Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
‘Primal’ cuts to the chase
ON A RECENT rainy afternoon, I re-watched Werner Herzog’s 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 found: wall paintings, some of which date back more than 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 mammoths and other animals existed, but otherwise, they fall outside our sense of time.
Far Cry: Primal 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 humanity is but 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 past using audio clips that conjure our impression of different centuries until the number on the screen halts at 10 000BCE.
A dark-skinned shaman makes a fire in a cave. Lighting a torch, he casts its light over cave paintings as he tells us the story of the Wenja tribe which became separated from its brethren over a migration that saw a portion of the tribe settle in the fertile land of Oros.
After the shaman tells us of the lost Wenja tribe, the game cuts to a group of Wenja tribesman stalking a herd of woolly mammoths. The leader of the hunters tells you to wait for a mammoth to fall behind the pack, then lead the charge on it.
What the game does very well, particularly in a small number of quests where you track a great predator over a large area of terrain, is to offer the most enticing hunting simulator of any Far Cry game. Whereas hunting felt some- what auxiliary to the psychedelic guerrilla warfare of the other Far Cry games, these activities are necessities in the paleolithic world.
The hunting expedition takes a catastrophic turn when a sabretooth tiger jumps into the fray. Your leader saves you, but not before suffering a mortal injury. It’s then up to you to find and reunite the Wenja tribe scattered throughout Oros. At length, you’ll encounter two other tribes who are hostile to the Wenja – the cannibalistic Udam and the matriarch- led Izila, who are reputed to be the masters of fire. It is your destiny to become the master of beasts and to break your rival tribes’ spirits.
Primal’s spectacular violence is consistent with a world in which animals pose one of the biggest threats so it’s not surprising to see your avatar, say, drink the blood of a rat then spirit walk. Because the setting is such a blank in our collective imagination it’s easy to take the game’s liberties in stride.
Over the 24 hours that I put into Far Cry: Primal, I found that most in-game missions pass by in a blur. More memorable for me were the little details in the game.
Far Cry: Primal has just enough energy to pleasurably distract one over the length of its journey.
● Available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One – Washington Post