Primal Planet, the one-man metroidvania where player two is a dinosaur, reaches PS5 and Xbox

Most games about protecting a family hand the hero a weapon and leave the family to the cutscenes. Primal Planet, the pixel-art metroidvania built almost entirely by one person, Albert van Zyl, working under the name Seethingswarm, turns the act of looking after someone into the controller itself: the small dinosaur that runs at the hero’s side, a nimble sinosauropteryx called Sino, can be taken over at any moment by a second player on the same couch. After winning over critics on PC, the game has now reached PlayStation and Xbox, carrying that idea to the machines where shared-screen play still lives.

The premise is pulp in the best sense. The player is a prehistoric father trying to keep his family alive against dinosaurs, savage tribes and, eventually, ancient aliens, a swerve the store page sums up with a coined label of its own, the “dinovania”. What is not pulp is the delivery: the story is told without a single word of dialogue, leaning instead on environmental storytelling and on the slow accumulation of things shown rather than said. Combat, exploration, survival and crafting are folded into the classic metroidvania loop, where new tools reopen old paths and a map that seemed closed keeps quietly unfolding.

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That loop is where the critical attention landed on PC. The publisher’s announcement gathers the praise: IGN’s Jared Petty called it one of the most charming games he had played since 1982, singling out its “incredible attention to detail and environmental storytelling”; PC Gamer’s Shaun Prescott wrote that he had more fun with it than with anything else he had played so far that year and that “the real joy of Primal Planet is in its movement”; and Eurogamer’s Christian Donlan dwelt on its abundance of secrets. IGN’s own headline put it most simply: this is the game that lets you hug your dinosaur.

The co-op design is the clearest statement of what van Zyl was reaching for. The dinosaur fights alongside the father whether or not anyone holds the second controller; when a friend, partner or child does pick it up, they inherit a companion rather than a copy of the hero, smaller and quicker, and bound to the bigger body beside it. The publisher calls it a game about taking care of somebody close, and the structure backs the phrase up: one player protects, the other is protected, and protects back.

Primal Planet took five years to make as a solo project and is published by Pretty Soon, a Polish indie label that works with solo developers and small teams and whose catalogue includes Backpack Hero and Havendock. The console versions arrived on October 28 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, priced at $19.99, with a 10% launch discount for PlayStation Plus members and Xbox players. It is also available on PC through Steam and GOG, and on Nintendo Switch.

For a genre built on solitude, the lone explorer in a hostile maze, that is a quietly radical choice: the map is the same, but nobody has to walk it alone.

Tags: indie games, Albert van Zyl, metroidvanias, Pretty Soon, Primal Planet, Seethingswarm

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