In an interview, Désilets pondered what it must have been like for the first human being to milk its first cow, and what desperation or ingenuity might have led to that decision. More than that, Désilets said he wants players to experience stories they might not have ever considered to be human stories. Ancestors openly challenges you from its very beginning to evolve faster than our own real-life ancestors ever could. Another story may be something of a speedrun of protohuman evolution as we know it. In one example he outlined, maybe the end of a player’s game is when two elders successfully bring the colony’s last remaining baby to a safe and fertile land, joining a group of outsiders, where the final stages of evolution can occur. Désilets wants players to form their own fiction. Fear manifests in the jungle of Ancestors Panache Digital GamesĪncestors is not built around a structured narrative. Deadlier threats, like poisonous snakes and tigers, await me in the wild, and I need to identify them by sight and sound. Things that are unknown in the world are stylized with a dark gray smoke and fierce glowing eyes, but I can go up to them and learn about them. Looking out into the game’s world, it’s clear there is so much to learn. That opened up new and improved skills, which would lead to more evolution and traits I could pass down to future generations. After performing certain actions, like eating new types of food, using my senses to process new sights and sounds, and experimenting with tools, I could grow and expand my ape’s neurons, forming new connections. While Ancestors is mostly free from intrusive menus or an ever-present HUD, you will dive into your ape’s brain to grow and evolve it. ![]() But I shouldn’t venture too far out into the unknown, where fear of unfamiliar surroundings could deteriorate into hysteria.Īs I learn, studying my environment and developing my senses, I can evolve how I want. I need to explore, especially as food and resources near my living area begin to dwindle. I can eat an egg, but might get sick from it, because my ape doesn’t yet have the enzyme to properly digest it. Some of that is done through simple exploration and experimentation. I need to learn how to use tools, make a bed of fronds for my ape to sleep on, and learn what’s safe to eat and what’s not. I need to learn to communicate with other apes better. One of my early tutorial tasks is to recover a mewling baby ape abandoned in the forest after its mother was killed. But I also need to protect my fellow apes. As my ape, I need to eat, sleep, and drink water. An ape drinks from a river Panache Digital GamesĪncestors is survival in its most basic forms. ![]() ![]() Or maybe, 10 minutes into the game, I’ll miss the landing on a daring swing, fall to the ground, snap my leg, and be attacked by a deadly viper, as I did during in my initial playthrough. ![]() Maybe I’ll make it as an ape, all the way to Australopithecus afarensis, through rapid evolution and cautious migration. That’s what Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is about: shepherding a species, the ape, through millions of years of evolution. But he was surviving, growing, and eventually evolving. Just prior to unguided hands-on time with Ancestors - Désilets urged us to jump into the experience ourselves without much of an introduction - I’d watched the studio’s founder swing through jungle treetops, gathering food, and deftly avoiding threats from competing wildlife. The new adventure game from Panache Digital, the studio founded by former Assassin’s Creed lead Patrice Désilets, is supposed to be about surviving with nothing but your own two hands. It wasn’t until I’d made my first tool, a sharpened stick, by stripping the dried twigs from a branch, and inspected it curiously that I would start to grasp what Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey was going for.
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