A patch released late in the review cycle half-fixed this. I couldn't interact with anything I was only able to hear the other members of my clan out of frame. In both, my solo-exploring hominid died and I'd get my baby to safety, but when it came time to switch to a new hominid, no clan member to take over was present. One in particular I hit in two playthroughs-one 10 hours in, the other just a few hours. The bugs I experienced scaled from minor annoyances to my progress being effectively halted. When every member of your clan dies, it's game over. I've unfortunately hit many bugs in my dozens of hours with Ancestors, which despite an alleged endpoint, is a game based on individual runs like Civilization or a roguelike. I have played this exact introduction four times, and mostly not because of my own failings as a hominid nurturer. From then on, you shift to another hominid in your clan, and you're off to go find where the baby is hiding, and coax them out through steady button prompts. The brief opening sequence is a crash course in the basics of Ancestors: a parent dies with a baby ape clinging to its back, and then you must direct that baby to safety in a hidden area. My first major evolution evolved 65,000 years "faster than science." Suck it, science. There is a soft endpoint where you evolve your lineage millions of years into the future, and you either matched or beat the actual evolutionary state of humanity. At the start of each evolution, you'll be treated to a report card of sorts, letting you know what you're faster at learning than the actual hominids, and what you were maybe worse at. And here's a tip I learned the hard way: the more you do before starting an evolution, the smarter and more capable your future hominids' generations will be. Time passes in-game, but it also jumps 15 months into the future with each baby born in your clan, and leaps thousands of years into the future if you kickstart an evolution, which is possible only after meeting specific requirements. The end goal, basically, is to evolve millions of years into the future. All you're shown in the beginning is how to identify things like plants or sticks in your surroundings using your senses-sight, smell, and sound-and loosely how to manage your clan of other hominids. Even with a full HUD and tutorial prompts on, Ancestors stubbornly refuses to teach you anything. How I feel playing Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, the new evolutionary survival game directed by Patrice Désilets of Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia fame, is probably not that far off from how my ancestors felt 10 million years ago just trying to survive. Except, instead of the dumb ways I evolve-like discovering the glory of getting a water filter attachment to my faucet so I don't have to drink pure tap water anymore-the apes (excuse me, hominids) that eventually evolved into us were learning how to survive by rubbing the little twigs off a tree branch to make a smooth stick.
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