Primal Planet’s already a beautiful thing. It’s a Metroidvania and crafting game involving dinosaurs and cave dwellers, it’s absolutely filled with lovely ideas, and there’s a demo you can currently check out on Steam.
A couple of things mark it out to me. One is the sheer lushness of it all. There’s something lovely about the pixel-art foliage and the cave people slipping through the leaves. Dinosaurs large and small play a role, all beautifully animated, and you even explore with a dinky little dino companion at your side.
On top of that it’s very inventive stuff. I was happily platforming around until I discovered my first crafting prompt. Pretty soon I had a campfire going, with an option to craft new materials while I sat by the flames or to level up myself and my dino. Further on, I found an impassable wall – it’s a Metroidvania after all – that I had to work out how to remove. In the end I needed to turn a standard spear into a flaming spear. No sooner was this done, than I was lighting lanterns and manoeuvring them past water puzzles in order to burn a path forward. All thrifty and creative stuff.
A later challenge had me lofting spears at a wall in order to climb higher, in a way that’s familiar to anyone who ever played the classic Mega Drive game Quackshot – and what a game that is! Everywhere you look in Primal Planet there’s something cool like this, bringing you deeper into the world or encouraging you to think about the tools at your disposal a little differently.
And then… My very favourite thing about the game so far may be something I always love in a Metroidvania. Primal Planet seems to be absolutely stuffed with secret areas. Give me a secret area and I am incredibly happy – even if nothing super meaningful is going on there. I love the chance to move past a wall and see something that others might miss. You feel a bit closer to the design at these points. You can almost imagine the designers tunneling through the game just a bit ahead of you.
All of which means I’m looking forward to the final release. I often think I’m done with Metroidvanias – I love the format but it can also be a little exhausting in its brilliance. Primal Planet makes it all feel fresh again – with dinosaurs, yes, but also with the kind of loving attention to detail that riddles the whole place with secrets.