Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Review (PC)

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey plays like any other survival game, but everything is so much more interconnected and difficult to anticipate than any of its counterparts. Exploring the world of the game makes you taste freedom and danger in a unique way.

Exploring and surviving in a lush jungle, in your underwear, would be almost impossible for any modern human. How long would you survive before getting bit by a snake or jumped by a jaguar? I guess that it would be for a much shorter time than a primitive humanoid ancestor that can still climb trees with the ease of a perfect acrobat.

And let’s not kid ourselves, Ancestors is ultimately a game about survival, more than anything else, but it should not be surprising since that’s the ultimate goal of any species. What’s striking about the game is that it keeps players in constant fear and anguish as they never know when they are going to be killed.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey comes from a studio named Panache Digital Games, which was founded by Patrice Désilets. Some of you might recognize the name. Patrice worked at Ubisoft for a long time, where he created the Assassin's Creed franchise, not to mention his involvement in many other titles.

Patrice Désilets fascination with precursor civilizations might have influenced the Assassin's Creed series, but he left the studio and founded Panache Digital Games. Clearly, he intended to go beyond some invented myths and focus on the real development of the human race. Although, the action in Ancestors takes place about 10 million years ago, which covers the evolution of a primate species that eventually separated into people and primates.

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When Ancestors was initially announced, I imagined playing as Lucy or something similar, but in evolutionary terms, the real progress was made by species long before that. And this is the period explored in the game, a period of true evolution.

Staying alive is not enough

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is described as a survival game, and that’s partly true. The first objective of the player is to establish a way to fulfill the basic needs, for water, food, and shelter. It might sound like it’s easy, but it will take a while to figure out what you can do, safely at least.

You can choose what type of help you want from the game when you start, and first-time players might want to get the full tutorial. Even with help, it still takes a while to figure out the surroundings, the food and dangers, and even the goals.

Most of the time, players will experiment because there's nothing written, anywhere, for obvious reasons. Just like our ancestor, we will have to discover everything, bit by bit. The only difference is that we don’t have the innate ability to climb trees when a giant constrictor snake attacks us. Death would come fast.

Soon after you start playing, you realize that staying alive is not all that difficult. But each step you take into the unknown jungle also means that you can learn new things. And Ancestors is also a game about learning, more than anything else.

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Players will be spending much of their time studying the environment, carefully, before venturing further into the jungle. The more you look around, the more you experiment, the easier it is to expand the neuronal links.

Evolution can be triggered when going to sleep, spending the points you’ve gathered doing various things in nature. Every time to learn something new, like the properties of a fruit, the fact that some things can be stripped, like the coconut, or when you discover obsidian tools and pointy sticks, you get some points that can be spent evolving.

It works very much like a research tree, picking the direction you want to go. The problem is that all things are essential, as the sense of smell, the ability to build complex items or the interaction with other primates. Players will have a hard time deciding on what to invest, but it’s a rewarding process nonetheless.

This entire aspect of the gameplay is taken to another level with the generational evolution. It’s not enough to evolve a single primate, you need to spread that knowledge to the next generation, and that’s not easy. You will need to select what traits will be passed onto the young ones, and you might not be able to choose all of them, which means that the new generation will have to learn some of the old things once more.

You can make it easier by making sure to select some of the essential traits, which help a lot during the start of a new like of primates.

The only advice I can give is that you need to spend as much time as possible with your clan, at the beginning of the game, learning the surroundings, finding the right food and it’s healing properties, and investing in the evolution process. Venturing into the unknown to find out where that’s mysterious meteorite landed (piqued your interest?) is just suicide.

It takes a few hours to get the hang of it, but the gameplay ramifies so much with each new thing you learn, that you’ll most likely miss a lot of useful stuff that becomes evident after another playthrough.

While the gameplay is enthralling, it’s not without its problems. Let’s start with the obvious. The climbing mechanics are OK, but it could have been much better. The animations seem a little bit choppy sometimes, the primate’s hand catches things that don’t exist, and there’s quite a bit of clipping.

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For example, I was being chased by a leopard or its prehistoric equivalent, and I climbed on a very tall rock, only to be attacked somewhere in the middle, through the textures. And this happens all the time.

Secondly, the UI for the regular gameplay is very well designed and offers players information through intelligence, smell, and hearing. I love how it’s implemented, but the evolution menus are less than intuitive. I still haven’t figured out what everything does, but I guess I need to experiment some more.

Graphics and design

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is developed on the Unreal Engine, and it’s extremely well optimized. Indeed, the graphics are not mind-blowing, but they don’t need to be. The action itself is so compelling that you won’t notice some low-resolution textures or other smaller problems here and there.

But the cool thing about Ancestors is the level design or the apparent lack of it. Technically, it’s valley between two mountains, and the gameplay funnels the players downstream, on a major river. Keeping next to the river means that you have lots of water, but it also means that you’ll encounter more wildlife.

The level design makes it looks like everything is randomly placed and that it’s a real jungle, and that’s pretty much all that we can ask. It is naturally pushing players to explore, without having to hold their hands and showing objectives. It’s just brilliant.

Good, but it could have been better.

If anything, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is captivating, but only if players are willing to put in the time and effort to learn, and it’s not an easy road. It’s a build-your-own adventure type game, which means the journey itself is the reward and not some imaginary goal.

It’s clear that the makers of Ancestors want players to discover what’s possible themselves, with as little help from the outside as possible. But they forget people don’t live in bubbles and many won’t have the patience to go through all the motions.

I should know, I’m one of them, but since I played the game before release, there weren’t online resources for me to consult. I had to think about every aspect as if the Internet doesn't exist. The menus and the information provided only offer a fraction of the necessary help to players, leaving them to find out pretty much everything.

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While it might sound appealing, it also means that you're going to miss a lot of stuff trying to advance. For example, you can bring other primates into your tribe, but it took me a while to figure out how. You can’t interact with them directly, but you can try to give them stuff. I tried various food and objects, and nothing worked. Eventually, coconut worked as they were suffering from food poisoning.

The fighting system is also somewhat flawed until you get a proper weapon and figure out what you need to do. Then, it all becomes simple enough, although you might still be surprised by attacks from time to time.

Finally, the mating process is weird (I know, right?). You find a mate, the female gets pregnant, and she gives birth 15 months later. Some of the genes you could pass on now live in the child. Advancing the lineage 15 more years turns the kind into adults, and you have to make sure to pass on the genes again. To make things worse, you can’t skip the birth animation, which takes a long time.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion