Mankind Odiously and the Dungeon Tree

"Gjev kraft til rota"

Wardruna - Rotlaust Tre Fell - translation

 

I picked up Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey a couple of years ago as one of those games having failed hard enough to sit in a nigh-perpetual 75%-off "sale" for more than it's worth anyway. What can I say, I was in the mood for a rare video game without fantasy elements that not sports-related. Slim pickins. And hey, I liked Quest for Fire well enough, so how bad could it be?

 

The politically correct title's a turn-off in its own right. Of course they could've called it "The Human Odyssey" or "Humanity's Odyssey" or "The Hominid Odyssey" (with a bonus id-od echo effect to boot!) etc. if you're that desperate to avoid the "man" slur, but SJWs just had to go one step further off the cliffs of insanity and beat the dead horse with a rocket launcher. Fine, whatever.

But don't imagine you'll cease groaning at bad choices once it boots up. Somewhere in the middle of the self-indulgently overextended opening sequence informing me repeatedly it's "inspired by true events" and the like, I couldn't help but laugh at an unexpected revelation: ah, crap, the developers' names are all French. (French-Canadian as it turns out?) Well, that means I can expect artistic panache (hey, now I get it!) with terrible or nonexistent game mechanics.

 

True enough, user reviews do warn but cannot convey the extent to which the control scheme is needlessly convoluted or just flat-out broken. Biggest problem?

I need an adult!

Though Ancestors handles through a workable enough third-person-slasher interface, you cannot attack or move normally once combat starts. Instead, all conflict is handled as quick-time events. Bad enough in itself except your command does not even register most of the time! And while we're at it, what hillbilly design school let you graduate without learning not to slap "helpful" pop-ups center-screen, obscuring the action in the middle of an unpausable action sequence!?!

On the plus side the primitive social life stuff (like mutual grooming) can feel quite charming and the jungle does look great, and though the gigantic tangled tree branches are a bit... Lothlorienish, at times, it's fun enough trying to chart a safe course through the treetops. Only wish I could fling poop at the frustrated crocodiles and angry warthogs down below. But you may notice I'm giving examples only from the jungle, not the savanna. That's because I simply cannot manage to advance past the first chapter. Like Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Elex or other FPS from the 2010s struggling to keep the formula fresh, Ancestors over-engineered basic movement or interaction mechanics until they're basically unusable. Aside from the aforementioned dodge dodginess, your hominid keeps latching onto random objects and the snap-targeting is customarily incompetent in separating out nearby objects. They do try to separate out social and environmental commands through the interface, but it takes a while to build up a gratuitous amount of muscle memory. (No I did not want to start grooming my elder's hairy ass, I wanted to eat his ass - I mean eat his berries - I mean eat the berries! The berries he's standing next to! The berries!) Good luck switching two tree branches at a 90-degree angle without jumping and possibly falling to your death. And just like other such misdesigned wrecks, the scripted interactions will actively cancel out your own input, with your character stopping dead or rubberbanding back to be hit by an attack you had in fact evaded. Naturally it also features the increasingly common flaw of keybindings only applying to some of that command's context-sensitive functions, e.g. standing up during sensing.

 

Then there's the greater interface itself, needlessly convoluted for the sake of faking more complexity that the game actually offers. Like combining run and jump commands into a single button. Or conversely splitting investigation mode into scent/hearing/intelligence instead of simply using different icons in the same overlay. Or again conflating your survival sim food/water/sleep status bars into a single concentric status icon that tells you little or nothing.

 

If you excuse all of that, you're still left with a fundamental design priority toward needless obfuscation.

You level up your homininnies like in any skill progression RPG (think Skyrim) by skilling up through repeated use until you can grab feats and move up through the various skill trees. Calling skills "neuronals" is slightly weird, but can be justified as immersion. On the other hand, giving you zero info on how much "neuronal energy" you currently have or need to buy a feat is, like the lack of numeric values for hunger and the like, just a pointless limitation.

One of your first tasks is building a sleep spot. Knowing how apes in general do it I looked for a bush or treetop I could modify, bending it down into a nest shape. Even after seeing the tutorial tip about stockpiling resources, I gave up after throwing three leaves on the ground because nothing was happening and sought other solutions until grinding my teeth in frustration I hit the wiki... to discover you need four leaves.

My first ape-man bled to death because I'd seen a broken bone heals with time and figured a bleed would be the same. My second bled to death because it was easy enough to figure out I need to staunch the bleeding with leaves, but nothing tells you that ONLY kapok or horsetail fibers will do, or that these objects have useful "modification" interactions when swapped to your left hand (unlike say, crushing an egg, which did nothing) and even then I didn't know why it kept failing and it turns out to be another QTE timer issue.

At one point I expanded my clan's territory. How? Hell if I know.

 

So on and on. One can spot glimmers of charming human evolution roleplaying buried under that gigantic pile of interface and interaction mistakes, but I can't in all honesty recommend wasting $10 to drive yourself insane trying to dig those few needles out the crapstack. However, I will note the irony of sabotaging your story about primitive humans by pretending to reinvent the wheel.

 

Which brings us to my second point, because playing Ancestors made me realize I've contradicted myself over the years on what constitutes good adventuring. One of my big complaints about Baldur's Gate 3 for example was its abuse of contrived or "lolrandom" surprises which for the most part merely force gratuitous reloads. But I was tickled pink when Skyrim randomly killed my character. As I detailed for TBS games, the distinction lies between an unexpected challenge or outcome growing naturally out of simpler elements, and game designers trying to force or fake such an experience, hobbling the player to strain at surprise or challenge.

 

In counterpoint to Ancestors let me offer the Dungeons games. Their main claim to fame is doubling down on being Dungeon Keeper knockoffs by parodying fantasy RTS in general. As such, their basic mechanics are... very, very basic. You've got a handful of workers and even fewer military units, all of standard goblin/zombie/demon types.

 

In fact, given its Warcraft-ish aesthetic it recalls Heroes of the Storm, a MOBA cross-promoting Blizzard's extant IPs, with one effect being highlighting just how repetitive their gimmicks had been over the previous two decades. You had two big fat guys with cleavers, elves and space elves, two races of giant spiny bugs, two kinds of paladins, etc. Yet from such trite redundancy HotS also built up true creativity like Deathwing, Murky, Abathur or The Lost Vikings all breaking the mold of such games' expected hero roles and development.

 

In Dungeons 3 I was blindsided by a new secondary resource called "evilness" which can only be harvested outside your own domain, by taking over surface locations. I was initially annoyed at yet another game throwing a wrench into my preferred turtling mindset. Interestingly though, evilness is used for research... which means a quick rush can in fact support a turtle strat instead.

 

Sparse as it may be, I'll take that sort of build-up, branching meaningfully from a simplistic interpretation of its root genre, over a bunch of pretentious artistes haplessly breaking functional genre conventions for no reason other than feigning creativity. Stick that shit alongside blank canvases sold as paintings and black-and-white movies with ten-minute scenes of some rando' eating soup.

Trying to work out a functional town layout or a tactic to defeat a new monster type is adventure.

Trying to guess the number of leaves you consider a bunch?

No.