Prehistoric Tales

Prehistoric Tales is a time management and city-building game set in a vibrant ancient world. Players take on the role of an amnesiac stranger who must build, protect, and guide a fledgling prehistoric settlement to prosperity. The gameplay involves managing resources to feed and house villagers while undertaking various missions such as clearing caves of dinosaurs and defending the settlement from invading armies. Through addictive real-time and turn-based gameplay, players become skilled builders and warriors, ensuring the tribe’s survival and growth in a vast, untamed wilderness.

Prehistoric Tales: A Stone Age Strategy Sim Lost to the Sands of Time

In the sprawling metropolis of modern gaming, where blockbuster titles command global attention, there exists a quieter, more modest stratum of games designed not to revolutionize, but to comfort. Prehistoric Tales, a 2016 release from Russian developer Amegami and publisher Alawar Entertainment, is a quintessential inhabitant of this stratum. It is a game of humble ambitions, a blend of time-management city-building and turn-based strategy that found a small, appreciative audience before receding into the vast archive of Steam’s casual catalogue. This is an exhaustive review of a game that time forgot, but whose story is worth telling.

Introduction: A Fledgling Tribe in a Vast Wilderness

You awaken with no memory, a stranger on the shores of a primitive land. A small village, threatened by rival tribes and prehistoric beasts, looks to you for salvation. This is the premise of Prehistoric Tales, a game that asks you to be both architect and general, farmer and hero. Its thesis is one of comforting simplicity: through diligent resource management and tactical prowess, you can guide a fledgling community to prosperity against all odds. While it never aspired to the complexity of Civilization or the depth of XCOM, Prehistoric Tales carved out its own niche as a accessible, low-stress fusion of genres, a game that one player on Gamer.se noted provided “solace during a tough period and played a role in their emotional recovery.” This review will unearth every detail of its development, mechanics, and the quiet legacy it left behind.

Development History & Context: The Alawar Casual Machine

The Studio and The Vision
Prehistoric Tales was developed by Amegami, a studio operating under the vast umbrella of Alawar Entertainment, a Russian publisher synonymous with the casual games market. Alawar’s business model, evident in franchises like Farm Frenzy and The Treasures of Montezuma, focused on high-volume, low-cost, accessible titles primarily distributed through digital storefronts. The vision for Prehistoric Tales was not to break new ground but to effectively synthesize popular casual game tropes: the city-building of a tycoon game, the mission-based structure of time-management titles, and the accessible tactics of light strategy games.

The Technological Landscape
Built using the Unity engine, the game was designed for maximum compatibility, with minimum system requirements calling for a Windows XP machine with a 1.6 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and 128 MB of graphics memory. These specs, laughable by 2016 standards, clearly indicate the target audience: players with older machines seeking undemanding entertainment. The choice of Unity was pragmatic, allowing the small team of 16 credited individuals—including Producer Artem Bochkarev and Lead Programmer Igor Grishchuk—to develop efficiently for a single platform (PC) and leverage the engine’s built-in tools for UI and 2D rendering.

The Gaming Landscape of 2016
Released on May 26, 2016, Prehistoric Tales entered a market dominated by titans like Overwatch, Dark Souls III, and Uncharted 4. Its existence was a testament to the diversity of the Steam marketplace, a platform that could accommodate both AAA blockbusters and humble casual games. It served a specific audience looking for a palate cleanser between more intense sessions, a game you could play “one-handed,” as noted by its fans. It was a product of a very specific era in digital distribution, when small-scale developers could find an audience without the need for massive marketing campaigns.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: The Amnesiac Chieftain

Plot and Characters
The narrative framework of Prehistoric Tales is simple but serviceable. You play an amnesiac who stumbles into a prehistoric village and, through a “twist of fate,” is immediately thrust into a leadership role. The story is a vehicle for gameplay, providing context for building huts, gathering berries, and fighting off “Greenskin” invaders and dinosaurs. There is no deep character development; the villagers are abstract entities represented by their labor needs. The dialogue, as glimpsed in community discussions where players reported bugs that obscured story text, is functional at best, serving to deliver mission objectives rather than build a rich narrative world.

