Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is known for having Patrice Désilets of Assassin’s Creed 1, 2 and Brotherhood fame as its director. It sees players controlling an ape in a Hominid clan during prehistoric times, surviving against harsh weather and predators while evolving. You can learn new skills, find items and resources, and even switch between clan members.

When it first launched for PC, Ancestors had several issues, including a harsh difficulty (which Désilets said is on the player). It’s improved over time and was released for PS4 and Xbox One. Check out our official review here. As for the future and a potential sequel, time will tell, so stay tuned.

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Patrice Desilets, known for Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed during the time he spent at Ubisoft, went on a new journey with his indie studio Panache Digital when they launched Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey in 2019, and the prehistoric survival title has now passed a major milestone.

The game has sold over 1 million copies since it launched, which is a pretty major milestone. It released for PC in August 2019, and for consoles in December of that year. Allowing players to play as a lineage of primates in prehistoric Africa and help the line evolve and survive the harsh wilds, Ancestors definitely offered something unique and fascinating, and though the game certainly had its issues, it’s clear that it has appealed to quite a few people.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is currently available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. You can read our full review of the game through here.

We live in a time when plenty of interesting and experimental games are being released on various levels, from the mainstream to the indie scene. One such game is Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. The game is one of the strangest and hardest to decipher products on the market. It’s been PC only, but now console users can join in on the evolving fun as well.

The game features exploration-based gameplay, as you play as a group of apes who are evolving to homo sapiens over the course of millions of years. It’s an odd one, and one that many people still don’t quite understand. The console version will add some new features to make things a little clearer and easier to understand, which you can read about through here. If you’re looking for an experience like nothing else out there, Ancestors might be worth checking out.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. To see the creator’s take on the harsh difficulty curve, take a look through here.

THE DIVISION 2

The Division 2 moved away from the wintery urban apocalypse of Manhattan to sun-drenched streets of Washington D.C., and it proved to be an excellent change in scenery. The Division 2’s world is large, diverse, and impeccably designed, full of interesting things to do and sights to see, and brimming with the same level of detail that its predecessor displayed so proudly as well.

Wattam

Of course it would be Katamari Damacy director Keita Takahashi making Wattam. How else could you explain the premise of walking around the world, befriending rocks, open mouths, trees and toilets to join hands and create melodies? It’s all quite whimsical in motion and gives Wattam a dream-like yet still unorthodox feel. Look for the game to release on December 17^th for PS4 and PC.

Phoenix Point

Phoenix Point is an important title for many tactical turn-based fans. For some, it could be their next big game after XCOM with its factions, evolving enemies and lasting psychological system for its soldiers. For others, it’s a true spiritual successor to the original X-COM games from creator Julian Gollop, offering the next step forward in the tactical strategy war against aliens. With terrifying foes, intriguing mechanics and a tense setting, Phoenix Point releases on December 3^rd for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

Halo: Reach (PC/Xbox One)

Finally, we get to remember Reach as it should be – in gorgeous 4K resolution and 60 FPS. 343 Industries’ Halo: Reach comes to PC on December 3^rd with its memorable campaign and hefty multiplayer modes like Firefight and Invasion (with Forge and Theater coming in 2020). For Xbox One players, Reach will round out Halo: The Master Chief Collection but for PC players, it kick-starts the collection’s release on PC. Whether you’re a fan of the series or not, Halo: Reach’s arrival next week is a momentous occasion.

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

It’s seemingly the month of nostalgia and MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is a long time coming. As the first mainline title in the franchise since MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries in 2002, MechWarrior 5 offers combat in large hulking mechs with highly customizable parts. Taking part during the Third Succession War, various factions will be vying for supremacy, allowing you to take contracts and cement your legacy. MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is out on December 10^th for PC.

Terminator Resistance

Teyon’s new Terminator shooter is an…odd title. It’s set in the year 2028 with the world decimated by Skynet’s robot incursions. You’ll battle through hordes of machines, killing and leveling up while also potentially altering the fates of those around you. What’s odd about the whole ordeal is that despite seeing significant criticism, the game has a rather positive rating on outlets like Steam. We’ll see how the console versions fare when they release on December 10^th for North America.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York

Before venturing into the RPG-heavy Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, why not visit the Coteries of New York instead? Developed by Draw Distance, Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York is a text-based adventure centered around two factions – the Camarilla and Anarchs. Depending on one’s clan and choices, there will be unique dialogue opportunities and powers, ultimately influencing the game’s outcome. The title is out for PC on December 11^th but also releases on Xbox One, PS4 and Nintendo Switch in Q1 2020.

