Ohhhhh-ahhh-urggg. Oooo-ooooh Panache Digital Games Aieeeie-ahooogh Private Division. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. Ahhh-ooo-aaaaah.

“Survive your evolution in Neogene Africa starting 10 million years ago. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a third-person open world survival game where you Explore, Expand, and Evolve to advance your clan to the next generation in the exciting new adventure from Panache Digital Games.”

I’m having to go back in time for this review, and I don’t mean the several million years past of when the game is set. I mean that Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey was released in 2019, but I have only recently got around to it. You play as one of several hominids, the common ancestor that humans and apes evolved from. You have to go right back to basics and live through 10 million years of evolution. That’s quite the game length, no? People boast about putting 200 hours into Skyrim or still playing GTA V over a decade after it was released. Yeah, well try beating 10 million years of gameplay!

Of course, you don’t experience 10 million years of evolution in real-time. Even so, Ancestors still offers up a massive chunk of gameplay. I glanced at a review before playing this myself, just to see if it was the type of game I may enjoy. That review said there is around 30-40 hours of game here. I’m not sure how true that is as I’ve not finished Ancestors yet and already spent 20 hours in the first biome (of several) alone. That doesn’t include the five times I restarted my game as I learned something new from previous attempts. I guestimate to have collectively spent around 60 hours so far, and as I write this review, I’ve still got a long, long way to go yet.

I just mentioned how I restarted my game after learning something new. You see, this game gives you very, very little to no help and it is up to you to experiment and learn the best way to evolve and survive. There’s no hand-holding here and while there is a tutorial, it is barebones and only slightly guides you as to what to do. As an example, one of the early goals is to build a sleeping area for your hominid. The game doesn’t tell you how, just that you need to. It is up to you to work out what you need to build that sleeping area and how to do it.

When I say that Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey takes you back to basics, it really does. Playing as these hominids, you have to go 10 million years back to basics, to the point that you have to learn what water is. I’m not joking, you have to learn what water is. At the start, your hominid knows nothing, just like our ancient ancestors, and you have to learn via trial and error. Need food and see some mushrooms growing nearby, are they edible or will they poison you? Only one way to find out. But hey, the more you eat poisonous mushrooms, the more of a tolerance you’ll build up. The more you experiment with your surroundings, the more your hominid will learn, as too will you as the player. Sometimes, you’ll have to put yourself in harm’s way to learn how to stay alive.

Whenever you come across something new, even something as simple as a stick, you have to inspect it so that your hominid knows what it is. Your hominid will have to learn to use more than one hand, learn how to craft simple tools and even learn how to walk. There’s no in-game map, because there was no cartography 10 million years ago and even if there was, hominids couldn’t read. Instead, you have to rely on landmarks and remember you way around. Oh, and the game map is HUGE. It is very easy to get lost and getting lost can mean death. There’s a lot of wildlife out there that would love a tasty hominid to chew on. When you begin, your hominids are pretty much defenceless. But what’s that, a dead branch? If you could strip away the twigs you’d have a stick that you could use to defend yourself. What if you could work out how to sharpen that stick too? Oh yeah, you can craft a simple stabbing weapon, but I’m not going to tell you how you do that. Or… just pick up a granite rock and slam it into a python’s face.

But you can’t just go around taking on the wildlife like some kind of primitive John Rambo, you have to learn how to defend yourself and how to attack. The only way to do that is to put yourself in danger. You are going to have to go toe-to-toe against snakes, alligators, boars, giant centipedes, buffalo, hippos and more. The combat mechanics here are simple to understand, but your hominid is not going to be very good at it unless you practise first. The more you risk your life, the more you will learn and the better you become. But it is that necessary risking of life that is a double edged sword. I tell you, when I first played Ancestors, I lost a lot of hominids. I completely killed off the species multiple times. And if that happens, then it is game over.

The main goal is just to survive, keep your lineage alive and evolve. To do this, you can mate and have little baby hominids. Think of them as extra lives, in gaming terms. But there is a limit, a female hominid can only give birth a strict limited number of times, so don’t go thinking that you can have 100 baby hominids running around, you can’t. Once you do have a few babies around, you can advance a generation. There are three generations to keep in mind too. Of course, you have babies, you have young hominids and elders. When you advance a generation, everything moves along a step, Babies become young hominids, young hominids become elders and elders… they die. Just make sure that you have more babies than elders and your lineage should be able to stay alive.

There so much depth to Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey that I am purposely trying to stay away from specifics because playing and learning first-hand really is the best way to experience this game. Going into it blind and just experimenting is immense fun. Frustrating at first, but fun. Honestly, my first few hours with Ancestors, I really wasn’t enjoying it at all. In fact, I had already began forming a negative review in my head. I didn’t like the fact I kept dying and I didn’t like the controls. You see, Ancestors binds both the run and jump to the same button. You have to hold down the button to run, and then let go of it to jump. This was massively annoying and if you want to run but not jump, then you have to stop moving altogether before you release the button. However, the more I played (and just like hominids), the more I adapted and learned, Now, I love the controls and the running/jumping thing is now natural.

This is exactly how Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey works, it’s a learning curve and often a pretty steep one. Much like our ancestors, you don’t get any help and it is only though experimenting that you will learn. As you do learn, you’ll earn neuronal points (experience points) which you can use to unlock new skills via an evolution menu (skill tree). However, not all skills will be open and you will have to unlock them by adapting and learning. The more you face the various wildlife, the more you will learn how to fight and defend yourself. The more you communicate with other hominids, the more options you’ll get to direct them. The more you use your intelligence the sharper it becomes and the more you can learn. It is all about learning.

There’s so much more that I just do not want to cover here. As I said before, playing this blind and working things out for yourself is the best way to approach Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. I’ve not even got into the evolution jumps and advancing through time (no, you don’t have to play this for 10 million years), how what you learn will effect future generations of your hominids and more. This is not an easy game to get into. It is slow, it is laborious and the lack of any real help will frustrate… at first. Discovering that you can use two hands, and not just the one, is the first major hurdle that you have to get over. There’s no inventory system as you only have those two hands. Ancestors takes you back to basics, very, very bare basics. It is a slow and very plodding game, definitely not one for speed runners. You will only get the best out the game if you do slow down and take everything in. 10 million years of evolution is a slow walk, not a sprint.

I’ve been playing this for the best part of the last three weeks and I’ve still not got to the end credits yet. More importantly, I kind of don’t want to. I’m really enjoying learning with my hominids, I like getting the next generation ready for their own struggle to stay alive. I’ve grown attached to my ancient ancestors and want to spend as much time with them as possible. Anyway, back to it. I left my tribe in the hot savanna near a heard of angry white rhinos.