Primordia

"If man is still alive
If robot can survive
They may fiiiiiind "

Futurama's parody of "In the Year 2525"


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Contains some spoilers as to the adventure game Primordia, though I'd kept things vague... except for one stupidly obscure visual clue.
Long story short: worth buying.
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This is a game like if WALL-E went goth.

I've gone light on the adventure games these past few years. The emotional gut-punch of The Cat Lady proved a tough act to follow, and as far as gameplay goes there's only so much old-timey pixel-hunting and non-sequitur puzzle solutions I can stomach. Also, I freely scoff at the lo-res pixelated "neo retro" fad in all its hipster glory. Give me my polygons, damnit! Still, Wadjet Eye has published enough thoughtful, memorable interactivity to warrant some trust, so Primordia's languished on my "next to play" list ever since I finished Gemini Rue and Resonance.

Welcome to Metropol.

You are a pious Man-fearing robot named Horatio Nullbuilt Version 5, an amnesiac robbed of your airship's power core (which also doubles as your own life support) at plasma cannon-point by a meeeeesteeerious and laconic boxy bot. Along with your floating head sidekick, you must travel to the center of your known universe to track down your horse thief, escape your encroaching fate, and, while you're at it, rediscover the fate of your previous incarnation. To anyone who's played the Blackwell games, the two-character setup will be instantly familiar (your floating sidekick even shares the voice of Joey Mallone) but Primordia's writer Mark Yohalem also acknowledged a creative debt to the reanimator and floating head of Planescape: Torment. Years later, his treatment of that theme netted him a spot on the writing team for Torment's intended spiritual successor, Tides of Numenera.

I declared T:ToN an excellent game but unfortunately falling short of the original Torment in one respect: as regards the torment. Though presenting at face value many terrible situations, the context, descriptions and dialogues rarely lend them the visceral nihilism of Sigil's slums. But, one of those occasions when Tides rose to the original's depths was the quest "Endless Horror" and the character Inifere, which if Reddit threads are to be believed was largely Yohalem's baby. While Primordia doesn't try to one-up Torment's bleakness, the writer knew enough not to pull his punches when it came to apocalyptic settings.

Caveat emptor: this is an adventure game, and as such suffers from the genre's usual failings dating back to the 1980s. Some of the puzzles are a bit too abstruse and obtuse and memory-based (e.g. Rex's ownership) with little feedback as to whether the steps you've taken are having a desired effect, or overextended to the point you start asking yourself whether this is all going anywhere (Memorious) and some of your MacGyver utensils tend toward redundancy. I had to backtrack from Goliath to the UNNIIC because when I'd unplugged one of my inventory items for transport I'd forgotten to also unplug its plug separately. Also, when I'm supposed to notice and count lights consisting of a five-pixel plus sign, your pixel-hunting's straying dangerously close to hunting literally singular pixels. Not to mention the polar bears in snowstorms:

No, seriously, even with my mouse pointering right at it can you discern what "robot" you're supposed to have spotted in this image? Hint: it's not the one with the printouts.

But, for the most part it's good. You're handed a few quaint tasks you don't see in every adventure title, like drawing lines to represent electrical wires or slapping sticky ends together to recombine a longer code. Some of the random goofiness can be hit-or-miss (I laughed out loud when "b'sod it" finally clicked for me but merely rolled my eyes at Ever-Faithful's merrie olde Englishe) and some of the verbal references fall a bit askew. Why would a bread-less world know what toasters are? Still, overall Primordia's plot, once you get into it, proves solid scifi and a great deal more complex and memorable than we've grown to expect from interactive fiction, retro or not. The ending deserves special mention, as not only is it multifaceted, with all facets carrying some degree of bittersweet or purely bitter loss, but:

- playing the moral choices by ear I pretty much struck my preferred Chaotic Neutral path through the endgame, and shockingly this yielded the most positive denouement of all of them. Maybe I'm just too accustomed to RPGs which try to badger or outright force you to end every hero's journey by becoming a Lawful Good champion of the status quo... or maybe I just can't reconcile this outcome with the minor detail that Mark Yohalem is a freaking lawyer!

Really, you want a puzzle-solving game? Riddle me that one. I can't wrap my head around it. At least it explains Clarity.