Primal Planet Review
Solo developer Seethingswarm’s Primal Planet is an action-packed, prehistoric 2D metroidvania.
Primal Planet. Seethingswarm
Most metroidvanias have sci-fi or fantasy themes and settings; Primal Planet has sci-fi elements, but the game is about a caveman in prehistoric times. Dinosaurs never actually coexisted with humans, but in Primal Planet, our caveman hero lives among dinos and even has a loyal dino pet that assists in battle and can optionally be controlled by a second player.
A competing cannibal tribe destroys the hero’s settlement, and he’s forced to flee with his wife and young daughter. As they make their way to safety, things get worse—aliens arrive and take his family captive. The game is about the caveman re-establishing his camp by finding his dispersed tribesmen and then rescuing his family.
Primal Planet. Seethingswarm
The story is told without dialogue—it unfolds through gripping in-game cutscenes that are both emotional and action-packed, achieved with special animations for the pixel art sprites. The game is full of these memorable moments that then carry into impressive action gameplay set-pieces. It’s incredibly cool to fuck shit up alongside an allosaurus you helped earlier in the game.
The caveman has a lot of traversal options. Running, jumping, wall-jumping, and grabbing ledges all feel fluid and natural. Swimming isn’t as fun, at least not until you improve your ability to hold your breath and find an optional underwater dash ability. You earn the remaining abilities at your disposal by buying them with skill points that you earn by leveling up or performing other actions, such as creating cave paintings in specific areas. Progression with these abilities, and the parts of the world they open up, is non-linear; all the abilities are available from the start, and it’s up to you whether you want to save up points to get things like double-jump or air dash before cheaper upgrades to health, movement speed, or others.
In combat, you have a short-range stone knife and a powerful but slow spear. Spears have limited durability, so they will eventually break, and you will have to craft more. Spears are versatile. They double as torches that you use to set fire to brambles that block certain paths or create permanent fires in specific spots. Spears also create platforms when you throw them into walls, sometimes necessary to reach new heights. You can also craft throwable bone knives, but I never use these, opting for melee instead.
Most of the enemies are dinosaurs, varied in size from tiny compies to massive spinosaurus and mosasaurus. The fights against the largest ones can be thrilling, though no fight is very difficult once you understand the attack patterns and hitboxes. Death returns you to your last campfire, and if you’re struggling, you can always level up and come back late in the game, since the fights against the most enormous creatures are entirely optional.
Primal Planet. Seethingswarm
Finding lost members of your tribe allows you to rebuild their homes in your camp. Each person’s home can be upgraded to spawn crafting materials or weapons whenever you return to the camp, and you can also pay to have them teach you crafting recipes or optional combat abilities. You can also hire anyone from your tribe to accompany you as a temporary computer-controlled ally that will fight by your side.
The caveman’s tribe is nomadic, which introduces an interesting mechanic—you can move your settlement any time you reach certain areas by spending materials; the tribe then automatically rebuilds at that location. Fast travel doesn’t become an option until late in the game, and even then it’s inconvenient to use because you have limited resources to keep portals open, so it’s nice to be able to conveniently place the camp in a place closer to the area you’re exploring.
Primal Planet. Seethingswarm
The game’s world is fairly large, and I enjoyed exploring it. However, I spent a lot of time wandering in circles trying to find things that I had left behind because I couldn’t yet reach them, which was frustrating because enhancements to the game’s map system would have prevented this. You can only view a detailed map for the section of the world you’re in, not any neighboring sections, and there’s no automatic or manual marking of the map for points of interest. I’ve gotten spoiled by metroidvanias that let you place flags on their world maps. Getting to certain places can take a while unless you open up some shortcuts, and fast travel doesn’t open up until nearly the end of the game, so a more comprehensive map would have saved me a lot of time.
Primal Planet. Seethingswarm
The game’s graphics are low-resolution pixel art, similar to 16-bit era consoles. The sprite animations are great, especially for the dinosaurs. The environment is richly detailed, with several layers of parallax backgrounds and lots of foreground vegetation; the game’s day and night cycle, though not impactful for gameplay, adds a lot of life to the environment, as do the rain effects.
I won’t spoil the game’s ending, other than to say it leaves things open for a clear sequel. I loved the game, and hope that Seethingswarm follows through with the possibilities the ending implies. Primal Planet is a game that metroidvania fans shouldn’t miss.
Primal Planet is available now on Steam.
Overall Score: 9/10
Played on: Steam Deck
