After locating the baby, I slid down a tree with all the dexterity of a seasoned primate and proceeded towards the objective marker. These early humans possessed a heightened sense of smell, hearing and vision, which the player must use to identify most of their surroundings. I started following the first and only objective that the game will ever give you: Find and rescue the clan’s lost baby. Throughout my entire playthrough, I felt like I always had to fight a little with the game to aim the camera where I needed it to go (and like Ancestors was training me to be a primate proctologist). If it’s not bobbing like a cork or veering off, the player is constantly staring up our early ancestors’ arses. Unfortunately, the camera handles like it is being held by an ADD-afflicted 5-year-old chugging Red Bull. It is all yours to explore, to look for food and for gathering resources. The vast, lush jungle (complete with day/night and weather cycle) was enormous and filled with gigantic trees, lakes and rocky cliffs probably rendered to scale. I took the role of an alpha female as part of a clan that has settled at the foot of the waterfall, and I was instantly impressed with the world that the developers have created within their game. Yes, the word is ‘humanoid’ and not a monkey or a gorilla as people who don’t know their evolution keep saying on YouTube! As someone who lives in Africa, I can attest this happens every day… when you go on safari The message is clear this is a hostile and dangerous world for the early humanoids. The game opens with an exhilarating cut scene of fearsome crocodiles, razor-beaked birds and sabre-toothed cats ravaging one another as just another day in prehistoric Africa. This is a purebred survival and crafting game set in prehistoric Africa where our ape-like forefathers first walked the jungle. Unlike Patrice’s previous undertakings though, Ancestors is not an action RPG. He’s the guy who left Ubisoft from the teams working on the Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia franchises, and founded Panache Digital Games to make Ancestors.
![ancestors the humankind odyssey crafting list ancestors the humankind odyssey crafting list](https://res.cloudinary.com/lmn/image/upload/e_sharpen:100/f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/v1/gameskinnyc/b/i/g/big-doom-eternal-demon-262bb.jpg)
A monkey’s taleīe honest, we all bolted upright like a dog hearing its food bowl at the mention of Patrice Désilets’s name.
![ancestors the humankind odyssey crafting list ancestors the humankind odyssey crafting list](https://i0.wp.com/culturedvultures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Ancestors-Screenshot-2019.08.20-12.31.13.26.jpg)
However, despite the really cryptic nature of the gameplay, I eventually found an interesting and refreshing rendition of the survival genre once I was willing to dig deep just a little deeper. I still don’t think Ancestors is a masterpiece, and I will get into some of the lamentable (but inexcusable) booby-traps that Panache Digital Games have stumbled into. The green orb at the bottom is a general indication of your current character’s overall vitality, including thirst, hunger and sleep. To my absolute surprise, I now find myself… a little obsessed, really.
![ancestors the humankind odyssey crafting list ancestors the humankind odyssey crafting list](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6dB2im5oLtc/maxresdefault.jpg)
Still, in the back of my mind I knew I was missing something which made me pick it up one more time just for the sake of being objective. I hated it, and such a poorly-made game deserved to be thrown to the wolves. That is, until I reviewed Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey.Īfter playing for about an hour, I had originally vowed to write an utterly scathing opinion piece on this trash. Either I like something or I don’t, and it has never taken more than twenty minutes to make up my mind. I am more much more binary when it comes to my opinion of what I play. I never understood why people would say that a game “won them over”, or that someone hated a game when they started playing, but then grew to love it.