Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

This is a very hesitant thumbs up, and even then I'm not sure it's correct. I'd only suggest picking this up if it's heavily discounted. If you're not sold on the theme, skip over it entirely.
Somewhat amusingly for a game about evolution, the biggest problem Ancestors has is that everything follows a rigid formula. I don't think the devs finished making the game. There's no story, no objective, no purpose to evolution. It's super shallow. It's also kinda fun, but this might be 'fun to watch a car crash' style fun? I'll try and break down what went wrong, and why for some reason I still enjoyed bits of the game.
The game also adamantly refuses to use terms like 'skill tree', 'experience points', etc. For the sake of the review I'll use them, but note the game uses confusing terminology throughout.
First, the controls. Oh heck the controls. The game has too many actions for a typical controller, so it ends up using a context-sensitive system. However the buttons used are not ideal. For example (using a 360 controller), holding A will sprint. Releasing A whilst moving will jump. Releasing A whilst not moving will cancel a jump. Pressing A whilst falling will grab onto something, if there's something to grab. Pressing A near an item will pick it up/interact with it. Pressing A whilst holding a consumable item will consume it. Pressing A whilst standing in a body of water - with no items in hand - will drink the water. Pressing A in combat will dodge OR attack (I'll get to this soon). It should be obvious how this system breaks down. What if I want to drink water whilst near an item? You can't, you grab the item. You equally might just jump off a cliff by mistake. This happens far too much. I was fighting against the controls the entire time.
The core mechanic of Ancestors is evolution. Take a bunch of hairy people, and progress them from sitting in poop to stabbing elephants with a pointy stick. Alright, I'm interested. It's a novel premise that hasn't really been explored before. Immediately this starts out good. New skills are unlocked rapidly early on, and they make a difference. Mobility goes from feeling clunky to (somewhat) fluid. New food options can be adapted to by sucking it up, eating them, and suffering with the ill effects. Learning to walk can be done by forcing yourself to stand up, walking a few steps, then falling over. Keep trying, you'll get it! I loved this. Skills work on a two-tier unlock system: first you have to learn the skill, then you have to pay XP to acquire it. I also enjoyed this as it both captured the spirit of evolution, and mechanically felt great.
However, evolution became less cool over time. By the end I was actively resenting it. There's two major problems here. The first: in order to evolve you have to reset the skill tree, but you get to make some skills permanent. The amount you can lock down varies by how many kids you have, and RADIATION FROM METEORITES (yes, literally). Once an upgrade is permanent it's permanent for all future generations. Everything else is lost - you still have the skills available, but you need to pay xp to get them back. This could work in theory, but in practice it's painful. Skills unlock by holding a button for 5-10 seconds, once per skill. The game makes you do this hundreds of times. This was at least an hour of real time. On top of this, there's an RNG mechanic where some babies will generate new permanent skills after evolving. This is why you're forced to reset the skill tree, because you can't unlock much without the special baby skills. This leads to a boring mechanical meta: have 6 kids, pass a generation, repeat, evolve, go back to step 1. Repeat until it feels too gamey, then go stab a rhino or something.
The second problem is the world itself. Whilst your own species evolves over time, the simulation does not. It's the same in the first minute as it is in the last. Even weirder - when you pass 'millions of years' during evolution, the simulation doesn't change. It just force-respawns all items and animals, but otherwise continues from the same second. This leads to nonsensical situations, such as my stockpile of raw meat which was still fresh after 6 million years. This also means evolution serves no purpose; it's viable to survive without unlocking a single skill, and each skill makes the game a little bit easier. Evolution doesn't grant access to new mechanics, nor new areas to explore. It's just evolution for the sake of it, and the more I evolved the more boring the game became. The first few hours were incredible (also terrifying): I didn't understand the world, and everything felt more powerful than me. By the mid-game I ran past everything because I had no reason to engage with it. There's no objective, no story, no narrative, no evolution of challenge. The later areas feel rushed and unfinished, with no reason to explore them.
On the subject of locations, oh dear. What happened here? The game starts off in a confusing jungle. It feels claustrophobic, menacing, almost an extinction level threat. But it also offers verticality, plenty of different routes to advance forward, and lots of hiding spaces for nasty snakes to jump out of. Then it becomes an open lake, when the tribe has no swimming ability. Then, as you start to learn how to swim, it changes to large grassy plains and never has swimming again. Then it's a wide open savannah, and finally a wide open desert. There's a few minor changes between these, but that's essentially the layout. The problem here: there's nothing to do in an empty plain! In the jungle you can climb trees, swing from vines, scale rocky cliffs, swim through lakes, and so on. In a wide open plain all you can do is run. This actively took away gameplay options. Whilst it was nice that the map became more open as my species learned how to be bipedal, it also became boring. There was nothing to do except sprint between points of interest for exp.
The jungle has snakes and alligators that are terrifying threats early game. The lake/grassy/woodland areas serve no purpose and should have been cut. The open plains has a full menagerie of creatures: snakes, rhinos, elephants, sabre-tooth tigers, jackals etc. Unfortunately these all have the same AI. They sit around in a pack doing nothing, then attack you if you go near. That's it.
The map design is also too formulaic. There's 6-10 'oasis' locations in each biome, and these always have 100% of your tribe's survival needs in them. There's no reason to explore or take risks when there's no reason to leave your oasis. Why become an omnivore when you have infinite edible plants in every oasis? Why migrate when you don't need anything from the savannah? Ancestors could be amazing if they fixed this aspect of it. If the plants didn't respawn you'd have a reason to become an omnivore and fight for food. The game needs some kind of extinction-level threat that forces you to adapt or die, rather than adapt 'because there's no gameplay if you don't'.
There's also combat in this game, but dang it's awful. When an enemy attacks the game goes into bullet time, then you have to hold A, and then either point the left stick at the enemy to attack or away from them to dodge. That's it. Congratulations, you now know how to beat every creature in the game without exception. You might lose if you don't have a pointy stick, but you will always win if you do. To make up for it, all sticks break after exactly one use. This system sucks. When you attack you get a cool cinematic cutscene, and these are visceral as heck. You'll stab a creature in the gut, jump on its back, then pummel it in the head with your fists until it dies. This is awesome! I just wish it was me pulling it off, and not a scripted cutscene triggered by me pressing A once.
There's a few more mechanics to the game, but this review is hitting the character limi

