Not only did it feel like someone else's job to care, most of what I'd seen felt it was too late to change anything important anyway. Horatio's initial goal is to find a replacement power source for his ship, and that's fine - more than enough for the first half of the story, spent exploring the radioactive dunes and ultimately figuring out he needs to get to Metropol, robot city of glass and light, where nothing ever, ever, ever goes wrong. Without getting into spoiler-heavy specifics, the plot's core problem is one of drive. In both areas, Primordia stumbles early on and never quite regains its footing. The catch is that as well as this works, these conversations are a bright spot in a game whose heavy lifting needed to be done by its story and puzzles. He's always fun though, giving the otherwise often bleak locations a sense of life, and jokes to distract while poking around. Other times, Crispin demands that, just once, Horatio force another robot to figure out how to talk to him instead of MacGuyvering up a special communications device. These conversations are a bright spot in a game whose heavy lifting needed to be done by its story and puzzles. Sometimes he helps directly, sometimes he comments on the scene, sometimes he acts as the game's hint system, and sometimes he just comes out with wisdom like "I'm pretty sure that 'explosives' and 'helpful' are synonyms, boss." He's sarcastic without being snide, snarks without being mean, and does it all with enough wit that it makes total sense that the largely humorless Horatio would happily keep him around for companionship instead of merely tolerating his presence.Ĭrispin also serves as Primordia's main way of breathing life into its relentlessly muddy, post-apocalyptic world. Crispin especially is that rarest of creations, a genuinely funny, likable comic relief character. Offering Joey-squared is hardly a strike against Primordia though, especially as Beneath A Steel Sky's hero/sidekick relationship was by far its best element and Crispin and protagonist Horatio do a fine job living up to it. The robot buddy in this one is called Crispin, and he's voiced by actor Abe Goldfarb - the same actor who gave voice to Blackwell's sidekick, Joey Mallone. The deja-joue dial goes all the way to 11 if you've played publisher Wadjet Eye's Blackwell adventures. Their premises are different, but the shared vibe is unmistakable, from an engineer type being pulled from the wasteland to a corrupt city with his wise-talking robot pal, to a few bits and pieces in spoiler country. Now the pair must travel outside the relative safety of their remote home to Metropol, where the search for power will yield unexpected discoveries about Horatio's origins, his purpose, and the world he thought he understood.Primordia isn't simply an old-school adventure - at times, it's a *specific* old-school adventure: 1992's Beneath A Steel Sky. But this solitary life is shattered when a rogue robot breaks into the airship and steals the power core Horatio and Crispin need to survive. His existence is a peaceful one: he combs the landscape for machine parts to repair his rundown airship and ruminates upon the Book of Man, which teaches of the humans who came before him. Stoic android Horatio Nullbuilt lives with his robot companion Crispin in the deserted dunes beyond the city of Metropol. His existence is a peaceful one: he combs the landscape for machine parts to repair his Primordia is a sci-fi adventure with an in-depth story and a philosophical bent. Summary: Primordia is a sci-fi adventure with an in-depth story and a philosophical bent.
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