PRIM review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Charmingly offbeat black-and-white adventure absolutely kills it in all the ways that a proper point-and-click should

If PRIM was the last game I ever played, I would die a happy point-and-clicker. But I do hope to have many more reviews in me, since I doubt anyone would be able to turn the underworld as expertly upside down to find me as the titular character does here, for reasons of her own. It’s the epitome of what I look for in an adventure game: a classic hand-drawn graphical style, a user-friendly interface, an orchestral soundtrack, great voice-overs belonging to a plethora of characters to engage in conversation, loads of inventory puzzles, a compelling story, and even some extra nifty gameplay elements. This is the type of game I love to play, and PRIM does it all superbly, offering a beautiful and delightfully whimsical exploration of the afterlife like we’ve never experienced before.

You play as Prim, an almost-sixteen-year-old whose look makes her appear more like an elementary schoolgirl, but with an unmistakable teenage sassy voice critiquing everything around her. She’s friends with nerdy Tristan, with whom she decides to rummage through her mother’s attic after the dear lady passes away. It’s there Prim discovers that her father, who has been absent all her life, is none other than Thanatos, God of the Dead, and he decides at that moment to take custody of her. That crazy premise was enough to hook me right from the start.

Prim is transported to the underworld, a place inspired by Greek mythology and yet still very much unique. There she undergoes a small physical metamorphosis – her wavy blonde hair turns completely black and a bit spikier, dark eyeliner appears out of nowhere and the buttons on her outfit turn into little skulls – making her look even more Burton-esque and thus completely fitting into her new home. Her welcome isn’t a smooth one, however, as Thanatos, new to being a dad, doesn’t really handle things that well, seeing no other solution to keeping Prim under control than locking her up in her room. First task in the underworld: escape!

PRIM uses a simple one-click interface to interact with the environment. There are hotspot highlighters but you have to manually release them first in a small inventory puzzle after Prim is locked up by her father, so they aren’t immediately available at the start of the game! Once these little firefly-like creatures are released, you can make them glow again by hitting the spacebar. Integrating this part of the user interface into the fictional world is so well executed, it deserves an extra thumbs up!

Clicking an interactive object will prompt Prim to give her thoughts on it, and if it’s interesting enough she’ll automatically pick it up. Here’s where the detailed and funny writing first becomes apparent, with unique responses for everything you can examine, and appropriately subtle signposting for any puzzles that might be linked to it. No firm hand holding, just little nudges to give you a sense of direction. You can open your inventory by scrolling the mouse wheel, and there you DO have a two-click interface: a left-click simply selects the item again to use on another item or on a hotspot, while right-clicking provides a description of it – a feature I often find lacking in modern games. 

Early on, Prim will meet a special companion in the form of a demon eyeball spider, which she’ll have to catch before you can give it a name. (I called it “Goggle” out of three possibilities.) Once caught, in a hilarious cutscene, Goggle will pull out one of Prim’s own eyeballs and firmly nestle in its place to keep you company for the rest of the adventure. From that point on you can use Goggle to get inside places Prim herself doesn’t have access to, and then you can control the loveable spider the way you control Prim, with its own inventory and all. 

Goggle can’t really talk, limited to the odd meep now and then, but the little walking eyeball can be used to reveal other characters’ secrets with the help of its “spider vision.” Using Goggle on an NPC will change the appearance of the cursor into their image, as if you’re using them like any inventory item, and you can then click on anything in their surroundings to see if they have a special connection to it. If you uncover such a secret, you are shown a hazy vision of that character performing some action, providing a more interesting and playful way to include fetch quests than a character unimaginatively telling you what they want. Eventually you’ll get to play as Prim’s best friend Tristan as well, when he sets off to find her after she disappears from her mom’s attic. Thankfully the developers don’t go overboard with this section, as the focus of the game stays on Prim for the remainder of the game. 

PRIM

Genre:	Drama, Fantasy
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Afterlife, Coming of age, Family
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium

Most of the puzzles in PRIM are of the inventory kind, though there are some fun mini-games included. At one point you have to build a catapult using a “DIEKIA” assembly manual to help a Zombeaver complete his dam. You must also win a battle of “Game of Gnomes” between Goggle and a possessive cat, and you’ll have to play multiple rounds of the “Casketball” card game in order to win a special item from the underworld champion, which serves not only as a mini-game but a collectible side quest as well. 

Exploring the Realm of the Dead will turn up hidden Casketball playing cards (featuring avatars of some Kickstarter backers). Some you can pick up easily, while others you’ll have to put in more effort to acquire. There are four types of cards (Sirens, Gorgons, Centaurs and Hydras) leading to a total of thirty-six cards to be collected – or won! You’ll need to find at least eight to play, after which you’ll have to challenge other characters to a game if you want to improve your deck or complete your entire collection. Each card has four values (strength, speed, intelligence and dexterity), to be used to cross a cemetery football field while carrying a casket. First one who can drop their casket into the open grave on the other side of the field wins! I found this a very fun diversion whenever I got stuck on a puzzle, though the story dragged me in so fully that I failed to complete my set before the end.

