Gears Grinding in the Dunes 1

“What hap­pened to the humans?” is Primordia’s mar­ket­ing tagline, but it’s not what the game is about.  It’s not about us, but rather about how our flaws and great­ness­es affect and shape what we will leave behind.

The des­o­late post-apocalyptic waste­land is a sta­ple of mod­ern fic­tion, and we know it well enough to under­stand its basic struc­ture: a lone trav­el­er moves through a bar­bar­ic waste­land, scroung­ing ruins for sup­plies, meet­ing bizarre and dan­ger­ous peo­ple wher­ev­er he (it’s near­ly always “he”) goes.  Familiar sights and sym­bols will be twist­ed and changed into grotesque mock­eries of their for­mer selves, and our mys­te­ri­ous stranger will show him­self to be hard, but fair.

Primordia is aware of its her­itage — there is an oblique Canticle For Leibowitz ref­er­ence in the game’s first hour — but it’s far more con­cerned with human­i­ty’s ide­o­log­i­cal fall­out than its nuclear fall­out.

In some neb­u­lous, post-human future, a robot named Horatio Nullbuilt Version 5 search­es through the rub­ble of the world in a search for use­ful parts, accom­pa­nied by his friend and cre­ation Crispin Horatiobuilt.  When their power core is stolen by a mas­sive, wan­der­ing hulk, their attempts to get it back require them to jour­ney to the mas­sive city of Metropol, and even­tu­al­ly force them into con­flict with that city’s dystopic ruler.  Humanity has passed into myth and leg­end — Horatio car­ries a book called the Gospel of Man and calls him­self a “Humanist” — but most of the robots go about their lives giv­ing no thought to the fate of their prog­en­i­tors, and it becomes clear­ly fair­ly early on that none of the robots are par­tic­u­lar­ly clear about what “Man” even was.

Much of the enjoy­ment of Primorida is found in explor­ing the soci­ety the robots have con­struct­ed, and learn­ing how and why it has gone to pieces.  It’s a lot like the first BioShock in this way — it’s telling two sto­ries at once, and the story of the soci­ety is fre­quent­ly far more inter­est­ing than that of the pro­tag­o­nist.  Horatio’s own story is pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with over­com­ing rel­a­tive­ly mun­dane obsta­cles — open­ing doors, break­ing codes, hunt­ing for bat­ter­ies.  There’s a cer­tain amount of metaphor­i­cal effect in this — as the whole game is about try­ing to reclaim a power source, it could also be seen as about how to gain power in the larg­er sense.  Horatio gains power (both elec­tri­cal and in the form of influ­ence over oth­ers) by solv­ing prob­lems and help­ing peo­ple out, where­as oth­ers gain that same power by forcibly tak­ing it from other robots.

Primordia is full of beau­ti­ful sto­ries and ideas.  The robots’ rul­ing coun­cil includes a robot designed to assist in reli­gious ser­vices, appar­ent­ly just because humans seemed to think that reli­gion was impor­tant.  The nigh-omniscient judge robot cre­ates two helpers to advise him — Clarity and Charity, pro­grammed to see the law from the per­spec­tives of absolute jus­tice and absolute mercy, respec­tive­ly.  A robot betrays his reli­gious con­vic­tions and in penance con­structs anoth­er robot, which he fills only with the good parts of him­self before eras­ing the cor­re­spond­ing parts of his own brain.  The robots curse by say­ing “BSOD,” which is adorable.

They also behave like think­ing machines, rather than just like humans with metal plates — they are not anthro­po­mor­phized.  Anyone who has ever worked much with com­put­ers knows that they fol­low a bizarrely strict logic which can make them infu­ri­at­ing­ly thick, even as they can do many things much faster and bet­ter than we can.  This leads to com­pli­cat­ed machines being brought to their knees by mis­placed com­mas in pro­gram­ming, and Primordia’s robots think very much along these lines.

At one point, a soldier-robot whose pla­toon was destroyed by a city’s defens­es imme­di­ate­ly sub­mits him­self to that city’s author­i­ties to be pun­ished for dam­ag­ing their prop­er­ty.  He then waits in line for months or years to see the local judge, even though it would be clear to any human being that the judge is not com­ing out to see him.  He waits because he’s been told to wait — he does­n’t have a sense that tells him this is ridicu­lous, or that he should ques­tion the pro­ce­dure, because he’s a robot, and robots think explic­it­ly in pro­ce­dures.

Primordia fur­ther makes excel­lent use of unre­li­able nar­ra­tors.  You learn early that any expo­si­tion comes with a polit­i­cal moti­va­tion — the “offi­cial” story dif­fers from the var­i­ous sto­ries told by indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens.  Did this robot choose to be deac­ti­vat­ed to save power for the city?  Was he cru­el­ly mur­dered by a would-be tyrant?  Or did he will­ing­ly enter hiber­na­tion, bid­ing his time until he choos­es to strike?  It reminds us that nar­ra­tives mat­ter more than the truth, and that how we choose to struc­ture and process his­tor­i­cal facts speaks to our own desires and alle­giances and pre­con­cep­tions.

