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Game

Ancestors: The humankind odyssey

Panache Digital Games

PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One

AN APE-LIKE creature examines the skeleton of a warthog. As horns swell and drums beat, the animal picks up one of the bones and begins crashing it around. Then it raises a fist to the sky and slams the bone into the warthog鈥檚 skull, smashing it to pieces.

This iconic and spine-tingling scene from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey is an attempt by director Stanley Kubrick to distil the moment our distant ancestors took their first step to becoming modern humans. The game Ancestors: The humankind odyssey attempts to go one further and depict millions of years of human evolutionary history 鈥� but it falls flat.

You can鈥檛 fault lead designer Patrice D茅silets for his ambition. He helped create Assassin鈥檚 Creed and its sequels, which put players in historical settings from ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy. 鈥淚 went, let鈥檚 do the very beginnings of it all, the beginning of the odyssey. Not 10,000 BC, let鈥檚 go 10 million years ago,鈥� he says.

The game opens with an ape-like creature carrying her child on her back, ambling through a jungle in Africa, before being suddenly killed by a giant bird. You take control of the child and find a safe place to hide, and then the game shifts to put you in control of another ape, who must now attempt to find the lost infant.

My odyssey didn鈥檛 start well. Within a few minutes, my ape had been eaten by a crocodile, and I flashed into the body of another creature from the tribe, only to be poisoned by a snake bite, attacked by a warthog and flee in fear.

The experience is baffling, by design, as the game explains very little. Just as our ancestors had to figure out everything for themselves, so do players of Ancestors. You can use the ape鈥檚 senses of smell and hearing to search the environment, and interact with all manner of plants and objects in an attempt to find a use for them. D茅silets says they studied the latest science to inform what went into the game.

My most satisfying experience while playing was when I realised I could take a stick, strip the leaves, then use it to poke a beehive and retrieve honey. Then the bees attacked and I nearly died again.

The game progresses as you complete new actions with a child in tow, generating 鈥渘euronal energy鈥� that you can use to evolve new skills. You can then choose to advance a generation, locking in some of those skills, and eventually evolve, passing hundreds of thousands of years in the blink of an eye.

It is an interesting view of evolution, but rather Lamarckian: the idea that animals can gain new traits during their lifetime that can be passed on biologically. This view has been widely discredited, as it goes against the accepted theory that what we pass on are the genes we are born with.

The trouble is, the game is quite dull. After you evolve, you find yourself in the same jungle location 鈥� others, such as a savannah, are available, but I never made it that far into the game. I just kept doing the same things, hoping I wouldn鈥檛 randomly die.

Other attempts to capture evolution in a game, such as the galaxy-spanning Spore or quirky platformer E.V.O.: Search for Eden, have also flopped. Maybe when it comes to compressing millions of years into a single experience, only Kubrick鈥檚 dramatic genius will do. Ancestors felt more like an infinite supply of monkey gamers hammering relentlessly at a genetic keyboard.