All 2D characters and backgrounds are hand-painted in hi-res black and white, in full Frankenweenie or original Addams Family style. There’s something dark and creepy about it all, but at the same time cartoonishly cute. And PRIM is anything but a static game. Whenever you’re near water, skeletal arms and hands will occasionally pop up in a desperate reach for salvation, or the bones of a herring will jump further upstream, still following its instinct from when it was alive. Every so often, a human form will float down from a light in the sky and disappear in the maw of a skull-shaped mountain. All this is accompanied by an elaborate and immersive soundtrack to boot, performed by the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg, which is playful but ominous when it has to be.

Even though you’re exploring the Realm of the Dead, the place is teeming with sort-of life. There’s all kinds of fauna roaming the world, and you can even find a book listing all the creatures you might encounter. Among others there’s the famous three-headed dog Cerberus, an undead chicken called a Necrocluck, and a series of puzzles require a feather from an aging and thus bald Phoenix. All of these creatures are minding their own business and seem to be there just as fun background flavor at first, until you realize you actually NEED them, perhaps for the main story or perhaps to get your hands on some extra Casketball cards.

There are lots of human(ish) characters to meet as well, such as Persephone, who would like to bring back some color to the local flora. She’s thwarted by environmental activist Hank, who prefers the forest to stay dry and dead so much that he resorts to ventriloquism to make a dead tree talk – with lots of tree-related puns as a result, of course. There’s Charon, the ferryman, whom Prim needs to persuade into taking her across the river Styx. And there’s Echo, a half-man, half-chicken type of self-proclaimed Siren who wants to win over the heart of one of the three Fates and needs Prim’s help in composing a song.

Every character is skillfully voiced by a cast of professional voice actors: Sally Beaumont performs a trifecta as the three Fates (or Moirai) Atropos, Clotho and Lachesis, who not only basically narrate the story but are also involved in a dialogue puzzle involving all three of them, requiring an entertaining bit of Sherlockian deduction. Ivy Dupler plays both Prim’s mother Morwen and her mythological aunt Keres, and Adrian Vaughan takes on the role of Thanatos. But the lead goes to Maria Pendolino, who has narrated loads of documentaries, among plenty of other voice work. It’s tricky for any adult actor to capture the youthful sound of an angsty teenager, and although Maria mostly gets it right, her delivery is not completely without flaw. The rare line sounds too honeysweet and lacks that whiny teen ennui so prevalent in all the rest of Prim’s lines, which the voice director should have caught. 

You’ll have reason to talk to all these characters, gather clues and solve puzzles to progress, because the plot thickens after Prim has escaped her room. Turning sixteen and being in the Realm of the Dead awakens special powers inside her that proves she’s Thanatos’s daughter, but these powers feel like a double-edged sword. You can’t actively wield them yourself, but they do get Prim into even more trouble, and without giving away too much, she’ll face a series of quests to bring back balance between the worlds of the dead and the living. 

Handy for keeping track of all this is Prim’s diary, available through the inventory. The larger quests are listed on the left page, while the smaller goals are displayed on the right. Clicking on the latter accesses the in-game hint system, giving clues on how to reach the solution – which I successfully refrained from using, I can smugly proclaim, even though I was very tempted once or twice! Although more credit is due to developer Common Colors for getting the difficulty balance just right.

While there aren’t that many different locations in PRIM, you do obtain a map of the area that automatically unfolds when you leave a location, but you can also open it directly from your inventory for fast-travel. Progress is saved automatically in a checkpoint system, but manual saves are also offered. You can’t die in this game – because, well, if you could, I guess Prim would just remain where she was – nor are there any choices or outcome-defining decisions to be made.

The inventory puzzles all make sense, even though you might not be wielding the most everyday objects – you ARE in the underworld, after all. Sometimes you might get off on the wrong foot at first, but if you keep your eyes peeled the solution will present itself without having to rack your brain too hard. Goggle is extremely helpful when an obstacle blocks your path, and your father’s birthday gift swiftly turns into a trusty tool: no simple pocket knife, but a pocket scythe! A nonstop-screaming, shrunken-head doorbell comes in handy several times as well, if you can figure out how to quiet it first so it doesn’t drive you mental. My personal favorite puzzle sequence was what could be considered a boss battle against a little version of Medusa. It’s thankfully not timed, but the scene does give you a definite sense of urgency and therefore a thrill to emerge victorious.

Occasionally the exploration and puzzle solving is interrupted by a cutscene showing how Prim and Thanatos are slowly connecting, thanks to the memories of Morwen, Prim’s mother, which can be surprisingly touching. The game consists of three parts, which took me eight hours to finish in total, but I was so engrossed that I played through in only a couple of sittings, which I rarely do for a game of this length. There’s only one ending, wrapping things up very nicely but perhaps opening up new possibilities for Prim to go on further adventures, which I would definitely love to see!

Final Verdict

While it does have a few creative tricks up its sleeve, PRIM is very much a traditional adventure game that takes what its classic predecessors did well and updates it for modern audiences. The result is a highly polished, entertaining new coming-of-age story about a wonky father-daughter relationship that will make you laugh and maybe even cry, offering plenty of fun but also connecting on an emotional level. PRIM does a masterful job of combining its serious themes with the right amount of humor, and everything about its production, from the artwork and interface to the music and voice-overs, screams excellence, an eye for detail, and a true love for both adventure gaming and storytelling. That would be impressive for any developer, let alone a small team making their very first game. I most enjoy playing games like this, but rarely are they done as well as it is here. Leave it to a game set in the Realm of the Dead to show that there’s still lots of life left in the point-and-click adventure genre. 

Johnny played PRIM on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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