Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey launched earlier this year on PC to some rather mixed reception. It’s a difficult game to really pin down, largely because it gives you little to no direction. Even now, it’s somewhat unclear what the actual endgame of the whole thing is supposed to be. This has obviously lead to some frustration for players, but the game’s Creator says it’s all on the player’s shoulders.
In an interview with Wccftech, when asked about the game’s harsh difficulty, Patrice Desilets has a rather unique take on it. He says that the game never really asks anything of you, saying that it’s really the player’s choice to go out in the woods, to play without the HUD, and all these types of things that leads to frustration, therefore putting a lot of the struggle to the player action over what the game is actually throwing at you.
“It’s interesting, because the game is not asking you anything. Somehow, you’re frustrated about yourself. If I asked you to do something really precise and didn’t help you out, then that’s my fault. But Ancestors doesn’t ask you anything. You can stay and have fun with your character and clan for hours in the first oasis. The game never actually says, ‘Go in that jungle and do whatever.’ You did it. We didn’t ask you to go around the lake to save your clan. We didn’t do that.
“Real story, my brother, he played and he wrote to me ‘I played without the HUD and it was really hard!’ Well, yeah — play with the HUD at the beginning! Play with the tutorial or it’s gonna be hard. Again, it’s on you. You thought you could do it without the HUD. Eh, probably not. But, you know, from harsh reviews and the failures we’ve identified, we can use them to get better. There’s another game to make, it’s not the end of the world.”
It’s definitely an… odd way to look at, but Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a rather odd game, so there you go. The game will be coming to consoles at the end of the year, so it’ll be interesting to see if impressions change much there. For our take on the whole thing, you can read our review.