Darksiders Genesis

And now for something completely different from the Darksiders franchise. Developed by Airship Syndicate, Darksiders Genesis is an isometric action hack and slash title that takes place before the first game. Horsemen Strife and War are on a quest to stop Lucifer from empowering the forces of Hell and that means lots of slicing and shooting. Co-op is included but solo players can switch between either Horseman at any time while taking advantage of various upgrades. Releasing on December 5^th worldwide for PC and Google Stadia, Darksiders Genesis looks to offer a fun 15 hours or so of adventure.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey (Xbox One/PS4)

Panache Digital Games’ Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey didn’t get the most rousing reception when it first released on PC. However, there have been updates and improvements overtime, making this tale of evolution and survival more tenable. As part of a primate clan in the prehistoric age, you’ll be climbing trees, exploring the world, hunting, and even avoiding predators. All of this feeds into your experience and evolution as you journey across eight million years of history. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey arrives on December 6^th for Xbox One and PS4.

Life is Strange 2: Episode 5

Dontnod Entertainment’s fifth and final episode for Life is Strange 2 is out next month, bringing the adventure of the brothers Sean and Daniel Diaz to an end. This is always a pivotal moment for fans of the series, since it allows for experiencing the entire adventure from start to finish without any delays. It’s been a wild journey since the two initially fled Seattle en route to their father’s hometown in Mexico. How could things get any stranger? Episode 5 is out on December 3^rd for Xbox One, PS4 and PC so it won’t be long before we find out.

Arise: A Simple Story

Arise: A Simple Story is another dream-like adventure game but one that explores the memories of two individuals across shifting landscapes and seasons. As a puzzle adventure title, players will have the ability to manipulate time, altering the environment as they see fit. While there’s still a lot we don’t know, Arise’s art-style looks great and the story has strong emotional potential. It’s out on December 3^rd for PS4 and PC.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is one of those games that’s hard to define. You play as humanity’s ancestors in a game that, even months after release, some people don’t really understand. It’s a game with some harsh difficulty that players are left to wonder largely alone. Console users are about to get their whack at the innovative title, but it will also come with some changes to nudge you along.

As revealed via the game’s official Twitter, the game will see changes that will give you a clearer idea of what the game expects of you. You’ll get new objectives, as well as new tutorial pop ups that weren’t available in the current PC version. They give you a small video showing how they work and say that more features will be revealed as the release gets closer.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is available now on PC and will release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One December 6th.

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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.

Survival and evolutionary adventure title Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey has a release date for Xbox One and PS4. It’s out on December 6th, having launched for PC in August via the Epic Games Store. Check out the recent accolades trailer below to see the game in action.

Developed by Panache Digital Studios with Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Désilets at the helm, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey sees players traveling millions of years to the past and leading a tribe of primates. The objective is to learn, evolve one’s skills and ultimately hit the next stage of evolution. Predators, harsh weather and other factors will hinder you along the way though.

Despite some positive reviews here and there, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey received generally mixed impressions all around. You can check out GamingBolt’s official review here for more details. Hopefully the game will be optimized properly for consoles by the time it launches. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey can be a harsh game. One moment you’re traversing the jungle, the next you’re dying to all kinds of elements and wildlife. Forget reaching the point of evolution – it can be a chore just to survive.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways to ensure your survival like unlocking new skills, crafting new tools and much more. Taking on predators will come later though – let’s start with staying warm.

Light My Fire

Look near any water bodies in the Savanna for some red leaves. These are herbs called Khat. Keep an eye out for any “?” items near a river and it should be easy enough to locate. Khat will help in surviving the cold but can be used in two different ways.

You can eat it to fill the cold resistance bar but the effect won’t be as strong. The other method is to grind it into paste using a Granite Grinder and apply it on your body. This will lead to a larger cold resistance bar and uses less of the herb overall.

The Neuronal Chart and Unlocking Skills

The skill tree in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, referred to as the Neuronal Chart, doesn’t function like most games. While it can be used to unlock new skills, it can’t be accessed whenever you feel like. Instead, you need to find a spot to sleep and press Y. This brings up the Evolution menu and lets you check the chart.

