Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey.
So I'm only about 6 hours into this game and I'm still learning how it works, so this is my thoughts so far. Ancestors is a survival simulation game with a unique concept. You are a pre-human hominid, starting about 10 million years ago and your goal is to lead your clan/tribe to eventually reach something close to human over the next 8 million years. The game doesn't explicitly tell you where you are in the evolutionary tree where you start out at 10 million BCE but based on cursory wiki research it's just about the time Human and Chimp lines were beginning to diverge from each other but the earliest stage feels a lot like playing a chimpanzee. Eventually the game will dump off at the proto-human stage approximately around Homo Erectus(hehe....Erectus) which is apparently our immediate precursors in the chain before being approximately (if not actual) humans, about 2 million years ago.
How you play the game is that you control one of the members of your ape clan and you want to not only survive but evolve, so on a base level it's making sure you have food, water and the ability to rest in safety without getting poisoned or murdered by predators(of which there are PLENTY). When one of your monkees(yes, I know they're apes but the monkey is also used by the fanbase and it's more amusing) dies, they're dead for good and you switch to another member of the clan(you can also do this whenever you want as long as you are next to them and hit the appropriate prompt). If the entire clan dies, your line is wiped out and presumably lose all your progress. So this means its important to keep them safe and make baby monkees to keep the line going. This is where things get interesting, because as you do things in the world, you gain essentially XP and develop Neurons in your primitive monkey brain which acts as a skill tree, but the amount you again depends on what you do, how often you've done it before(novel experiences are worth more than ones you're familiar with). And you gain more XP by carrying a baby monkee or two around with you(which means if you die you might lose the baby too, though you do have a chance to take control of the baby and tree to run back to camp and safety), because presumably it's learning from watching you do things.
So you can choose which neurons/skills to develop but eventually you'll reach the limit of how many baby monkees you can have at a time and will need to skip to the next generation(about 15 years) to allow the babies to grow to adulthood(and the adults become elder monkees while the elder monkees die of old age in the interim). However, when you do this, any skills/neurons you don't reinforce(by selecting on the tree are lost) and you can only reinforce as many as you have baby monkees(which caps at 6 per generation and each female can only have 2 before becoming infertile). So essentially, you can learn new skills and then reinforce them before performing a time skip to lock in those skills for the next generation(and once locked in, skills don't become unlocked, so you will slowly expand the tree and get stronger). You also get random mutations as well(which are always beneficial) when you skip to the next generation.-
There's also a step up from this called Evolution where you evolve towards the present day based on milestones you've achieved along the way, such as attaining new skills, finding landmarks on the map, making new tools, repeating certain actions, etc which eventually. This also skips Thousands to million of years based on how many milestones you've racked up and eventually a new type of monkee that's a step closer to humans(which I haven't accomplished yet). Doing so also moves you to a new biome on the map, starting the jungle and eventually moving out onto the African Savannas.
Granted, this whole "Make Baby Monkees to level/skill up" comes with it's own weirdness because whatever monkee you are controlling is the only one that really does anything. The others, while not being controlled, will hang out at camp unless you lead them somewhere and pretty much will do nothing other then the minimum to keep themselves alive. You(the monkee you are controlling) must explore the world, learn new skills, figure out tools, and most importantly, make all the baby monkees, because none of the others will do it on their own. Which leads to this awkward situation where you can bond with any opposite sex monkee(by grooming them), regardless if they're listed as bonded with another in the clan, take to a bed, do some quick monkee sex(in case you're wondering, you don't see it because they move off camera, but you do hear some shouting as it's happening), pump out some kids and keep doing that till you run out of fertile females or reach the baby limit. Also, despite the fact you can never make more then 2 babies per female, the population doesn't die out and you can find other monkees to recruit on the map.
But yeah, the world is a dangerous place, since predators abound, you can only eat certain things to start with(or risk poisoning, but that's easily fixed by drinking a bunch of water to flush your system) and there's no map. You have icons and your senses, which you must use or risk getting lost and even your camp may not be safe from predators(some are, some are basically open with no real protection). I found this out the hard way when a saber tooth cat wandered into my camp and started eating my tribe one by one and since I didn't know how to fight it(I'll get to that soon), it would not go away and the best thing I could do was try to distract from eating the entire monkee buffet(complete with snack sized baby portions) until restarted the game to despawn it from my camp(but all the dead were still dead). It's worst because in case of animal attacks like that, your monkee gets stressed, gets scared and will eventually go fear crazy and run around out of your control. And even if you survive, the predator is still eating your fellow monkees while this is happening.
Part of this is because I didn't understand how to defend again such attacks because you can't actually attack predators. You essentially have to do a QTE akin to a parry if you are holding a weapon, and if you fail you die. You can also dodge but you'll probably take damage, drop any weapon you have and still be within striking range. If you succeed, you can kill or drive off the predator(which feels wonderful if you do). The game kind of teaches you this except it kinda doesn't.So it's easy enough to learn how to make a weapon early on. Making a crude spear(a sharpened stick made from a tree branch and using a rock to sharpen the end to a point) can be done with a minute or two of work once you know how and resources are all over the place, but the other monkees won't make them on their own, so you need to arm them yourself and hope they know how to use them properly, and the game only sort of tells you how to actually fight off a predator.
That's the real problem with the game, assuming you're onboard with the Pre-human survival sim. There are tutorials but it feels like they don't really tell you how to do stuff, but only give you some idea what to do. I've had to check the wiki numerous times to figure out how to deal with common survival issues, such as how to heal wounds, how to fight off predators and how to recruit other monkees. And apparently the originally released version was worse about this, which is one of the reasons it wasn't reviewed that well. I get that it's part of the conceit, that our Early ape ancestors had nothing but their wits to rely on and somehow made it work or we wouldn't be here playing games and then talking about it on the internet. However, it still needs to be engaging/entertaining and getting wiped out because everything is trying to murder you and you don't know the rules of survival plays a little too well into the "Survival of the fittest" nature of the setting. This is where the game needs to train the player to play it properly so it is engaging, which it only sort of does because the tutorial pop ups don't do a great job of explaining this too you.
With that out of the way, I am engaged by this and it's commitment to "Be Monkey, Act like Monkey become smarter and eventually to become human". Learning how to make a spear is pretty awesome, figuring out to find new food sources is always nice and slowly watching your characters become stronger and more capable does feel like a nice sense of progression. Once you get in the mindset of you are not the apex predator here, but rather a scared monkee in a big unknown world and you need to think like a monkee to thrive(staying in the trees, using your senses to look for food, resources and threats, etc) makes it a unique experience in a survival sim but by using tools like sharpened sticks properly you can take down large predators without too much trouble. I'll update once I get further in and get a better feel for how the game changes as you go through the evolutionary ladder.
