Wadjet Eye Primordia - A Point and Click Adventure - Now Available

[almondblight]

The GoG versions of Primordia and other Wadjet Eye games seem to work perfectly well on the Mac. I know that those versions were ported by GoG though (not versions that Wadjet Eye sells), and Humble Bundle appears to be pretty Steam-centric (doesn't seem like they'll do GoG keys), but hopefully it's not that much of a hurdle.

 

[Tolknaz]

How on earth did this game manage to slip under my radar? I picked it up during the last Steam sale and now after playing through it, i almost feel guilty for getting it so cheap. It's easily one of the best adventure games of the last decade. Ah, well, i guess i can get a second copy on GOG to show my support.

 

[MRY]

@ Rohit: I think people have gotten it running in Linux using that method. To be honest, I lazily leave the distribution stuff to WEG. I probably should dig into it more.

@ Tolknaz: Thanks! But you don't need to buy a second game. There are lots of other great games out there, and plenty of projects that need funding on Kickstarter. I wouldn't object to your writing a review on GOG though. I think those matter quite a bit (perhaps I'm deluded), since it's the only place where a large number of user reviews of the game are aggregated.

 

[Aeschylus]

Adventure Game Studio has a working Linux build. Would it be possible to package that with the game data to make an Linux version of the game (assuming it is tested)?

Just based on how AGS has always worked (packaging the game engine in the binary file) it would probably be possible to make a working Linux build as long as there's no major differences in the engine. It would require the original game source, but I assume that's not a huge problem. You generally can't just swap game data files to a Linux machine due to how the engine is packaged.

 

[VioletShadow]

I just bought the game on steam...aaand there's achievements! Heh, off to play now, looks beautiful.

 

[MRY]

The achievements are absurd, and a net negative, but per WEG (and seemingly rightly so), a commercial necessity.

 

[suejak]

What's negative about them?

 

[Darth Roxor]

What's negative about them?

They give away "spoilers" in their descriptions.

 

[VioletShadow]

To me achievements are always a replayability sort of incentive. I never look at their descriptions before playing a game for the first time, but I find that its hard for me sometimes to play anything other than RPGs (incline) more than once. Then after playthrough #1 I'll look at them and it'll motivate me to replay. By the way, I'm about three hours into Primordia and I'll just say I can't believe I didn't get my claws on this sooner. :D

 

[MRY]

[SLIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD]

My biggest concern about achievements is that they changed the way players looked at various aspects of the game. For example, with the kiosk, I tried to write as many possible entries as I could imagine people asking about, which is to say, it was meant to be overinclusive: players weren't SUPPOSED to find all of them, it was just a way to get extra backstory if that was your thing. But thanks to the Know-It-All achievement, players view the kiosk as a guess-the-word puzzle, and get annoyed that they can't find everything. (The achievement was also glitched, which didn't help.) Likewise, depending on how you resolve some puzzles, there is a slight effect at the end in terms of who does and doesn't show up. This was meant to be a small way to acknowledge a "better" solution path, but it wasn't meant to weight the scales too heavily -- so, for example, every answer to the In re Rex case is meant to be a legitimate answer. But when only one leads to the achievement (We're All In This Together), players think they've been cheated if they pick differently.

It's not a huge deal, but I do think it matters.

 

[suejak]

Fair enough. Adventure games have tradition of "points," so it's always been a thing to get all the points, if you're an OCD completionist type. Achievements are just the modern version of that concept.

But I do see your point.

 

[VioletShadow]

Yes, I also see your point. A player experiencing the game for the first time that has previously looked at the achievements would not only have metagame kind of knowledge but it would definitively influence their perception of different parts of the game. Like for example a steam friend told me that

Spoiler

there's an achievement for answering Ever-Faithful correctly on the first try

but since I didn't know that I just continued playing and felt no need to use a previous save or even had any negative feelings about his second quest.

 

[MRY]

Fair point about score. I do think it's a little different, though, in part because of ViolentShadow flags about the spoiler aspect.

 

[Aeschylus]

I think in general the concept of game score (at least in Sierra games, which were the only ones I can recall really having it) was kind of different from the current concept of Achievements. Achievements are mostly completely secondary things or unnecessary (but possibly interesting), alternate solutions to certain obstacles in games. The scores however, while kind of arbitrary in the amounts awarded, were really not the same thing. In the early Sierra games, it was actually fairly important to pay attention to when you got points or not, or you might well stumble into a dead-end. In general, if you did something that didn't get you points, you were probably screwing yourself (like eating the pie in KQ5). Achievements on the other hand are just window dressing unrelated to actual gameplay. I suppose getting a full score is somewhat similar, as it generally included a few optional things you could do (at least in the later games ala KQ6, GK1, etc.) but it didn't really extend to the same level of silly meta-gaming that achievements do.

 

[suejak]

No, they actually provided an entirely disgusting extra layer of silly meta-gaming, wherein you had to check on the points to figure out whether you were doing something the designer wanted you to do or not. And if not, Roberta Williams was probably silently plotting to waste a lot of your time.

So, they're similar, but Achievements are better. I agree.

 

[piydek]

No, they actually provided an entirely disgusting extra layer of silly meta-gaming, wherein you had to check on the points to figure out whether you were doing something the designer wanted you to do or not. And if not, Roberta Williams was probably silently plotting to waste a lot of your time.

