Primordia

[Erkki]

Starting a new thread for the game since the other thread turned out to be more about AGS.

I really like the game so far. I've made it to a point where a new big area opens up and I'm not sure how big/long the game is, but I really loved the first areas. I don't want to spoil anything (I had seen nothing besides a trailer myself before starting it), except I'll say what you'll learn immediately in the opening scene anyway: you play a humanoid-shaped robot, and his small floating assistant called Crispin.

Horatio Nullbuilt version 5 is a builder robot who makes things out of scrap. He built Crispin, who has no arms and floats using a maglev device. The robots all have names in the form "<Given name> <Builder's name>built, <version>", which is a nice detail that is similar to russian names for example and also seems to tie into the rest of the culture in which the robots seem to live. Some of them also follow a religion called Humanism, in which Man is the perfect machine who built the first robots after his own image and later passed from the world and left the robots to take care of it.

And least that's how it starts, but from the point I stopped playing yesterday, it seems Humanism is not necessarily followed everywhere.

I'm not a big fan of pixel art, but it looks good. Again, as with Resonance, there are UI components that are stupidly tiny in the 320x200 resolution, but at least what this game does right is that it puts in the miniscule effort required to make some things work with keyboard (not all of them, though). For example, you can select Crispin by pressing C, and skip the menu navigation for that. I didn't even have to read a readme.txt for that -- I just tried it and it worked, so it felt intuitive.

The sound and music seem really fitting so far as well, and I loved the environments in the part I completed. There are some really subtly funny things in there.

Although Crispin's voice sounded a bit weird and even jarring at first, considering the environments, I got used to it pretty quick and I actually like the dynamics between the two robots.

Looking forward to playing through the rest of the game and enjoying the various robots.

[Tanukitsune]

Crispin's voice actor is the same as Joey Mallone in the Blackwell games, so he's got practice at being the snarky sidekick character.

I really love the world's design and lore and I love how

Horatio worships humans as gods, yet when he sees a human skeleton he thinks it's an android of sorts, I'm pretty sure it's meant to be some sort of religious allegory of sorts since he meets robots that don't believe in humans and they are considered myth and they are illegal to be believed in.

I don't think this needs a spoiler, but you can sometimes solve some puzzles in more than one way.... what is a spoiler is that

some robots will lie or die depending on your solution.

[SecretAsianMan]

Horatio's voice actor is Logan Cunningham, probably better known as the narrator from Bastion. I kept wanting him to call someone "kid".

Overall, I enjoyed the game. I think my favorite puzzles were the info terminal puzzle and the door code. The info terminal one in particular I thought was very clever.

[Dewar]

How long is it? I enjoyed what I've seen around the internet, but I'm not looking for a 20 hour adventure game in my life right now.

[SecretAsianMan]

It's not that long. I got through my first playthough in a couple of hours and that was taking the time to hear/see everything I could. Of course, there are multiple choices to some things and multiple endings, so if you want to see everything it will take longer. You can save at any time though, so it's easy to see different results without going through the whole game again.

[Erkki]

I think my favorite puzzles were the info terminal puzzle ...

What puzzle is that? Spoiler tags please. I may have not noticed there was a puzzle ther, or did you mean just

getting the laws printed out

Haven't finished the game yet, so maybe it's something else entirely?

[Tanukitsune]

It's one of later puzzles in the game.

Did you just more or less just arrive in the city? It sounds like you have more than half the way to go.

[SecretAsianMan]

One of the code fragments for the elevator door can be found by putting the correct commands into the info terminal. To see the correct screens, you need the monocle from one of the two robots outside the courthouse arguing about who gets to name their pet. I forget what the robot's name is. I actually figured out the door code before I got the fragment from the terminal, but the puzzle in the terminal was by far my favorite one.

[Erkki]

Finished it. I had to cheat (look up walkthrough) in the ending scene to get the good ending. I had tried almost everything besides the thing that was required.

Glancing at the walkthrough a bit more, there were several things I had missed and I might even replay it. Actually I think most of it was due to the first thing that I did a bit wrong. At the time I thought it was just the one thing and din't reload and redo it, but turned out it even effected what ending I could get. I don't usually use a lot of save games or even save very often if there isn't a binding for quicksave, so I was reluctant to redo any of the things I got wrong. It's an interesting approach to make puzzles you can actually fail at (with some after a couple of attempts you don't get a third one), and made me think of The Walking Dead. Of course Walking Dead was all about making choices, but in this game such events made me think it was my fault for rushing with solutions I wasn't sure of.