You’ll need Neuronal Energy for upgrading skills and unlocking new ones. Energy can be earned by doing tasks such as crafting new tools, fighting enemies, exploring new areas and so on. This will all contribute to filling up the Neuronal Energy circle in the chart. Increasing the overall Energy capacity requires evolving into a new species.

Fun fact: Neuronal Energy cannot be accessed when away from a baby. If you find a different place to sleep outside of your home without a baby, the Evolution menu can still be accessed but Neuronal Energy can’t be used for unlocking skills.

One tip to gathering more Neuronal Energy is – no joke – to carry a baby. Press B near a baby to pick them up. This provides a bonus to the amount of Energy earned. Carrying a second child will further increase the bonus. It can be dangerous in the wilderness so exercise caution when taking babies with you – if you die, they’ll need to hide until another clan member can find them.

Skills are dependent on the actions performed in-game. Fight more and combat skills will become available. The game will also let you know when a new skill can be unlocked. To know what a skill does, you have to click on its node to unlock it, which should provide a full description.

Acquire the new ability at the cost of some Energy. Locked skills appear as black nodes – you can hover over them to receive clues on unlocking them. Keep in mind that certain skills require certain actions so focusing more on those should get you closer to unlocking them.

What about skills that require Genetic Mutations? First, you need Mutant Genes to actually appear. They have a chance of popping up after breeding and a baby is born. When a Genetic Mutation happens, they’ll appear as orange nodes on the Neuronal Chart.

You can find out what the Mutation does when the child matures but it will only take effect once your species has evolved. The Mutation nodes will then turn into a normal nodes for unlocking. Be warned – Genetic Mutations will go away if the carrier dies – whether from a wild animal, sickness or old age – before evolution takes place. Try to evolve as soon as a favorable Mutation emerges.

Crafting Tools

There are four main tools – the Sharpened Stick, Granite Grinder, Obsidian Carver and Basalt Chopper – that you should craft. Not only will they serve as weapons but can also provide essential functions like grinding herbs into paste. Let’s take a look at how to craft them below

• Sharpened Stick: Locate some dead branches in the jungle or in trees. Place a branch in your character’s left hand and alter it. Hold the button and go by the instructions provided to strip the branch. You can use this stick for making holes, fishing and lifting rocks. However, for combat, look for a good rock. Place the rock in your right hand and the stick in your left. Press the alter button again and follow the cues. Eventually you’ll have your Sharpened Stick.
• Granite Grinder: Find two rocks of granite – they can be found in a variety of locations in the Savanna. With the two rocks in hand, press the alter button while listening for cues and follow the instructions. Soon enough, you’ll have the Granite Grinder on hand, which is handy for making paste from herbs.
• Obsidian Carver: Look for obsidian in caves and hit a rock or some other tool against it to get an Obsidian Carver. This is useful for sharpening sticks, butchering corpses or even fighting. You can also use it to open coconuts for drinking.
• Basalt Chopper: First, locate two basalt pieces. Though found throughout the Savanna, they aren’t as common as the other materials so keep an eye out. Take the pieces and press the alter button, listening for the audio and going by the instructions as usual. Eventually you’ll get the Basalt Chopper which greatly decreases the time needed to sharpen a stick. It can open coconuts, kill predators and even chop meat effectively.

“Good luck, we won’t help you much,” Panache Digital promises before sending you back 10 million years to the human predecessors roaming the jungle. It keeps that promise. Immediately, it throws you into control of an ape with no sense of direction, threat, or survival in the middle of a jungle. It gives you one simple task of evolving from the creatures you’re controlling to modern-day humans, and you learn from the ground up how to do simple tasks like eating, sleeping, and mating. You will need to do to these to keep yourself alive and pass to another generation, which leads to progressively learning more complicated forms of communication, dexterity, and intelligence. With the option to skip a tutorial and minimize the HUD, it is possible to completely forgo any assistance Ancestors tries to give you, and, because of this, there’s organic enlightenment and true exploration in your quest for evolution that will likely result in the deaths of some apes but benefit the clan and the species in the long-run.

"“Good luck, we won’t help you much,” Panache Digital promises before sending you back 10 million years to the human predecessors roaming the jungle. It keeps that promise. Immediately, it throws you into control of an ape with no sense of direction, threat, or survival in the middle of a jungle."

