Primal Planet is my favorite new metroidvania because it has friendly dinosaurs, gorgeous pixel art, and you can hug your wife

In Primal Planet I'm a cheerful ol' brute living in a lush jungle with my wife, daughter, and pet dinosaur Sino. As a confident guy of the Mesozoic era, I'm not too worried about all the dinosaurs and insect life. I can use fruit to distract some enemies, I can stealth crabwalk past sleeping T-rexes, and I can even use my spears to reach otherwise inaccessible heights. It's a pretty nice life, though sometimes dinosaurs try to eat me and my family. Also, giant mechanical monstrosities have started appearing: What the hell are they?

It's all very cute. Whenever I stand next to my wife we automatically hug (sometimes even in combat!). If I press the down button near my daughter she hops onto my back. The dinosaur Sino attacks on my behalf, and as a result dies a lot, but it doesn't matter: Sino respawns super quickly. It's all chill and tranquil for a while, until the inevitable complication arises. My wife and daughter get abducted, and the village I usually call home is decimated.

Primal Planet is a metroidvania with no spoken or written dialogue, but it's pretty obvious that my objective is to save my family and investigate what's going on with all this mysterious hi-tech equipment spread across the map. After the fast-paced opening, the game adopts a relaxed pace, tasking me with finding villagers dispersed by the recent disaster. To do this, I need to make my primal guy a bit stronger and smarter.

Though Primal Planet has some light survival trappings, it's rarely a grind. In the early hours I mainly wanted to upgrade my guy to be able to craft firestarters, all the better to burn through the spiky vines blocking many passages. As a caveman, fire is very important, but keeping my torch lit on a 2D plane can be tricky when waterfalls are everywhere, not to mention rain. After I'd saved the villager who could sell me that upgrade, I realised that exploring underwater was very important, so I needed to upgrade my guy with bigger lungs, all the better to explore deeper fathoms.

This is not a tightly structured metroidvania in the style of Hollow Knight, nor is it as freeranging and volatile as Rain World. Most things can be crafted with resources found throughout the world, but during the 15 hours it took me to complete Primal Planet I never spent more than a couple of minutes looking for plants to craft medicine, for instance. Nor did I really die that much.

The giant herbivore dinosaurs tend to ignore me, but the carnivores salivate on my approach. I can choose to stick around and set traps or throw spears at them—and this is fun—but it's easy to run away from pretty much every creature in Primal Planet, except some of the smaller and faster ones (damn you, small green dinosaur, whatever your name is). Aside from killing dinosaurs for raw meat, which can be cooked at campfires to make… cooked meat, which is a healing item, I generally didn't bother killing the ancient creatures I encountered.

The real joy of Primal Planet is in its movement. My guy can double jump, but he also has a really neat ability to jump further just after a roll. This feels so good in action, especially when I chained long jumps together. It's funny how fast I can get this loinclothed barbarian to move, and it plays into exploration as well. I can use my spears as little makeshift platforms, so it's possible to climb much higher than a boring old single jump would usually allow. Like all good metroidvanias, Primal Planet is very good at making me feel smart and accomplished for doing things I've been doing in metroidvanias for decades.

I said the "real joy" was in its movement, but it might actually be in its tropical pixel art, which was the quality that attracted me to Primal Planet in the first place. The panoramic exteriors give a real sense of depth and scale, but also of fecund life. Ginormous friendly dinosaurs roam in the near distance while smaller, friskier bipeds frolic nearby. Sometimes the screen is completely overcrowded with ancient life, with all the shrieking noise and streaking colours that suggests.

The game also captures the mysterious aura of the deep ocean beautifully. Crowds of bioluminescent jellyfish bob among pastel coral gardens, electric eels send charges of light through the murk, and a multitude of tiny creatures bob aloofly around my guy as he goes deeper and deeper.

Towards… weird alien stuff. I did finish Primal Planet. I loved it, but kind of despite its metroidvania structure, which feels a little undercooked. Just as the mystery starts to untangle the game abruptly ends, and some of the requirements for completion—chiefly the last "objective"—sent me on a map-wide hunt for items that would have annoyed me much more if Primal Planet didn't feel so fun in the hand.

But more experienced and much better-resourced studios have pulled the same trick on me before (looking at you, Wind Waker) and Primal Planet is the work of just one person who goes by the name Seethingswarm. Leaving aside how impressive that is, Primal Planet's imperfections don't change the fact that I had more fun playing this game than I have anything else so far in 2025. It's a gorgeous gem, and I predict it will gather a modest but passionate following. It's out July 28 on Steam and GOG.