game features attractive environments and well-designed character models, a fantastic soundtrack and voice acting, and a compelling storyline, with effective, realistic dialogue and relationship-building between the main characters. This is marred only by some minor control and camera issues, very occasional bugs, and some off-putting choppy editing around the cut-scenes. Overall, it is an excellent game, if you can live with the endless puzzle/obstacle-exploration format that is at the heart of 3rd person adventure games. On this basis, I give this game a score of 8/10 overall.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/18/03