That’s not unusual for games in the survival genre, but there is so much information you’re meant to understand from a handful of extremely unhelpful visual cues. There’s a lot of showing without telling going on, with the player expected to figure everything out, in ways that aren’t entirely consistent with one another. The points themselves, of course, are shown as an amorphous ball of light without numerical value, and no way of knowing if it’s enough to unlock things until you just can. It’s only when you try to access those traits, however, that the game drops the hint that you need to be carrying children around to generate those much-needed experience points. You learn by repeatedly performing the same tasks, or viewing new territory, accruing experience to unlock new genetic traits. Or, more accurately, when you figure out that you need to trigger that transition yourself by stuffing around in the evolution menu for awhile. Impregnation and gestation happen simultaneously and instantly, with birth occurring immediately after (if you so choose.) Your little ape children seem to remain indefinitely as infants, however, until you decide to progress the timeline onto the next generation.
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Mating is brief and full of awkward hooting. Think of the most annoying tropes that survival games are known for, and Ancestors either has them or has found new annoying twists to add onto old “classics.” The game picks and chooses in a curiously selective way what you have to act out, and what gets glossed over to save time. It would be less confusing to have Yoda sitting on your shoulder the entire time whispering incorrect Confucian sayings.
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Not giving you direct objectives would be one thing but the cryptic drivel that passes for tutorials and hints on simple things, like how to get around and use basic mechanics, is completely maddening. While that’s a novel idea, the deliberate vagueness is a massive source of frustration.
It’s meant to mirror early humans’ struggles with a lack of direction about how to survive. You’ll be dropped into the thick of things right from the beginning, but the gameplay is far from intuitive, and the different systems absolutely need some explaining. One of the first few lines of the opening cinematic writes, “We won’t help you very much,” and that is not a lie. “Representative” is the keyword here, however, and it takes that concept a little too far.
It’s meant to be representative of humanity’s evolutionary journey. Instead, the game is too caught up in its smugness, forcing the players into an experience I’m sure it thinks is clever and thematic but comes across more as distracted, under-developed, and all-around frustrating.Īncestors is a confusing game by design, and there’s a certain logic to that. Unfortunately, Ancestors is none of those things. I’m not usually a fan of survival games in general, but, done right, it could be a unique and fulfilling, perhaps even educational experience to play. The evolution of man from the earliest apes through to proto-humans and beyond is turned into a survival game, informed by data gleaned from scientific discovery and research.
The general concept behind Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a good one.
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