When a game, film or TV show takes on the idea of human evolution, it’s usually concerned with the future. What might humans become? How might technology change us? But Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey’s interpretation is literal. You play as a great ape, part of a small troop in a jungle, swinging through trees, picking up sticks and rocks and trying to figure out how to use them to advance the species. It is a fascinating concept, challenging the player to reconnect with the curiosity and ingenuity that helped our distant genetic ancestors to figure out how to progress.

Ancestors opens 10 million years ago with a nature-documentary-style montage of cruel life in the jungle, featuring crocodiles, sabre-toothed cats and giant predatory birds – all eating each other. When an elder ape meets a grisly end in the treetops, the infant creature clinging to its back is thrown to the ground, and you begin the game as a baby desperately searching for somewhere to hide on the forest floor, calling for help. Switching into the body of an adult primate, you pursue the cries through the dense jungle, eventually picking up the infant and returning them to the safety of the tribe.

From there, you’re on your own. Switching between any ape in the tribe, you head out on expeditions with babies clinging to you, seeking food, swinging through trees and trying to avoid anything that might devour you. As you figure out how to create basic tools from sticks, bond with other apes, use leaves or tree bark to staunch bleeding or create bedding from palm leaves, your abilities slowly develop in a progress screen that shows a network of developing neurons. Through learning and breeding, you progress the species and eventually reach another stage of evolution, moving from the jungle to the savannah.

The developing brain … progress screen of Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. Photograph: Panache Digital

It’s a few months from completion, but right now Ancestors is almost painful to play. There are so many ways for an ape to die. You can plunge to your death from the forest canopy, slowly bleed to death after ill-advisedly taking on a boar with a pointed stick, eat something poisonous, or be swallowed by a crocodile. In two hours I managed to be accidentally responsible for the deaths of almost an entire tribe while achieving little else except learning how to spear fish – which did, admittedly, make me briefly feel like the jungle smartest beast. Discoveries or triumphs give your ape a confidence-boosting shot of dopamine, in a clever mirroring of the actual dopamine that small successes release in the player’s brain.



Unfortunately, my ape was unused to a pescetarian diet and quickly developed a stomach upset from the raw fish. Swinging around the canopy is harder than it looks, leading to plenty of broken bones, and a cumbersome control system has you switching tree branches from hand to hand. I spent a lot of time laboriously scanning my surroundings with my ape’s senses, feeling lost.

Much of this initial difficulty is intentional, says creative director and co-founder of Panache Digital Games Patrice Désilets, whose previous credits include Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series of historical adventures. “It took us millions of years to get here,” he says. “As a homo sapiens, you have a lot of knowledge within you. It’s about asking yourself questions, and then asking the game whether it works. We won’t tell you what do to.”

Ancestors’ relatively small development team of 35 people, headed by Désilets – used up-to-date scientific research, but decided to let players chart their own courses through human history. You might invent weapons or discover fire earlier than real-life hominids. “At first, I designed a much more linear game, using the actual timeline. But it was boring,” says Désilets.

“This way, you figure it out yourself. There is the opportunity to compare yourself against the timeline, to learn things a different way around.”

On your own out there … Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. Photograph: Panache Digital

It’s impossible to make a game about hominid evolution without saying something about human nature, and Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey doesn’t pretend to be neutral in this respect. Anthropology has typically imposed modern values on to our ancestors, and the concept of “natural order” is often invoked by those looking to enforce a certain way of being in the present. This game emphasises human ingenuity: our collective ability to figure things out from what’s around us. And female apes don’t stay at home with the tribe while male apes do all the exploring and gathering.

“I was tired of hearing that our ancestors were ultraviolent, that we were all about killing. This is not true,” says Désilets. “There was no finding of wars before civilisation. It’s when you start to control territory – post-farming, post-religion – that we started to divide and confront. We’ve only recently proved that Neanderthals drew, that they had culture … I feel that our real strength is compassion, much more than killing each other.”

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey’s journey through the dawn of humankind is not brief. The developers estimate 50 hours for a playthrough, ending around 2m years ago. This was easy to believe after I spent several hours making zero progress in the jungle (beyond my short-lived fishing triumph). It’s not the most welcoming game, but it is charting territory that has been little explored in the medium until now – strangely, perhaps, as video games are a fascinating arena in which to explore our origins. By giving players power to act as they please, feeling their own way through the kinds of environments in which early hominids had to survive, it’s possible we might learn something new about human nature.