Game review: Far Cry: Primal immerses you in a vivid prehistoric world
Primal doesn’t redefine gaming by any stretch, but it does offer a vast world of possibilities to explore – and addresses a deep need to connect to a time before humans were ascendant
Ubisoft
On a recent rainy afternoon, I rewatched Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which reverently presents images from the Chauvet Cave in France. Closed to the general public, the place houses the oldest human art ever found: wall paintings, some of which date back over 30,000 years. Pondering the dizzying gulf of time that separates us from those elusive artists, Herzog says, “We are locked in history, and they were not.” Hearing his words, the imagination can’t help but take flight. We know that the people who painted those rock surfaces with woolly mammoth and other animals existed, but otherwise, they fall outside our sense of time.
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Far Cry: Primal (for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One) caters to those longing to connect with our earliest ancestors. The game speaks to the atavistic wish to experience the world in a pristine state, where humankind is a participant in the natural order and not its master. (Post-apocalyptic narratives do something similar by reining in mankind’s power over the environment.) Primal opens with the chatter and noise of the present and then rapidly reaches back through the past using audio that conjures impressions of different centuries until the number on the screen halts at 10,000 BC. What better exit from the noise of the present than the primordial past?
In Central Europe, a dark-skinned shaman makes a fire in a cave. Lighting a torch, he casts its wavering light over cave paintings as he tells us the story of the Wenja tribe who became separated from their brethren during a migration that saw a portion of the tribe settle in the fertile land of Oros. The pseudo proto-Indo-European language he speaks was assembled for the game by professors Brenna Reinhart Byrd and Andrew Miles Byrd from the University of Kentucky. The developers were wise to bet that their audience wouldn’t be thrown off by subtitles. The language barrier sharpens the game’s exoticism, an intrinsic aspect of the series’ DNA.