FOREVER A GOTHIC STINKER
Also for: Playstation 2, Playstation 3
Primal was a Sony exclusive, created by the now-defunct
SCE Studio Cambridge, that was originally released for the
Playstation 2 in 2003 to mixed reviews. Out of curiosity I played the
PS4-port from 2016, available on PS Plus, since I'd heard it's a "forgotten"
and "underrated gem". I'm always wary of remarks like that, because
it painfully often means that the game has some fine quality that players
latch on to, while they underemphasize myriads of other problems. And boy, is that true of this "problematic timesink of a stinker" (my quote, feel free to use it).
First, let's get that redeeming quality out of the way: In Primal, you alternate between controlling a human girl, Jen, and a gargoyle, called Scree. The game has quite a
nice dynamic going on between them. In
good old adventure movie style, their banter can be something to chuckle
at. They bicker about every little mishap, blaming each other because
they've got no one else to vent their frustrations on.
Or to be frank, it's mostly the spunky human girl, Jen, who blames the more
level-headed gargoyle, Scree, for her current predicament. As the story
begins in the ordinary world (called "Mortalis" in this lore), Jen attends a
concert held at a nightclub by her boyfriend's band. As the pair leave after
the gig, they get assaulted and mauled by a huge beast in a back alley. Both
end up in hospital, on the brink of death.
Jen's soul experiences an out-of-body moment, as she realizes what's about
to happen. That's when Scree appears out of nowhere and offers her a way to
reunite with her body. All she has to do is accompany him through a portal into Oblivion,
where things are out of whack, and help restore the balance. She
relucantly accepts, because what choice does she have?
Jen comes from an obscure, shady lineage, which explains some latent powers that make her unstoppable: She can turn
into different demonic creatures and adopt their powers. Over the course of this
game, she gradually learns to unleash these powers, as she visits four big
realms of different themes and solves the issue for the day - with Scree's
assistance of course. You can switch freely (most of the time) between the two
playable characters, that have unique combat- and problem-solving skills.
The story has that Alice in Wonderland-strangeness to it, depicting an ordinary girl in an extraordinary situation. It is average-to-poor by today's standards, but
the dialogue can be amusing. The voice performances are unusually good
for a PS2-game, since the lead actors (Hudson Leick and
Andreas Katsulas) recorded their dialogue together and could respond to each other's performances. This creates a rare chemistry rarely heard in
games of the era. I guess this is what the yay-sayers choose to remember.
But that quality alone doesn't make Primal anywhere near tolerable. This
game just wore me down, chipping away at my mental health until my brain
felt like Swiss cheese. This must be the most drawn-out game in history. Everything takes forever for no apparent
reason. The pace of moving around is down to a crawl, and you cannot sprint.
Combat is sluggish and delayed, because every animation takes forever to
execute. Every cutscene keeps rolling for minutes after they get the
point across.
Transforming between the four different demonic appearances (plus the fifth
standard human one) involves an unskippable eleven-second animation. Towards
the end of the game, where you have to switch in and out of different forms
to solve puzzles and adapt to different combat- and environmental
situations, this almost drove me into an existential crisis.
Every stupid level is extended to unbearable length, repeating the slow,
tedious puzzles that make you backtrack through the same barren
corridors, caves, underwater lairs and identical village streets. In spite
of the extreme linearity, an extensive auto-map and a quest marker,
you often feel lost with no idea of where to go and what to do.
The game has
an overarching problem with communication. It's super-clear about certain obvious things, and unclear about other, even more important matters. I don't know how they even pulled that off - it's gotta be some sort of meta-commentary on how
to not design levels and tutorials.
Every realm is dark and gothic - except the underwater level which is dark
and aquatic - which could have helped establish a certain atmosphere. But it
gets so dark that it can often halt the player's progression, throwing all
atmosphere out the window due to the mounting frustration. The puzzles sometimes get harder due to their unhelpful visual design. Important hints are a rarity - instead the designers prefer to hide them
in all the obscure doom and gloom. And so, there are times that the aesthetics actively harm the playability.
Out of nowhere, halfway through the game, some random enemies suddenly start dropping vital quest
items (keys) upon defeat. They are extremely hard to detect in the darkness.
One puzzle expects you to notice the fact that the floorboards creak a little when
you walk upon a section of the floor. Some puzzles hinge on game mechanics
never properly introduced. For instance, the fourth level introduces a
weird one-off door physics puzzle, that never gets
explained and then never returns. One of the different demons Jen can turn
into has the ability to "timeshift", which is also not explained,
and hardly used at all.
And don't get me started on combat, which is a joke with its awful blocking
mechanics and extremely floaty animations that never seem to connect. Often
enough, the hitsponge enemies will approach you one at a time, very
politely, and your best bet is to find the best combo and repeat it to
death. The hitboxes work at a whim, both for you and the enemy. Some enemies
are so slow you can just run around them and skip the fight. The bosses are
a joke, often involving some obvious puzzle mechanic. I didn't see a
game over screen until the final boss.
I won't go into detail about the automatic, context-based platforming
fiasco, nor about Scree's slow and confusing wall-climbing sections. And
should I even be surprised that the game is a buggy mess, even though it's
seen plenty of re-releases?
I glitched through the wall, floor and the ceiling a handful of times,
and got stuck in limbo. One time I actually clawed my way back into the stage, but another time I had to reload a previous save and lost 30 minutes of progress, because Primal
doesn't feature autosave or checkpoints. Another occasional glitch is the
audio hiccup that causes the first word of a spoken line to repeat for a few
seconds. And in one cutscene Scree was missing entirely, so Jen had a heated argument
with no-one but thin air.
Nope. We got off on the wrong foot, this game and I, and though I tried to
get along, Primal did its best to drive us further apart. Apparently, I
spent 29 long hours playing it. A lot of that time may have been idle, because I
found plenty of reasons to take breaks and calm my nerves.
Please,
retro-lovers, I beg of you: let this one stay forgotten. Don't elevate it into something it isn't, because it
is a stinker, and time does it no favors. Its technical merits (it
looked Sony-good in 2003) are tragically outdated, and the animosity I feel
isn't playful or comical - such as the one between Jen and Scree - but very
real indeed.
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