Some things turn out to be much simpler than you’d assume. It comes with its fair share of frustrations. But, since I’m playing before launch, I got the experience that developer Panache seems to hope everyone will: exploration and pure trial and error, literally banging rocks together to see what happens. If you want to surprise people these days you have to do procedural generation, which (as far as I can tell) Ancestors does virtually none of.
Because Minecraft has trained an entire generation to do so, I have no doubt that when the vast, vast majority comes into contact with, say, a basalt stone, the first thing they’re going to do is Google it and find out everything it can possibly be used for. You have to consider that having access to the internet is an actual prerequisite for playing in the first place, since there’s no option for a physical copy at the moment (it won’t even be out on consoles until December). “It’s during this early exploration and experimentation that Ancestors’ taunting “figure it out yourself” vibe seems a little out of touch. If someone had just told me the basics, I might’ve had a better time appreciating the majesty of nature around me. 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. 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. “We won’t help you much,” the introductory text declares. 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. There was a lot of hard work, repetition, and death that turned out to be completely unnecessary in hindsight. 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.
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