I was on the bus the other day when I realised that Ancestors was probably starting to get to me. I found myself thinking about haircuts. About hairstyles. Looking at all the different ways of dealing with hair that were evident around me. Why do we do this? I wondered. The fringe, the pony, the pompadour. Why do we do this with our fur?
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey reviewDeveloper: Panache DigitalPublisher: Private DivisionAvailability: Out August 27th on PC, PS4 and Xbox One
Every now and then, just to freak myself out, I try to remember that I’m a great ape. I haven’t evolved from an ape, I don’t share a common ancestor with an ape, I one. My hands are ape hands. My feet are ape feet. Making a sandwich, using a stapler, worrying about the season finale for Million Dollar Listing: NYC? All of these are ape behaviours. And now here’s Ancestors to remind me afresh.
Ancestors – its full name is Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, just in case you weren’t already thinking about the first act of 2001 quite enough – is an attempt, I think, to make a game of something like Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens. How did modern humans get going? Let’s see! Meet a group of hominids, living their lives millions of years ago. They’re out there deep in the wilds somewhere. Can you lead them on a journey across hundreds of generations and put them on the path towards becoming something like us? Can you take them from fur to the side-parting, to the meet-me-at-McDonalds?
This is a pretty ambitious agenda for a game, and it makes for some wonderfully bewildering opening moments. First off, I’m a little hominid baby, lost in the jungle, scary faces emerging from the smoky surroundings, overwhelming sounds and sensations and movement as I try to find a place to hide. This smoke is the primordial imagination, and it’s all about the fear of being eaten. Then, seconds later, I’m a mature hominid, setting out to find the baby. I can use sight and sound and smell to select points of interest around me, and I can memorise one of these points of interest at a time to highlight it on my HUD and allow me to investigate further. I need to eat, drink, and sleep enough to stay healthy. I need to learn how to tackle snakes and boars and big cats and other wild animals. I need to learn what the different kinds of plants around me do, and what stones are, what water is. I need to learn about gravity, too: I need to stop falling out of trees every five minutes and breaking a bone. I really need to stop breaking bones, actually, because it slows me down. And I need to find that sodding baby.
This was my first day of Ancestors – my first real-world day; it took me forever. I would leave the settlement, go and look for the baby, get lost, fall out of a tree, break a bone, eat the wrong thing, get poisoned, lose all my energy, forget what I was looking for, fall out of another tree, break another bone, onwards and onwards. I would start over again and again. It was a bit like I was borrowing cars from a showroom and returning them dented and with broken windscreens, with missing wheels, with smoke curling up from under the hood. Except the cars were hominids, and cars themselves were a distant dream, millions of years distant, and I was not getting my species any closer to them with my current behaviour. Sometimes I wouldn’t break a bone but I would get bitten by a snake. Sometimes I would find the baby and then realise I had lost my settlement. If evolution is a lottery, this was one of those lotteries you can only enter by buying a ticket from someone stood outside a second-hand furniture showroom, wearing an ID tag that looks like it’s been hastily photocopied and filled in with crayon.