Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
Evolution by repetition in survival game.
The aroused moaning of the prehistoric ape I’m trying to bang is getting to be a bit much. She’s really into this backrub I’m giving her, but I’m having trouble feeling the mood myself. We’re squatting in the freezing rain, my leg is broken, I have an orphaned toddler clinging to my back, and another member of my clan is enthusiastically picking his nose in my sightline. It’s not even a tiny bit romantic, but hey – I’m trying to save our species.
Listening to an ape get horny as I rub her hairy back isn’t the only thing I’m not keen on in third-person survival game Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. It begins 10 million years in the past with you controlling the leader of a small clan of hominids – the distant precursors to human beings that eventually evolved, invented computers, developed games about ancient hominids, and wrote reviews about them. Like evolution itself, Ancestors is slow, often uneventful, and a frequently frustrating struggle.
MONKEYSHINES
An average day in Ancestors is spent exploring the forests of Africa, using your senses to examine your surroundings. But the novelty of detecting something by sound or scent wears off almost immediately due to repetition and awkward controls. When I want to use my senses to investigate something, I need to stop moving completely. Then I need to make sure I’m not close to any rock, stick, plant, or food item or I’ll get the prompt to interact with that item instead of the prompts to use my senses, resulting in a lot of awkward shuffling around. Even just trying to target another hominid for an interaction is a fiddly annoyancee.
There’s naturally lots of climbing and jumping around on the cliffs and trees, which can be exhilarating when making long leaps to snag vines and branches, but much less fun when you miss. Most expeditions wind up with me plummeting to the ground at least once and shattering my leg. The finer movements of my hominid are even more difficult, like trying to transition from a vertical tree trunk to a horizontal branch, which takes a lot of manoeuvring and re-adjusting.
STICKS AND STONES
If you survive and progress long enough, you can advance time hundreds of thousands of years at once and continue playing with the successors of your lineage. Your clan’s experiences and knowledge are matched against science’s estimation of the real thing when you make these evolutionary leaps. I was pretty stoked that my first clan, the Chunky Monkeys, was evolving faster than hominids actually did, mainly because I’d figured out how to bash things with chunks of obsidian earlier than my real-life ancestors did.
Alas, the lineage of the Chunky Monkeys was wiped out about a million years later after losing a few fights and running out of fertile females. Starting Ancestors over again from the beginning is a major drag, having to re-discover every leaf and plant I’ve already long since grown tired of gathering, sniffing, and tasting – not to mention all those backrubs. I haven’t finished Ancestors yet, but I’ve had enough of it.