FOREVER A GOTHIC STINKER
Primal was a Sony exclusive developed by the now-defunct SCE Studio Cambridge, originally released for the PlayStation 2 in 2003 to mixed reviews. Out of curiosity, I played the 2016 PS4 port—available via PS Plus—after repeatedly hearing it described as a “forgotten” and “underrated gem.” I’m always wary of that label. More often than not, it means players cling to one redeeming quality while quietly downplaying a multitude of problems. And yes—this is very much the case with this particular “problematic timesink of a stinker” (my words, feel free to quote them).
Let’s get that redeeming quality out of the way. In Primal, you alternate between controlling a human girl, Jen, and a gargoyle named Scree. The dynamic between them is genuinely solid. In classic adventure-movie fashion, their banter can be amusing. They bicker constantly, blaming each other for every inconvenience, simply because they have no one else to vent their frustrations on.
To be fair, it’s mostly the spunky human girl, Jen, who unloads her irritation onto the more level-headed Scree. The story begins in the ordinary world—called Mortalis—where Jen attends a nightclub concert performed by her boyfriend’s band. As the couple leave the venue, they are ambushed in a back alley and mauled by a monstrous creature. Both end up hospitalized, hovering near death.
During an out-of-body experience, Jen realizes she's due for the afterlife. That’s when Scree appears and offers her a chance to reunite with her body. All she has to do is accompany him through a portal into Oblivion, a realm thrown out of balance, and help set things right. She reluctantly agrees—because what other choice does she have?
Jen hails from a shadowy lineage that conveniently explains her latent powers. Over the course of the game, she learns to transform into various demonic forms, each with unique abilities. She visits four distinct realms, each with its own theme and crisis to resolve, assisted by Scree. You can usually switch freely between the two characters, combining their combat and problem-solving skills.
The story has a mild Alice in Wonderland strangeness to it: an ordinary girl trapped in an extraordinary situation. By modern standards, it’s average at best, but the dialogue can be charming. The voice acting is unusually strong for a PS2-era game, largely because the lead actors—Hudson Leick and Andreas Katsulas—recorded their lines together. Their chemistry is rare for the time, and I suspect this is what fans remember when defending the game.
Unfortunately, that alone doesn’t make Primal even remotely tolerable.
This game slowly but relentlessly wore me down, chipping away at my mental health until my brain felt like Swiss cheese. It may genuinely be one of the most drawn-out games I’ve ever played. Everything takes forever for no good reason. Movement is glacial, with no sprint option. Combat feels delayed and mushy because every animation takes an eternity to complete. Cutscenes drag on long after they’ve made their point.
Transforming between Jen’s four demonic forms—plus her default human state—triggers an unskippable eleven-second animation. Late in the game, when frequent switching is required for puzzles and combat, this design choice nearly sent me into an existential crisis.
Every single level is stretched to unbearable length, padded with slow, repetitive puzzles that force constant backtracking through barren corridors, caves, underwater ruins, and indistinguishable village streets. Despite extreme linearity, an auto-map, and a quest marker, I was often lost, unsure of where to go or what the game wanted from me.
That puts the finger on Primal's most consistent issue. It has a serious communication problem. It explains trivial things in exhausting detail while remaining vague—or silent—about critical mechanics. It’s almost impressive how consistently it fails at tutorializing.
Every realm is drenched in darkness and gothic gloom—except the underwater one, which is dark and aquatic. While this could have established atmosphere, it frequently halts progress instead. Poor visibility turns mood into frustration, and puzzles become harder not through design but through obscurity. Vital visual cues are hidden in shadow, meaning the aesthetics actively sabotage playability.
Halfway through the game, some enemies suddenly begin dropping essential quest items like keys—items that are nearly impossible to see in the darkness. One puzzle hinges on you to noticing faintly creaking floorboards. Others rely on mechanics never properly introduced. The fourth realm throws in a bizarre one-off door physics puzzle, never explained and never reused. Jen’s “timeshift” ability is similarly underdeveloped and barely utilized.
Combat is a joke. Blocking barely works, animations feel floaty, and hits often fail to connect. Enemies politely approach one at a time, encouraging you to spam the same effective combo endlessly. Hitboxes behave unpredictably on both sides. Some enemies are so slow you can simply jog past them. Bosses are trivial, usually hinging on an obvious gimmick. I didn’t even see a game-over screen until the final boss.
I won’t dwell on the automatic, context-sensitive platforming or Scree’s slow and confusing wall-climbing sections. Nor should it surprise anyone that the game remains buggy despite multiple re-releases.
I clipped through walls, floors, and ceilings several times. Once, I managed to claw my way back into the level. Another time, I had to reload a previous save and lost thirty minutes of progress—because Primal lacks autosaves and checkpoints. Audio glitches cause dialogue to stutter, repeating the first word of a line to comical effect. In one cutscene, Scree failed to load entirely, leaving Jen to argue passionately with thin air.
We got off on the wrong foot, Primal and I. I tried to meet it halfway, but it did everything it could to push me away. Apparently, I spent twenty-nine long hours with it—many of them punctuated by forced breaks to preserve my sanity.
Please, retro-lovers, I beg you: let this one stay forgotten. Don’t elevate it into something it isn’t. It’s a stinker, and time has done it no favors. Its technical merits—impressive by Sony standards in 2003—are hopelessly outdated. And the animosity I feel toward this game isn’t playful or affectionate, like the banter between Jen and Scree, but very real indeed.
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