When our distant ape ancestors got together and decided one day, roughly 10 million years ago, that they should evolve into humans, did they have an instruction manual that told them which two things to rub together to get there? No! They had to put pretty much everything they encountered into their mouths, one at a time, to figure out which was tasty and which was deadly poison. There was a lot of hard work, repetition, and death that turned out to be completely unnecessary in hindsight. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey does its very best to recreate much of that maddening blindness and futility and some of the associated sense of discovery in a beautiful prehistoric world, becoming an apt metaphor in the process.

Ancestors prides itself in withholding information on how its most important systems work or what you’re supposed to be doing, beyond the broad goal of evolving a group of chimpanzee-like common ancestors toward modern humans faster than they actually did. “We won’t help you much,” the introductory text declares. As a result there’s some mysticism to it in the opening hours as both you and your tribe of primates attempt to figure out the world around you at the same time. But once you’ve demystified the basics of how systems like skill progression and combat work, you begin a long, drawn-out, and repetitious slog toward sentience. If someone had just told me the basics, I might’ve had a better time appreciating the majesty of nature around me.

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To be up front, I haven’t yet reached the end of Ancestors – which, I assume, means becoming human. I have, however, spent roughly 40 hours starting and restarting the journey, each time learning at least one crucial “Well why didn’t you just tell me that?” piece of information that allowed me to get much further the next time around. Somehow, the many tips on the pause screen and help section of the menu avoid getting specific enough to be useful. For example, I still don’t fully understand how the indicator in the lower right corner of the screen works, though I have some theories.

“ Knowing what I know now, I could get back to where I am in a fraction of the time.

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In my most successful run I’ve progressed roughly half of the 10 million years between the starting and ending points (which does not appear to have a 1:1 relationship with time played), and I’ve seen some stuff. My main complaint is that much of that stuff has looked new but been otherwise exactly the same as the stuff I saw before, and does not give me a lot of confidence that what comes next will be significantly different.

At first, controlling a small group of common-ancestor apes in a prehistoric African jungle is intriguing. Animations are a highlight, and the way they move and interact feels lifelike and authentic. I’ve found it to be more of a gut-punch when one of these animals is in distress or dying than with a typical human character. They each have their own monosyllabic names like Kwu and Na and Mo, too… but they’re otherwise disappointingly interchangeable and almost entirely disposable. That’s probably for the best because the AI of those you aren’t controlling is pretty bad at keeping them alive. Besides which, these are effectively your lab rats and you definitely should not get attached. I ended a few early lineages by failing to prioritize the next generation over the current one. And, because you can’t revert to an earlier save state, losing your last ape is really the end of the line.

“ The way apes move and interact seems lifelike and authentic.

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Some things turn out to be much simpler than you’d assume. Hereditary, for example, tracks only a given ape’s parents and their children, and nothing beyond that - so history is completely lost over just a few generations. And there’s no real individuality or complexity to breeding because every evolutionary advancement you make is collective. The only bit of individuality is that babies are born with spontaneous mutations that give them special abilities, but they only become available after you trigger a generational advance and they become adults – and then everybody gets them (even though the mutant ape hasn’t even had children yet).

The way you progress your lineage is a pretty standard skill tree dressed up as connecting neurons in a brain using “neural energy” (aka XP), which is a cool way of representing it. But there’s a catch: every time you decide to advance a generation or make a much larger evolutionary leap that effectively resets your game but preserves your evolution, you’re given a set number of lock-ins to use (determined by factors that aren’t revealed to you) and everything that isn’t locked in is lost and must be unlocked again, with newly earned experience. That’s a hassle that feels designed to slow down progress, especially when you waste a bunch of time figuring out how it works and how to optimize it.

“ Getting across a rushing river or a steep cliff takes some effort, and it all feels well thought out.

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All of that African habitat is heavily populated with predators, but once you understand how evading and fighting back works it quickly becomes apparent that the many jungle cats, snakes, crocodiles, enormous birds, and more who try to eat you are effectively all the same, and none poses a threat. Don’t get me wrong – there were still moments when I was taken by surprise and they scared the bajeesus out of me, but it’s almost entirely shock value. I won’t tell you how combat works because you might want to figure it out yourself, but I will tell you you’ll probably be disappointed to learn that fighting a hippopotamus or buffalo is mechanically identical to killing a wild boar.

Before you figure out how simple it is to craft a stick to defend yourself it often makes a lot of sense to stay off the ground as possible, since predators are almost exclusively on the forest floor (even snakes, which you’d think would be decent climbers). Swinging from tree to tree is a thrill, except the fact that we’re doing this from a third-person perspective and flying through leaves means that you can’t really see what’s coming. When the branches run out unexpectedly you get to go down in history as the one who invents the concept of the face plant. Part of that is never really knowing how far you can fall without injuring or killing your ape (it’s pretty far) but once you figure out the confusing three-layered stamina system you can do a lot of climbing and swimming to get over pretty much any obstacle.

“ Importantly, it’s not a game about amassing large piles of resources to manufacture into walls, tables, and chairs.

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The goal of all of this is evolution, which (contrary to what Pokemon may have taught you) requires many generations of gradual change. That means making lots of babies, but tragically the act of procreation in Ancestors is deeply, deeply unsexy. Not only is courtship a matter of very mechanically locating a suitable mate for the ape you’re currently controlling and pushing B to groom them for 20 seconds, but then you summon them to the mating bed with a shriek and a thump on the ground and then are forced to watch a full one-minute cutscene for every birth.Now, I’m a dad, and I’m the first to admit that deeply ingrained in just about every proud parent is the desire to compel everyone around them watch a montage of videos of their first year with their newborn. It’s a sickness – we all know it, and we do it anyway. In Ancestors, I’ve gotten an overdose of my own medicine: you’re forced to watch the exact same minute-long unskippable cutscene again and again, every time a new baby is born. And babies are a thing you need to have a lot of – the more successful your clan is, the more babies it will bear, and my best strategy thus far is to do nothing else until every female ape has had the maximum two children. With your starting tribe you can expect to watch this four times every generation, and it only goes up from there. The cutscene is literally long enough for me to get up and make myself a drink while it happens. That is, unless I’m doing something wrong, which I might be because again, Ancestors “won’t help you much.” [Edit: as it turns out that you can skip cutscenes by holding the back button on the Xbox controller for a few seconds, which is why my hammering every button didn't do the trick. Just another very important thing that Ancestors doesn't tell you.]