#and the AI is good for prompts anyways its meant to be an assistive tool not the end all be all of art

[spearxwind]

btw i fully condone the theft of AI generated designs. it's morally correct

[terryblount]

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey – Review

I never understood why people would say that a game “won them over”, or that they hated a game when they started playing, but then they grew to love it. I am more much more binary when it comes to my opinion of what I play. Either I like something or I don’t, and it has never taken more than twenty minutes to make up my mind. That is, until I reviewed Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey.

After playing for about an hour, I had originally vowed to write an utterly scathing opinion piece on this trash. I hated it, and such a poorly-made game deserved to be thrown to the wolves. Still, in the back of my mind I knew I was missing something which made me pick it up one more time just for the sake of being objective. To my absolute surprise, I now find myself… a little obsessed, really.

Monkey see, monkey do.  The green orb at the bottom is a general indication of your current character’s overall vitality, including thirst, hunger and sleep.

I still don’t think Ancestors is a masterpiece, and I will mention some of the lamentable (but inexcusable) booby-traps that Panache Digital Games have stumbled into. However despite the cryptic nature of the gameplay, I eventually found an interesting and refreshingly original rendition of the survival genre here once I was willing to dig deep enough.

A monkey’s tale

Be honest, we all bolted upright like a dog hearing its food bowl at the mention of Patrice Désilets’s name. He’s the guy who left Ubisoft from the Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia franchises and founded Panache Digital Games to make Ancestors.

Unlike Patrice’s previous undertakings though, Ancestors is not an action RPG. This is a purebred survival and crafting game set in prehistoric Africa where our forefathers first walked the jungle.

The game opens with an exhilarating cut scene of fearsome animals like crocodiles, razor-beaked birds and sabre-toothed cats ravaging one another as just another day in prehistoric Africa. The message is clear; this is a hostile and dangerous world for the early humanoids. Yes, the word is ‘humanoid’ and not a monkey or a gorilla as people who don’t know their evolution keep saying on YouTube!

As someone who lives in Africa, I can attest this happens every day… when you go on safari

I took on the role of an alpha female as part of a clan that have settled at the foot of the waterfall, and I was instantly impressed with the world that the developers have set their game in. The vast, lush jungle (complete with day/night cycle) was enormous filled with gigantic trees, lakes and rocky cliffs probably rendered to scale. It is all yours to explore, to look for food and for gathering resources.

Unfortunately, the camera handles like it was being held by a an ADD 5-year-old chugging Red Bull. If it’s not bobbing like a cork or veering off, the player is constantly staring up our early ancestors’ arses. Throughout my entire playthrough, I felt like I always had to fight a bit with the game to aim the camera where I needed it to go. It felt like Ancestors was training me to be a primate proctologist.

I started following the first and only objective that the game will ever give you: Find and rescue the clan’s lost baby. These early humans possessed a heightened sense of smell, hearing and vision which the player can use to identify most of their surroundings. After locating the baby, I slid down a tree with all the dexterity of a seasoned primate and proceeded towards the objective marker.

Son, please don’t run off again while your mother and I mate in front of you, okay?

Mistakes were made

The little guy was hiding underneath a rock and I gave him a piggyback ride back to the nest just like the monkeys I saw on BBC the other day. It was then, once I returned to the nest, that I experienced exactly what about 95% of all day one players ran into: Absolutely no indication of what to do next. No further objective markers, no tutorials and no stats meters. Bugger-all.

Suddenly I appreciated the true gravity of these words in the opening scene

I get that this experience of the unknown was meant to replicate the situation of our actual ancestors, but it is all just too much too soon and the game punishes you severely for getting it wrong. Every now and then I like a game that doesn’t hold your hand, but it needs to happen more organically and logically through the gameplay. I cannot say that is the case here.

This is even more bizarre when you consider Ancestors actually lets you adjust how much on-screen info you want before starting your new lineage (or clan). Why even bother if players who stipulate they prefer some help are not going to be assisted anyway? No wonder so many people were put off.

I would be equally happy for discovering this egg if I knew what it was for. Also, notice how dark this game is? I wish they had gone for a more vibrant colour scheme.

Okay, I thought, my overgrown chimpanzee must want food, right? There is a green orb at the bottom of the screen that was beginning to fill with red, which means it has to eat or drink I’m guessing. Either that or it is preparing to fling poop at something. I spotted some berries hanging from a bush and followed the prompt to gorge myself on the red fruit.

Big mistake. Turns out the berries give you an upset stomach, meaning the humanoid looked like it was REALLY about to fling poop everywhere. Here Ancestors also committed one of the Seven Deadly Sins of gaming: It makes the screen go all wobbly and wonky to simulate the ape’s churning gut.

