Introduction
Prehistoric Dude is a mini Metroidvania game, developed by the indie dev lightUP and Ratalaika games. It was released in August 2020 for Consoles and PC!
Review
One day as a little caveman, you’re out doing caveman things. You come home ready to eat your favourite dinner ever. A giant piece of ham. You’re so enamoured by this piece of ham, that you take it outside. Unfortunately you run into a giant dinosaur who also thinks the piece of ham looks tasty. So it finds a way to steal your piece of ham and run away with it! Little does it know, that ham means everything to you, and you’re off on your adventure to get your dinner back!
Other than that, that’s all the story there is until you beat the game. But that is more than okay because the game has a lot of heart. You start off with only a few pieces of health, and throwing axes. So at the start of the game, I died a lot. But as you continue on, it got easier as I was getting more health, and eventually a club to beat anything that got in my way. As you travel through the plains and caves, and snowy mountains, you find even more upgrades! Like the ability to double jump, or grab onto ledges. The game plays nice and tight too. The platforming doesn’t feel floaty in the slightest, and having access to close combat and ranged was great. Though when it comes to the throwing axes, I wish it told me I could charge them up to toss them for instant kills on enemies.
I was annoyed at first though because I honestly thought there was no map in the game. So I was sitting there making sense of it. “A small Metroidvania doesn’t need a map. It makes sense.”. Until eventually I hit the inventory button to see how many items I had left to collect, and that is where I saw it. I even went back to the control menu to see if I missed reading a control. But it doesn’t say that the inventory menu was also the map menu.
As you get through each area, there is a boss you have to fight. Though there were only 3, they were really fun to fight. I think the best one was the Pterodactyl fight. Not only did you have to do it a certain way, you had to time it when you did damage to it. It was a fun fight as opposed to the normal “hit it until it dies”. The other bosses were like that though, but at least they were fun!
I will say though that one of my favourite things about this game is how compact it truly is. Instead of spending a dozen hours running back and forth, trying to figure out where to go, or having to back track across the map a billion times, it’s all fairly straight forward. You do backtrack on paths after you get to the end, but other than that you don’t have to find hidden holes in the ground to get through a door or something like that. Plus to 100% it, which was fun to do because I had a ton of health and stamina by the end, it only took about an hour and a half! Though I will say it did kind of suck that there were no super hidden secrets to find.
Rating
Pros:
- Silly Premise
- Fun To 100%
- Not A Bloated Experience
Cons:
- Not Much Story
- No Secrets To Find
- Map Button Isn’t Specified
Summary
I truly loved how small and compact this game was. I loved how there was no needing to find secrets to get through doors, but I also hated how there were no secrets to find. I do wish there was more silly dialogue and a bigger sillier story, but the premise and tight gameplay really make up for it. I can’t recommend this game enough, especially if you’ve never played the genre before, or want a smaller experience. I can’t wait for a possible sequel!
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Game & Developer Information
Developer Website: lightUP
Developer Socials: Twitter
Publisher Website: Ratalaika Games
Publisher Socials: Twitter
PSN Store Links: £3.99/€4.99 Europe / $4.99 North America
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