PRIM Review – A mostly well-made but forgettable adventure that plays things too safe

When I first started up PRIM, I was intrigued by its art style, but soon found myself sort of... not feeling the game. I didn’t really gel with the setup of the storyline, the jokes didn’t land for me, and most important of all, the main character’s voice acting was, uh... well, let’s just say I really wasn’t a fan of the character’s delivery. These criticisms didn’t suddenly vanish now that I’ve completely finished the game, but at least I can confidently say I didn’t dislike PRIM. I think it’s very cute and generally well-made, but... it’s far from perfect, and is most certainly bleeding from several wounds. Yes, I’m going to be a bit of a curmudgeon about this. Do hear me out, though.

The Prim Reaper, not always prim & proper

So, PRIM begins with a Discworld-esque premise and some Tim Burton visuals: Death, as it turns out, has a daughter. Prim is a girl who’s just lost her mother, you see, so now her father, the aforementioned grumpy reaper, shows up out of nowhere to take her with him to the land of the dead, where she is supposedly destined to live. One thing leads to another, Prim accidentally kills her best friend (hey, it happens to the best of us), and so, she must now go on a quest to collect all the ingredients for a magic ritual that could help bring back her sadly deceased buddy. That’s the gist of PRIM’s storyline – a plot that places themes of family in the spotlight, but does so in a rather forgettable way. That’s really my main issue with the game: its storyline and even some of its characters have failed to really get me hooked. Everything plays out like you’d expect: young Prim acts sassy and rude with her stern, workaholic dad, but wait – they eventually start to understand each other, realize they’re not as incompatible as they thought, and everyone lives happily ever after. It’s a bite-sized family drama that plays everything exasperatingly safe, without any exciting twists and turns, no intriguing revelations and a repertoire of milquetoast jokes that only sometimes work. It also feels a lot shorter than it is – despite spending a good 8 hours in this world, I didn’t feel like much of it was particularly fleshed out.

Which is a shame, because I do like the art style and the voice acting... for the most part. As I implied earlier, I personally wasn’t a fan of Prim’s (that is, the main character’s) voice acting performance, as to me it came off as entirely too forced and even a bit nails-on-a-chalkboard-y at times. The rest of the cast is perfectly fine, though, and I did greatly enjoy their performances – it’s just a shame that the actual main protagonist is the one character I couldn’t get used to. The visuals are just lovely to look at, though, combining the macabre style of Tim Burton with the cartoony cuteness of The Curse of Monkey Island. So no issues on that front.

Puzzling Prim

So, I may not have been invested in the characters, and I may have rolled my eyes at the story, but the art style, the music, and the puzzles I generally found to be enjoyable. PRIM does feel like a game made in the late 90s, when such a style was quite popular, and the puzzles weren’t entirely straightforward either, which I found to be a plus. Some require you to tackle minigames, others expect you to use your mind-reading spider friend to dig out people’s secrets; there’s some item combination, a bit of detective-like investigation, and you even have to manually build a catapult once, if you can believe that. All in all, I found PRIM to be engaging from a gameplay-perspective, and it’s what kept me coming back to its otherwise reasonably lengthy campaign of roughly 6 to 8 hours. There’s also a quite well-made (and 100% optional) hint function built into the game, which gradually gives you small tidbits of information for a given puzzle if you ask for them – and if you keep asking, you can even request the whole solution to be shown. It’s a very handy quality-of-life feature to have in an adventure game, and I wish more titles would include such things.

I will say, though, that the card-based minigame you’re forced to do in order to progress the main story was rather infuriating, as it relies entirely on luck, and can feel thoroughly unfair until you get a better deck. It could’ve been a nice diversion, but making it mandatory was a bit of a questionable design decision, especially when the minigame itself isn’t particularly well-designed, either.

So where does all this leave us?

That’s a very good question, because I’m fairly torn. PRIM isn’t a bad game by any means, and I did have a decent enough time with it for the most part – I just don’t think it’s the kind of instant classic I’d go out of my way to recommend to others. It is a project with tons of heart, mind you. It’s obvious to me how much care and attention went into it, from its lovely Tim Burton-esque art style to its atmospheric music and (mostly) enjoyable voice acting. The puzzles are all crafted well, and remain decently engaging from start to finish. But the game also doesn’t really try anything interesting with its plot or characters – it plays things entirely too safe, keeping its plotline and narrative tone extremely family-friendly, without giving it a certain edge – a bit of extra spice – that I would’ve liked. It has neither the outrageously charismatic NPCs of the genre classics it’s trying to emulate, nor does it feature any insanely quotable lines I’d keep mentioning to my friends even years later. That, I suppose, is what keeps holding PRIM back: it could’ve been great, but it settled for being just okay.