Review for Prim

Prim is one of the best indie point-and-click adventures I’ve played in a while – with some caveats, which I’ll explain later. It offers classic LucasArts-style gameplay; click to move, click hotspots to interact, plus items you can use on in-game objects (and also combine within your inventory). There’s lots of dialog with other characters and puzzles to solve. The puzzles are mostly straightforward, though occasionally some backtracking is required. Early on you earn a map, which allows fast travel to different locations, so backtracking does not become onerous.

You play as the eponymous Prim, who is the daughter of Death (full name: Prim Reaper). In the first chapter she does not know who her father is, but her mother has just died in an accident, and after solving some initial puzzles, Dad shows up to bring her to the Land of the Dead and take care of her, leaving behind her best friend, Tristan. Tristan later winds up dead himself, and for much of the game, Prim is working to bring him back to life.

Where the game absolutely shines is in dialog and audio. The writing is first rate, and often funny. All dialog is fully voiced, and the voice acting is commendable. (Voice-overs are in both English and German, but I haven’t played the German-language version, since "je ne parle pas allemand", but the developer is German, so I assume the voiced German is at least as good.) The voice of Prim is particularly excellent; she has a sardonic, somewhat cynical tone that sounds completely appropriate for the teenage daughter of Death. (Perhaps oddly, she is one of the few characters who sounds American. Most others sound British, but I expect people with British accents are easier for a European developer to find.)

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The music is surprisingly diverse, ranging from soft jazz to orchestral to punk rock, as is appropriate for whatever scene you are exploring. No ear worms to take away, but it’s rare to find a game with such varied musical styles.

Less impressive are the graphics. The developer is evidently going for a Tim Burton-esque look, and the graphics are stylish enough to carry that off, but other than Prim, Death, and Death’s sister Keres, most characters and settings are low on detail. It is also entirely black-and-white, which I’m sure is a stylistic choice rather than a cost-reduction measure; still, players who prefer color, beauty, and detail in their games may find it lacking from an art perspective.

The puzzles are – not necessarily always straightforward – but are not absurd, nor is moon logic involved. I will note two things: First, I was stymied by the sequence in which you have to serenade the Fates, until I realized you can scroll down through dialog choices (using the mouse wheel), so some options you may need in conversation are below the fold (there’s no visual cue to tell you this). Maybe my stupidity, but a down-arrow or scroll bar would have helped. Second, in some cases, you need to right-click to inspect something in inventory before you can left-click to interact with it in a necessary way; a little obtuse, and sometimes frustrating.

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Amusingly, one of the first things you do in the game is use your Swiss Army scythe to free a jar of fireflies/hotspots, which enables you to use the space bar to show hotspots on the screen – a common adventure game system, but I liked the narrative conceit of having you unlock them during play. This means that the game does not have “hunt the pixel” issues: You can always click on hotspots, and if necessary, go to the adventure gaming resort of brute forcing problems by “using everything with everything.”

Still, these are quibbles. There's not a huge emotional investment in the story, but Prim's relationship with Daddy Death does evolve satisfyingly over the course of the game. Most of the time, playing Prim is a wholly entertaining exercise in interacting with amusing characters and solving intriguing but not overly difficult challenges.