Underlying Themes
Thematically, the game explores ideas of community, survival, and rebuilding—both of a civilization and of the protagonist’s own identity. The amnesia trope mirrors the player’s own experience of learning the game’s systems from scratch. The central theme is one of benevolent leadership: you are a “brave and kind soul” whose purpose is purely to safeguard and guide others. There are no moral choices or complex dilemmas; your role is unambiguously to be a good chief. This purity of purpose is a core tenet of its design, reinforcing its identity as a low-stress, therapeutic experience.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: A Jigsaw of Genres

Core Gameplay Loop
The gameplay of Prehistoric Tales is a hybrid of two distinct modes:
1. City-Building & Resource Management: In the village view, played from a diagonal-down perspective, you manage resources like food and wood. You assign workers to tasks such as foraging, farming, and constructing buildings. This is a simplified time-management sim, where the primary challenge is efficiently sequencing tasks to ensure your village grows without starving.
2. Turn-Based Tactical Combat: Periodically, missions trigger that transition to a separate battle map. Here, the game shifts to a turn-based strategy format. You command a small party of units on a grid-based battlefield, engaging in “captivating step-by-step battles” against dinosaurs and hostile tribesmen.

Innovation and Flaw
The innovation lies in the fusion itself, attempting to marry the relaxed pace of city-building with the engaged thinking of tactics. A Gamezebo review quoted on Steam called it a “great blend of management-sim and turn-based combat.”

However, this fusion is also the source of its flaws, as indicated by player discussions on Steam:
* Pacing Issues: The shift between two different gameplay styles could feel jarring and disjointed rather than cohesive.
* Technical Bugs: Community threads highlight persistent issues, such as achievement tracking failures (e.g., the “Archeologist” achievement for finding items not unlocking), menus getting stuck over critical dialogue, and graphical glitches where foreground elements would disappear.
* Simplified Systems: Each individual system is relatively shallow. The tactics lack the unit variety or strategic depth of dedicated strategy games, and the resource management is simpler than most dedicated sims.

UI and Progression
The user interface is designed for mouse-only input, with clear icons and simple menus befitting its casual nature. Progression is linear, guided by a series of missions that unlock new buildings and units. The game features 20 Steam Achievements and Trading Cards, adding a layer of goals for completionists.

World-Building, Art & Sound: A Colorful Prehistoric Cartoon

Visual Direction
The art style is bright, colorful, and cartoonish. It leans into a friendly, non-threatening aesthetic where dinosaurs are more charming than terrifying. The diagonal-down perspective of the village view provides a clear overview of your growing settlement, while the battle maps are simple and functional. The visuals are competent but unremarkable, designed for clarity and performance on low-end systems rather than artistic awe. Community screenshots showcase bustling little villages with a quaint charm.

Sound Design
The official description promises “ear-pleasing music and sound effects.” The soundtrack is reported by players to be one of its strongest assets—soothing, uplifting, and contributing significantly to the game’s calming, therapeutic atmosphere. It is the audio equivalent of a comfort blanket, designed to relax rather than excite.

Atmosphere
The overall atmosphere is one of relaxed challenge. It is not a game that seeks to induce anxiety (despite the invasions) but to provide a satisfying sense of incremental progress and control. The world feels small, safe, and manageable—a key to its appeal for a specific audience.

Reception & Legacy: A Minor Footnote with a Personal Impact

Critical and Commercial Reception
Upon release, Prehistoric Tales garnered little critical attention. No major outlet produced a formal review, and it holds no Metascore. Its reception is measured almost exclusively through its Steam user reviews, where it maintains a “Mostly Positive” rating (75% positive out of 60 reviews, with an overall Player Score of 76/100 from Steambase.io based on 110 reviews). The commercial performance was likely modest, typical for a low-price-point ($2.99 USD) title in Alawar’s extensive portfolio. It was frequently discounted to under a dollar.

Evolving Reputation and Lasting Legacy
The legacy of Prehistoric Tales is not one of industry influence but of personal resonance. It did not inspire a new genre or create a franchise. Its true impact is highlighted in anecdotal player experiences, such as the one on Gamer.se that credited the game with aiding in a period of emotional recovery. Its legacy is that of a comfort game—a title that provided a few hours of uncomplicated, strategic fun for a small group of players.

While it shares a prehistoric setting with games like Prehistoric Kingdom (2022), it bears no mechanical or conceptual resemblance to them. It is a forgotten relic, a testament to the thousands of small-scale games that live and die on digital storefronts, remembered not for their innovation but for the small moments of joy they provided.

Conclusion: A Perfectly Adequate, Deeply Niche Experience

Prehistoric Tales is not a great game, nor is it a bad one. It is a profoundly adequate execution of a simple concept. Its ambitions were perfectly aligned with its resources: to create a pleasant, undemanding hybrid game for the casual strategy fan. It succeeds on those terms.

For players seeking a deep, challenging, or narrative-rich experience, it is an easy skip. But for a specific player—someone recovering from surgery, looking for a game to play while watching TV, or simply in need of a digital comfort food—it was, and perhaps still is, a perfect solution. Its final verdict is etched not in aggregated review scores but in a single player’s testimony: it was a game that helped during a tough time. In the grand, brutal history of video games, that is a legacy as meaningful as any.