[Video Game] Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

The last few weeks I have been unduly fascinated by Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, a 2019 game that was supposed to make the whole of human evolution playable in a breathtaking journey.

You might think that’s promising a bit much, and it is. The game released to rather critical reviews and never made the impact it was supposed to.

And I see why. The game is intentionally impenetrable. It seems in the beginning it didn’t even have the visual cues for the actions I came to rely on, and even with those barely anything is explained. The tutorial is brief and drops you directly into an intensely dangerous world, and the game delights in telling you it won’t give you further hints.

You start as a tribe of hominids about 10 million years ago (the missing link) and have to make your way to about 2.5 million years ago.

In between you have to steer your hominids, start figuring out the world (horsetail good, mushrooms uuugh but filling), invent the first tools like “stick” and “mud” (a truly versatile tool!), and, well, die a lot.

Everything seems made to kill you. Go too high up the tree and an eagle gets you, go through grass a python gets you, walk through water a crocodile eats you. And then there’s the stalker cat which often comes unannounced and pounces you. And unlike the others the cats will stalk you until they can kill you. I had one follow me from one side of one biome to the other.

In between you carry kids with you, because it’s not important what you do with your current character, unless kids see you do it and learn from it. If you do enough of a particular action neural energy will grow and new neurons will activate. In the end its a skill tree system, even if developing it needs generations, or hundreds of thousands of years and a single character will never survive it. From one generation to the next a limited amount of newly learned skills can be kept, but what you really need to get is mutations. These come randomly with new kids, but they won’t become apparent until you do an evolutionary leap. But you need them because some skills are gated by them, and you won’t be able to progress unless you have them.

It’s all very complicated and worse, barely explained.

Unlike many other games this game has nearly no fantastic elements at all. Everything is based on scientific research, there is no story at all, outside of the story of how humans start becoming bipedal and omnivorous… and start killing everything else I guess. The only element I would term fantastical are the meteors.

Danger, here be spoilers: Every once in a while you discover a new landmark and it triggers a cut scene where meteors rain down on the landscape. These will smoke for a while (multiple generations and even generational leaps), but in the end they stop. If your hominid finds them they will gain further unity with the universe, and they will get a free skill, and all kids present get a mutation. It becomes a convenient shortcut to organize an expedition to a meteor site with as many kids as possible to lock down as many mutations as possible over one or two generations. Of course it turns out all these meteor sites have some rather dangerous wildlife nearby, or are in rather inconvenient sites.

Even the actual goal of the game is barely communicated: you have to reach the last evolutionary step in the game, reaching the genus homo ergaster, and then the closing animation plays. I guess it was planned that the next part of the series show the further development, alas I don’t think the game was successful enough. It is rather niche, and the only reason I even got it was because it was part of my Humble subscription at one point. Still. It is an interesting game, and one that I spent a lot of time on. It gives you an appreciation of how far we’ve come, and how dangerous cats used to be. Or still are.