Reject humanity, become monke

This game frustrates me to no end. On the other hand, I absolutely love the movement dynamics, the evolution system, the world itself and exploring, and the overall underlying concept, yet at the same time, the game has such clear flaws and missing elements that playing it just makes me sad for what it could have been.
The most glaring of these flaws is the total lack of proper outside pressures on your tribe, be it from scarcity of resources, actually dangerous predators, and most importantly OTHER tribes of apes. As it stands, there is basically zero reason to ever go out of the jungles and explore the map outside of sheer curiosity of the player and the banal desire to "just finish the game", which in itself isn't exactly fun because the game never ups the challenge the gameworld presents to the player, nor do the base gameplay mechanics ever really expand, or interact with one another in any interesting way. For example, you can't place food to attract prey animals to a location where you could trap them or hunt them more easily.
However ,it is the lack of other ape tribes is something I am utterly baffled by, and have yet to find any explanation to why the devs decided to make your ape tribe the sole monkeys in the game. Territory disputes between apes is a big part of their behavior, as was most likely the same case for our ancestors, and the lack of them just makes the game world feel utterly empty. Having to deal with other tribes would have opened up a whole new element of gameplay to the game, which in my opinion, would have improved this game tremendously.
All in all, the above flaws basically mean that once you have figured out the intentionally obscure ways of how the game mechanics work (and unlocked the few that are behind evolution leaps), the whole gameworld becomes your oyster and you face basically zero challenges from the game which ends up making the whole experience dull.
In short, this game could have been a masterpiece, and it has a good idea at it's core, but for some reason the devs failed to implement vital elements that would make the game actually engaging to play in the long term.
Thanks for reading my blog.

YOU'RE FINALLY AWAKE! THAT FALL LOOKED REALLY BAD. INDUSTRIALIZED SOCIETY? HUMANS? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? LETS GO EAT ANTS.

Return to Monke; Relearn Humanity.
"Look over here Monke. Heres my rock pile, heres my plant pile. Heres my food pile. Isn't it cool."
"What if you smack them together?"
":o"
Only tip I think you need to enjoy. The game is about discovering locations and moving your clan forwards. Don't stay in the spawn for more than like 7 hours or you will have negative experience. You have to relocate and more outwards to progress.
Dopamine, Neuron learning, Generations. This game has the most unique mechanics in it. I would recommend light reading on the game, and experiment yourself. **If you like plunging into the Unknown give the game a go through. It's the games main strength.** Otherwise don't, Ancestors has no tutorials whatsoever and learning it LITERALLY is about the same level as a smart ape figuring shit out. (which is the point)

Reject modernity, become monke.
The only complaint I have about the game is that when you switch apes, they don't automatically follow you. I've had to backtrack for hours looking for lost tribe's members carrying babies because I didn't notice that they were missing, which is incredibly frustrating in a game that prides itself on not using an ingame map. Everything is pretty cool though.

keep eating shrooms until your monkeys invent hentai and capitalism