Every activity contributes to upgrading certain neurons of a lineage, opening the door to upgrade abilities and see improvements between generations, despite a limit on skills that can be passed through generations. Using your hearing or smelling to identify objects will improve your senses, while climbing and jumping improves your motricity. The survival loop to achieve these upgrades is engaging, especially in tense moments of fighting off or intimidating a predator or in finding a new food source to narrowly stave off starvation. Frequently, though, the actions required to upgrade neurons become repetitive because of the game’s encouragement to consistently upgrade them. For example, upgrading senses and intelligence happens primarily through scanning the environments to identify useful objects or to locate other animals, but this quickly devolves into scanning every marker in the area and seeing the same few objects repeatedly with the hopes of upgrading a neuron. In the early hours, this is a much more prominent problem because of the urgency of evolution and the limits to the gameplay.

As the evolutions progress and millions of years pass, gameplay opportunities begin to open up as you learn how to fight, conquer territory, and thrive. It ultimately becomes more fun to play as years passed because the gameplay becomes more diverse and survival more certain. The most rewarding experiences are the Evolution Feats that prove your lineage’s superiority and adaptation to the world around it, spurring the ability to evolve more quickly through the years. The best of these are in combat, especially the first time you kill a predator or bring two predators together to fight and kill one another. They are the ones that make you feel powerful and, more often than not, show tangible evidence of your improvement and evolution.

However, these happen most often later in the game. There is a problem with the balance of activities, especially early on, that makes it become repetitive and frustrating at points to play without the satisfaction necessary to keep you going. Certain activities offer benefits much more easily than others, meaning you will naturally gravitate toward them, even if this isn’t what the game intends. For example, during points where a predator attacks an ape, it’s often easier to sleep on a tree branch with the predator underneath to heal a broken bone or return to the settlement, than to climb a tree and find the item required to stop bleeding. The time jumps, which come from giving birth, passing generations, or completing true evolutions through hundreds of thousands of years, often became crutches that saved my lineage from potential issues than the signs of triumph over the time period they are meant to be.

"There is a problem with the balance of activities, especially early on, that makes it become repetitive and frustrating at points to play without the satisfaction necessary to keep you going. "

Later in the timeline, when the evolution has created significant new abilities for the lineage’s survival, these crutches are less necessary, but the imbalance in the early hours is frustrating. It’s very easy to get blindsided by a tiger or python, and, though avoiding them is as easy as hiding in a tree, you have very little ability to protect yourself or your clan before you can counterattack. You will often be traveling with your clan, and, though you may be hiding, they can still be attacked and killed. More than once I had a lineage killed because I was attacked from seemingly nowhere and was powerless against the attacks, forcing me to begin a new lineage. Every new lineage starts from the beginning, and the lack of a manual save prevents salvaging a lineage before it is killed off. Though this gives the perma-death the weight it deserves to force you to be careful and mimic how humanity’s ancestors would have acted, it amplifies the frustration of the early hours, most notably when it comes through hysteria and losing the animal for a reason that feels out of your control. Having to restart after multiple hours multiple times was frustrating and made the satisfying later hours feel so far away, especially as the first hours became more stale and repetitive.

Luckily, when you eventually get to those later hours, you are rewarded with much more vast and diverse environments. Nearly every evolution will bring your clan to a new location, whether it’s a new jungle or a sandy open field. Seeing these new places is not only rewarding because it breaks the monotony of the early hours, but it also signifies your progression and feels like you’re succeeding.

The environments themselves, though diverse and enjoyable to explore, don’t look incredible, especially after seeing the same textures for an extended period of time. Textures are muddy, and it can become almost unplayably dark at night, even with the moon shining. Looking out over a sea of trees and into the distance, though, is always beautiful. Playing with a mouse and keyboard also had input problems, so it’s recommended to play with a controller to avoid them, even on PC. The largest performance issue, aside from some stuttering and a crash, was a persistent pop-in that covered a significant amount of the ground. Even after a reinstall and graphics settings changes, it remained and, though not game-breaking, made it very difficult to see certain objects on the ground.

"The environments themselves, though diverse and enjoyable to explore, don’t look incredible, especially after seeing the same textures for an extended period of time."

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey presents a survival game that needs a lot of time to work. If you are ready and willing to spend dozens of hours building your clan and risking a restart, it offers some truly rewarding progression and exploration without having to tell you much. It offers a satisfying loop that rewards you over the course of your time, but in its first few hours, which you will inevitably have to replay multiple times, it’s too tedious, unbalanced, and repetitive to warrant a recommendation for anyone who doesn’t like the genre.

This game was reviewed on PC.