In fact, whenever you get poisoned, high off mushrooms, cold, frightened, or for no particular reason, Ancestors simply loves to make your screen go bonkers. I HATE it when games do this since this is a hopelessly outdated way of simulating a characters experiencing trauma. Too many other games have found better ways of conveying these situations to the player.

The only thing I could see around the nest was more berries, so I broadened my search to find some primordial antacid. It was then with my poor visibility that I missed a jump, causing my already suffering alpha female to plummet off a high branch and break a bone when she hit the ground. So now my clan leader is both sick and limping. The human race is really off to a rocky start.

I finally figured out that water helps with the stomach problems at least, so I waded deeper into the river to settle in for some drinking… which is when a green mamba locked its venomous fangs on the ape’s arm from behind a tree. Now I can add poisoning to my list of woes, and the screen looked like vomit at this point making it really hard to see anything.

“No,” I said as I hit exit, “no, no, no. Screw this. Maybe the human race was meant to go extinct. You’ll thank me later mother earth.” I left the game, and didn’t play again for a day as I plotted my review vendetta.

Let’s do the monkey

Before I munched on those deadly dingleberries, I did some exploring around the settlement and noticed a variety of interactions and crafting options that I did not quite understand (because the stupid game failed to explain them). Perhaps the answer lay here. Perhaps there was something more beneath this horrid first impression and the developers’ pathetic attempts to help you in their game.

It was at this point that I stumbled upon a streamer by the name of TagBackTV on YouTube. If my attempt at playing Ancestors was a patient in the head injury ward doing a cowbell solo, he played like a symphonic orchestra conducted by Hans Zimmer. This guy had evolved the hunched little clan of simians into a bipedal army holding hunting expeditions through the Savannah wielding stone tools and weapons.

According to my friends, this is still pretty much how I cook today. Seriously though, bashing the leaves with a rock makes a medicinal paste.

Confident that it could be done I spent hours on Reddit, watched instructional videos and finally summoned the courage to try again. This time, Ancestors felt like a completely different game. Now I was watching my clan grow and survive because I was teaching them to adapt and become smarter. Suddenly, it was 2:30 in the morning and JUST ONE MORE GENERATION AND I PROMISE I WILL GO TO BED.

Like all good survival games, Ancestors has this internal rhythm and momentum for the player to fall into. Once you learn a set of basic gameplay mechanics, you gain the confidence and knowhow to apply them in more complex tasks. In other words, once you understand the law of the jungle, it becomes a place of exploration and opportunity rather than one big death trap.

See, the aim of the game in Ancestors is to help your little clan of humanoids survive the harsh landscape of prehistoric Africa by building up their neuron cells. In other words, the player must give the early humans bigger brains, which in turn makes each successive generation (the babies) smarter and more capable in their environment.

Ancestor’s version of a ‘tech tree’. The white orb in the middle is how much neuronal energy you have to make links to other neurons. More babies makes you gather neuronal energy much faster.

In the opening sections, players will mostly learn the ABCs of just getting around the jungle, what to eat and avoid, and how to keep a keen eye out for predators. While the latter becomes annoying at times, the developers have programmed their AI really well since they can sneak up on you completely silently. I needed to change my underwear a few times after a crocodile lunged at me out of the water, or a sabre-toothed cat suddenly jumped out of the undergrowth.

Example of an upgrade as you develop the brain of the apes

After those neurons have been developed and you have passed through a few generations, you find that you can eat even the most poisonous foods and kill even the most intimidating predators with a self-made spear. Players will learn how to use stone tools not just to make weapons, but also to grind plants into paste for making medicinal products.

After every major evolution the distant descendants of the clan you started off with will find themselves in a new environment. From the jungle the player will eventually move to grass planes, the arid savannah, and even the sea shore. Again, these environments are HUGE and each one presents a unique set of challenges which is a great way to keep the repetitive gameplay fresh and engaging.

Staying in touch with your roots

The survival genre is an exciting area to explore for gamers these days. Games like Subnautica, the comeback of No Man’s Sky, and now Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey show that studios have a unique confidence here to turn some interesting concepts into games. As a community we should consider supporting these flawed but ambitious projects so that they can evolve into bigger and more refined products, and Ancestors is no exception.

That’s what you get for attacking my clan. Oh crap… did I just cause cats to go extinct!?

Do try this game if you have the means or the time, but make sure you do a substantial amount of background research before you click that icon. While the developers were morons for not easing the players into this complex experience, all gamers should try their hand at witnessing the very birth of our species.

Big world to explore

Vast and engaging skill tree

Rewarding exploration

Interesting concept

Decisions matter

Needs more player guidance

Frustrating camera

Screen distortion effects

Mediocre graphics

Can be repetitive at times

        Play time: About 27 hours total. Most players should reach the final stage of evolution between 35 – 40 hours

Computer Specs: Windows 10 64-bit computer using Nvidia GTX 1070, i5 4690K CPU, 16GB RAM – Played using an Xbox One Controller

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