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.

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.

https://twitter.com/AncestorsGame/status/1199057724505505792

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.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey came out earlier this year after a very long development cycle. It’s a bit of a head scracther and one that many players are still trying to figure out (you can read our review here). The game’s Creator, Patrice Desilets, is thinking about the game and its upcoming updates, but it’s not the only thing he’s got in his head, as there’s another long stewing project he seems to finally be able to do.

In an interview with Wccftech, when asked about what was after Ancestors, Desilets said it’s very likely that he will return to 1666 Amsterdam, something that he announced a long time ago but seems to have never gotten off the ground due to rights issues surrounding the project. It also could look significantly different than when he first pitched it due to his new experiences and new upcoming tech.

“I’ve been talking about [1666 Amsterdam] since I got the rights back to it. Yeah, I want to make that game. The chances that it’s my next one are really, really high. In my head, I started it. I went back to what I designed in 2011 and 2012 and said, what do I want to do? Now it’s the game after Ancestors and not Assassin’s Creed II. I’m a different person and designer and have a new team, so it’s going to change.

Ancestors is going to be how Panache does games in the future. That’s our signature. So…1666 will not be an easy game. Eventually I’ll announce it for real. The elevator pitch is really simple — do you want to play the devil in 1666 Amsterdam by the guy who did Assassin’s Creed and Ancestors?”

The game was at one point announced, but then got stalled due to a rights battle that Desilet eventually won. All that was really known about the game was that you would play as the devil in, you guessed it, 1666 Amsterdam. What the game will end up looking like is anyone’s guess, but we’re still probably in for a decent wait.

“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.

AUDIO CUES

Ancestors relies on audio more than you’d expect, especially if you’re playing the game with a minimal HUD, so always keep an ear out for any audio cues. These cues are tied to everything from dodges to grooming to crafting and a whole lot else, and timing the press and release of buttons after you hear these cues will be very important while you play.

INVESTIGATING

Curiosity is the name of the game in Ancestors, especially in the early hours. For starters, make sure that you’re always scanning the areas you find yourself in using intelligence, since this gives you valuable Neuronal experience. Once you’ve done so, pick up any objects you haven’t previosly encountered, and investigate them. Gathering information about everything and anything and then using that information to survive better and longer is how you succeed in Ancestors, and scanning everything contributes to that immensely.

DEXTERITY

It’s a good idea to invest in the Dexterity branch of your primate in the early hours, since most of your important motor skills fall in this branch (such as being able to use both hands, and as such, being able to hold two weapons. From combat to traversal, this will be quite important, as you can imagine, so get your dexterity up to begin with.

EARLY WEAPON COMBO

You’ll come across a lot of dangerous enemies and predators in the jungles and other biomes that you traverse throughout the game, but how should you deal with these in the earlier stages of the game, when you’re trying to come to grips with its litany of other systems? A sharp stick and a rock is a great weapon combo to start off with. Not only are they abundant, they’re also quite effective.

KIDS

Advancing your clan’s lineage and evolving through millions of years is what Ancestors is all about, so it goes without saying, but you’re going to need to procreate. As soon as start a new generation, get to doing this right away. Not only does that mean you’re adding numbers to your clans, kids are also useful in other areas. Incidentally, that brings us to our next point…

CARRYING KIDS

Anywhere you go, make sure you have a kid from your clan with you. Why, you ask? Well, because doing stuff while you’ve got a kid piggybacking with you is how you earn Neuronal energy, which, of course, is how you unlock cognitive enhancements. Having a kid with you at all times is crucial, especially early on in the game when you’re trying to learn even the most basic things.

MUTANT GENES

Every so often, you might randomly come across a genetic mutation in your clan as a result of your breeding. These can be incredibly useful with nodes in the Neuronal upgrade chart, so keep an eye out for if and when you happen to get one of these. If you do get them, immediately advance to the next generation, because you don’t want to risk getting the clan member carrying it get killed. Once you’ve advanced to the next generation, initiate your clan’s evolution to unlock the mutation.

EAT AND DRINK WHEN YOU WAKE UP

Ancestors is a survival game at its core, so of course, managing your health, hunger, and thirst is central to everything. Generally, it’s a good idea to eat something and drink some water as soon as you’re up (also a good thumb rule for life). For starters, it does the basic thing of keeping those things at a minim level. More importantly, it also means you won’t be worrying about those things for a while, giving you more time to explore.

TASTE EVERYTHING

Speaking of eating food- when you start out in Ancestors, you will have very little knowledge of what’s good for you, what might kill you, or even about what’s edible and what isn’t. So how do you get that knowledge? Well, it’s all trial and error. If something can be eaten, try eating it, and find out how good (or not) it is for you. As mentioned, Ancestors depends on trial and error in a lot of ways, so don’t be afraid to experiment with any edibles you might find in the world, especially early on.

BUFFS

Food has other advantages besides just keeping hunger at bay, of course. As you might image, it can give you some pretty useful buffs as well. Some of these buffs can be pretty useful, such as protecting you from broken bones, or preventing bleeding. So a) find the ingredient you need to get that buff, and b) once you do, don’t ignore it. Actually make use of it, because they really can be quite handy.

RESOURCES

This goes without saying, especially in a game where your primary concern is using whatever you can get your hands on to survive another day, but gather and bring back any and all resources you can. Their most obvious advantage is that you’ll run short less often. But more importantly, piling together a lot of the same object can build entirely new things that can be useful in other ways.

NEXT GENERATION

Jumping ahead to the next generation is something you’ll be doing in Ancestors anyway, but there’s no point in holding off on doing so for too long. Each generation only allows you to lock in a specific number of skills, with future generations requiring you to unlock anything else you’ve unlocked once again. As such, it’s generally a good idea to get to the next generation as soon as you’ve spent all your lock-in points.