You may have noticed that I’ve spent very lit­tle time so far talk­ing about Primordia qua “game.”  This is because I’m not sure how best to eval­u­ate it in that regard.  The game is full of great fic­tion and ideas and fas­ci­nat­ing char­ac­ters, but I spent most of my time with the thing frus­trat­ed­ly try­ing to solve puz­zles quick­ly so that I could get back to them.

Primordia is an adven­ture game of the old school, much more like Monkey Island than The Walking Dead.  The inter­face is sim­pler, but the pixel art and struc­ture of the game are delib­er­ate­ly intend­ed to invoke a par­tic­u­lar nos­tal­gia.  I can’t speak to how well it works in that regard because I did­n’t actu­al­ly play any of those games.  Whenever I try now to play Dig or LOOM, I am seized by a deep ambiva­lence — I love the ideas, and am utter­ly repulsed by the engine and the minute-to-minute puz­zles.

For all that I am sup­pos­ed­ly a “smart per­son” I don’t much like puz­zle games.  Finishing Myst felt less like a vic­to­ry than it did like I’d been released from a con­cen­tra­tion camp.  I do enjoy puz­zles of the “here are all the vari­ables — per­mute to suc­cess” vari­ety — the Magic: The Puzzling sec­tions of MTG games or Hero Academy’s chal­lenge modes real­ly do it for me — but adven­ture games are never quite hon­est about what all the pieces are.  More than once I dis­cov­ered the solu­tion to a puz­zle in Primordia involved some other object hid­den far away that I sim­ply had­n’t found yet.

I’m not sure that my whol­ly sub­jec­tive dis­like for out-of-the-box think­ing is a valid crit­i­cism of the game or the adven­ture genre.  It’s whol­ly per­mis­si­ble for it to just be Not My Sort Of Thing, but Primorida’s puz­zles felt large­ly per­func­to­ry.  With the excep­tion of one pret­ty neat com­put­er ter­mi­nal word puz­zle towards the end of the game, I was rarely inter­est­ed in the puz­zles them­selves save as obsta­cles to the next bit of plot or char­ac­ter devel­op­ment.

The smar­tass thing might be to say some­thing like “why is this even a game when it could have been a novel,” but I under­stand why it’s a game.  Moving through the world of Primordia and uncov­er­ing its secrets as an active par­tic­i­pant in the world is fas­ci­nat­ing, and it longs to be inter­ac­tive.  I want to go back to Metropol again, explore more of its hid­den alley­ways and get to know its cit­i­zens.  Moving through the game­space as some kind of dig­i­tal fla­neur feels exact­ly right.  I quite enjoyed the follow-up graph­ic novel­la they put out this month, but while it may have been more inter­nal­ly coher­ent, it lacked the won­der­ful sense of dis­cov­ery that char­ac­ter­izes Primordia because I was­n’t the one mak­ing the deci­sions.

But play­ing the puz­zles of Primordia feels bizarre — I’m never sure why, in the grand sense, I’m doing any of what I’m doing.  Perhaps it’s the obses­sive hunt­ing through dark cor­ners for use­ful things that encour­ages play­ers to find all the won­der­ful lit­tle world­build­ing details.  Or, more like­ly, Primordia was con­ceived as “let’s make an adven­ture game with cool pixel art that’s about robots,” and all the fic­tion came later.

There’s noth­ing wrong with that at all, and per­haps to an adven­ture game con­nois­seur, Primordia is more engag­ing as a series of puz­zles.  I don’t know enough to fully appre­ci­ate good scotch, either.  But my unini­ti­at­ed self had a walk­through open by the halfway mark, and never closed it again.

This weird ten­sion between “game” and “story” is one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing things about games as a medi­um.  Usually I find the rela­tion­ship is reversed: I adore Gears of War’s mechan­ics, but can’t bring myself to give the slight­est hint of a damn about the story or char­ac­ters.  Folks like to talk about ludonar­ra­tive dis­so­nance — where rules and nar­ra­tive argue with each other — but this prob­lem is more like ludonar­ra­tive com­part­men­tal­iza­tion: they just don’t have much to do with each other.

So what does this mean for some kind of over­all eval­u­a­tion of Primordia or anoth­er game like it?  Do you weight cer­tain ele­ments over oth­ers?  Do you just com­plete­ly refuse to answer a ques­tion like “Is Primordia good?”  It feels disin­gen­u­ous to sim­ply sub­di­vide the two and say “The story is good but the game­play is mediocre,” because it’s very hard to draw a harsh line between the two.

Regardless, I found Primordia very much worth play­ing, even as I was frus­trat­ed with it at times.  I think it’s worth the occa­sion­al­ly annoy­ing puz­zles to see the won­der­ful world and char­ac­ters with­in.  Primordia is a good piece of sci­ence fic­tion, and a per­son more patient than I will prob­a­bly get more out of the “gami­er” parts.  I’m glad of the time I spent in Primordia, and I’ll hap­pi­ly rec­om­mend it to any­one who asks.