It’s when you start to control territory – post-farming, post-religion – that we started to divide and confront. “There was no finding of wars before civilisation. “I was tired of hearing that our ancestors were ultraviolent, that we were all about killing. And female apes don’t stay at home with the tribe while male apes do all the exploring and gathering. This game emphasises human ingenuity: our collective ability to figure things out from what’s around us. 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. 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. On your own out there … Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. I spent a lot of time laboriously scanning my surroundings with my ape’s senses, feeling lost. 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. Unfortunately, my ape was unused to a pescetarian diet and quickly developed a stomach upset from the raw fish. 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. 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. 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. There are so many ways for an ape to die. It’s a few months from completion, but right now Ancestors is almost painful to play. The developing brain … progress screen of Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. 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. 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. 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.Īncestors 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. 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. What might humans become? How might technology change us? But Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey’s interpretation is literal. W hen a game, film or TV show takes on the idea of human evolution, it’s usually concerned with the future.
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