EXPAND YOUR CLAN

You’ll lose plenty of your primates and clan members in Ancestors – an easy game this isn’t – which means there’s strength in numbers. Expanding your clan to make sure you’re always well-stocked, so to speak, acts as something of an insurance. So expand your clan however you can, whether that’s through having kids (which we’ve already discussed) or recruiting for primates from outside the clan.

EXPLORE

Exploration in Ancestors can be a scary thing, given how dangerous its world is, but it’s also something that you’re going to have to do eventually. Every area you settle down in has limited resources, which means moving around to find more resources becomes kind of necessary after a while. Additionally, new areas bring new objects and enemies with them, which helps you grow even further. Finally, there’s the fact that if you explore enough, you’ll ed up finding more areas outside of the jungle you start in.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey looks like a very unique game, letting its players loose in pre-historic Africa and tasking them with survival in its harsh environments, while charting millions of years of the ape’s evolution. Though there’s a very fundamental narrative at play, the vast majority of the experience is all about what the player may or may not choose to do, and how that affects everything around you- and that is exactly what the newest video for the game goes over in detail.

In the video, Game Director Patrice Désilets talks about things such as skill trees and progression mechanics, and how they’re hugely dependent on what you’re doing in the game’s world and what things you’re learning and picking up while you do those things. Désilets talks about how each playthrough holds the potential of being completely different from all the rest for this very reason. Take a look below.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is out on August 27th for PC, while an Xbox One and PS4 launch is also scheduled for later this year.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is an ambitious title with a lot of big ideas. It takes place in pre-civilization, as we play our ancestors – the apes – as they try to survive against the harsh realities of life millions of year ago. It has a narrative of genetic survival that tells of the journey to mankind’s evolution, but that journey isn’t the only thing that took a long time to get to. It was also a hard sell for director Patrice Désilets.

In an interview with GamesIndustry, Désilets spoke at length about finding funding for the game, as well as his studio that would develop it. It was a hard pass for many studios, he said, when they realized he wasn’t out to make a new age Assassin’s Creed (Désilets was one of the original creators of that franchise). He went to no less than 45 different places before finally landing a publisher. For two years, the game was in pseudo-development without a studio to house it.

“JF and I spoke to 45 people before somebody finally said yes,” he says. “To start a business, you have to be willing to receive a lot of nos, but the first yes is what starts it all. Out of the four years it took to build Ancestors, those first two years was building a studio while making a game. We started with six guys coming to my place every Tuesday. Then we eventually got a little bit of money, and then I eventually could say: ‘Panache exists, f**k it.’

“I was at MIGS [Montreal International Games Summit] doing a micro-conference, and I didn’t want to put my Hotmail address at the end of the talk. I thought that was cheap, so that’s when I got the Panache email address. And people were like ‘he’s setting up his own studio,’ which got picked up by a journalist in the crowd, and it was in the local press.

“Then a friend of JF said: ‘Hey, do you need some money? Come pitch to us.’ It was someone in Montreal and that was the first one to give us money. So we started to open up and tear down walls… And then Take-Two was doing their thing with Private Division, so they called us up. Now we are four years later.”

The odyssey of getting there is almost as fun to think about as the one that’ll be in the game. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey releases August 27th for PC, with a December release planned for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. You can also check out a fun webseries relating to the game and its many influences in the meantime.

Whatever you want to say about Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, you sure can’t say it’s not trying to do something very different than the norm. Thrusting us millions of years in the past to humanity’s distant ancestors is a trip of a concept, and to go along with it they’ve introduced a new video series called simply Experiences.

In the video, Game Director Patrice Désilets steps out into the real world to explore the themes of his game and how the things our ancestors experienced are still mirrored today. He promises to look at a wide range of personalities and jobs, such as athletes, scientists, and creative minds.

In the first episode he talks to Dr. Niobe Thompson to discuss survival 10 million years ago in Neogene Africa, where the game takes place and promises many challenges ahead, much like it did those many millions years ago.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey will launch August 27th for PC, with a PlayStation 4 and Xbox One release in December. 7 more episodes of Experiences are slated to follow, so stay tuned.

After several years of hearing about the game, we finally have a release date for Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. It will come later this year for both PC and consoles. It comes from the creator of Assassin’s Creed, Patrice Désilets, and is about the odyssey of our species’ evolution from primates to humanity. It’s always had an ambitious air about it, but it’s never been clear what, if any, narrative the game would follow. Now, the creator says there is an endpoint, and it’s going to be up to the community to get there.

In an interview with Wccftech, Désilets talked a lot about the upcoming game. Topics ranged from how he got ideas for the game, what it means to play the original “badass” of humanity, and what he hopes the game’s post-release to look like. When asked about the game’s narrative, he said that there is a story, though maybe not in the traditional sense, and that he’s looking at the community to find ways to get from point A to B and go from there, hopefully simulating our early ancestors’ attempts to understand the world around them.

“There is a conclusion,” he said. “This is where eventually you change physically as a species. So you go from the very first one to another species, and eventually, they’ll kind of finish evolution. But you can always come back and start a new game. In the gaming world, you can find that you don’t have a car in your game, right? So the game world, you need to f***ing get it there. And there’s no map, I wish, it’s my hope, that the community will draw a map.

“And that the wiki of Ancestors will be useful because we’re not doing that. It’s up to you, that’s your journey, your odyssey of life. Because it fits the subject matter. Our ancestors didn’t know. You know why our gods exist; because it’s the moon, and the sun, the stars. This thing appears in the sky that gives light, it’s god, will it come back tomorrow? Generally, it comes back, but what if? What if it’s the day it doesn’t come back? And the moon, oh, now we’ve got light, and it changes!”

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey will release for PC on August 27^th, with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions to follow in December.