So, they're similar, but Achievements are better. I agree.

This extra level of meta-gaming in achievements works only with arcade games such as Super Meatboy. There it's actually not meta-gaming, since the whole thing is skill-related.

 

[Infinitron]

MRY Something that you asked me during the interview was whether I had played through Primordia. The answer is that I actually played it over the course of the interview.

I have two questions/remarks:

1) Is there any thematic significance to the fact that Scraper was not built by his mistress, MetroMind? Or is Sturnweiler just a red herring setting detail?

2) It appears that Horatio has had several "previous lives", in an obvious nod to Planescape: Torment. Yet the game's story doesn't really do much with that - nothing really matters in the end other than his original identity as Horus and his current one. Those initial remarks from Ever-Faithful about previous versions of Horatio visiting him got me expecting that aspect to be more fleshed out.

 

[MRY]

(1) I guess I wanted MetroMind to be what in my fake Latin I call the "mater municipas" -- in other words, mother to the whole city, not just to a particular creation. Also, if Scraper was something she built, things get a lot more complicated with respect to their relationship (is she "favoring" her offspring, is it outrageous that she puts him in the line of danger, why hasn't she upgraded his intelligence, etc.). He couldn't be a Factorbuilt, though, because that created divided loyalty issues, too. [EDIT: Also, one thing I forgot, was that there was some significance to MetroMind not having actually "built" anything. Aside from soldiers, almost all the sapient bots you meet have built something -- Leopold -> EFL; O&C -> Rex; etc. The most obvious non-builders are Clarity (who is almost necessarily a "virginal" ice-queen), Crispin (whose virginal nature is revealed through his constant skirt-chasing), the soldiers (187, Primer, ELF, and Goliath), and MetroMind.]

(2) The suggestion is that each version reached the same epiphany that Horatio did, somehow, and locked the memories again because they couldn't cope. Or that it was an iterative / evolutionary process to move Horatio away from still being a destroyer ("wroth confusion") and into being a builder. It also helped introduce the version concept early in the game, allowing us to riff on it with Leopold and MetroMind herself. Finally, in an early design, the ending was going to be Horatio asking (a la the Matrix) Metromind to relock his memories (or relocking them himself) so he could go back to worshiping humans and tinkering in the desert, with the implication that the cycle would eventually start again.

 

[tuluse]

I just finished the game today. It was absolutely delightful. I loved how dark most of the endings were.

I have a criticism which I don't think has been brought up yet. In general, I think your puzzles were too straightforward. For a puzzle to really capture the imagination and make the player feel smart there needs to be a trick or something unexpected that needs to be done in order to solve the problem. Tim Schafer talked about this in the Broken Age documentary. He used the puzzle to get into the junkyard in Full Throttle as his example. You pull the chain and it opens the door, but you can't get through before it closes. So the obvious thing to do is find a way to hold the chain in place so you can get through the door. The real solution of course is that you lock the door so it can't open, and the can't move so you can climb up it. I felt like there was a lack of this kind of quirk (for lack of a better term) to the puzzles that made them feel more like busy work than doing something fun.

Similarly, but slightly different. I found some of the easy puzzles to be much harder for me than they should have been. I would always think the obvious solution was too obvious and try everything else first. Like the electrical wire on the bridge. I scoured the city looking for something that would let me handle electricity safely before finally trying Crispin and kicking myself.

Actually, I found a lot of the time that I would forget Crispin could actually be used to solve problems and wasn't just there for commentary.

 

[Infinitron]

Actually, I found a lot of the time that I would forget Crispin could actually be used to solve problems and wasn't just there for commentary.

A consequence of Crispin being separated from the main inventory, perhaps. He sort of slips out of your mental category of "usable things" that way.

 

[ghostdog]

A consequence of Crispin being separated from the main inventory, perhaps. He sort of slips out of your mental category of "usable things" that way.

Not if, as soon as you see crispin, you make the "Beneath a steel sky" connection

 

[felipepepe]

I also just finished the game this week, congratulations to Wormwood Studios, was definitely a great game.

I agree that the achievements kind of spoil things... playing unspoiled I got the "bad" ending of uploading the virus to scrapper and retuning home alone, when Horatio repeats the cycle of his previous versions and build Horatio v6. And I was happy with that ending, even if it was very dark. But then I saw the achievements and loaded my last save to try things differently, until I finally looked at a walkthrought to see all endings.

Overall, the game was great, especially the art, story and voice acting. My only gripes would be the excess of number puzzles, and as Tuluse said, the lack of more "weird" puzzles.

 

[MRY]

Thanks guys! That's a great point about the lack of "weird" puzzles. The only one that I think qualifies is the Gamma puzzle: first it looks like three-card Monty where you're trying to find the monitor he's in, then it flips to realizing that you want to find the ones he's not in. Otherwise, though, you're right: the puzzles are pretty straightforward.

If you haven't already, it would be great if you'd rate us on GOG. While most of our sales come from Steam, I think the strong GOG presence we have has been a big part of what's fueled our success (what that it is).

 

[Jaesun]

I have never rated stuff on GOG. I just never remember too. I will do so for this.

 

[tuluse]

I feel like I'm bad at describing why I like things (I'm better at saying why I don't like something), but I gave it my best show.

And GoG fucked up my formatting, all my beautiful paragraphs look merged together. :/