So this is my first book review for Gameindustry.com and go figure the irony of it shows initially in the book coming from Eastern Europe. My first book review is based off of developer Nival’s game Prime World. Nival got Russian Bestselling author Vadim Panov to write the story behind this online game. Now I have never played Primeworld, it’s been on my list but I just haven’t got to it yet. So I was quite happy to get a peek into the World that Nival has created.
The prologue captured my interest and was beautifully done. It was a strong conversation between two very important people. One being a ruler named Agatha and the other being a scientist named Invariet. The two disagree on the usage of Invariet’s new invention, the Primachine. The discussion comes to a screeching halt when Agatha learns Invariet sabotaged his own machine, and before she could capture him, he threw himself from a window.
Over the next chapter, which I say chapter as in singular because each part is really long, the story advances. Chapter one was close to two hundred pages long. The first forty pages were rough in terms of following along due to some pretty abrupt point of view changes. More than once I had to back track and see who I was following at that moment. This happens every now and again throughout the book, but the early going is by far the most confusing.
Once I caught my bearings and who was what character I learned plenty about the way the Primeworld universe works. There are normal humans as well has the prime fused heroes. Heroes have a few interesting quarks with them. The best being they can be brought back after death with a special machine, the downside is they remember every time they die. Also there are a race of people called Keepers who live in the south. After an event called the cataclysm they began to absorb prime and use it for magic.
Back to the story. A young noble named Carlos Gryd gets involved in the manhunt for a wanted criminal from the southern country of Cobria. Once involved in the manhunt, against the advice of a Cobrian knight named Lachard, Carlos ends up killing the fugitive. With his dying breaths the criminal mentions something about a primachine to Carlos. Carlos keeps the information to himself and goes on about his night.
Lachard requests an audience with the leader, Carlos’s father, and refuses to divulge the details on his visit. After pressuring Carlos with questions he realizes the youth won’t answer him truthfully and a coup starts ending with the death of Carlos’s father and Carlos framed as his murderer.
Now I’m not going any farther because I don’t want to spoil anything. I do want to say that for a book based off of a game, it came in at a whopping 114,000 words. This book is very long, as in trying to read as fast as I could it still took me about a week and a half to complete it. Now this isn’t a bad thing, but it’s different.
The story is top notch and Panov does an excellent job of laying out the world for you. Appendixes describing the countries, places, and heroes, and more is included which is awesome if you read before you play. I didn’t pay attention and just started reading right away. While you get the feel for this being a stereotypical ending, Panov throws some unexpected twists into it.
All in all, Primachine is a great book to pick up. At only a dollar on Amazon, it really matches it’s value and then some. While there are some confusing moments, they vanish after a while and you fall into the Primeworld universe, which is exactly what a book based on a video game should do. And Primachine delivers.