![]() ![]() However, when you first begin, that mission is glimpsed only faintly ‘Good luck, we won’t help you much,’ the game wishes and warns us, which I’m sure is the gist of the Book of Genesis. The power to develop your senses, to communicate, to use both hands, to fashion tools, to stand on two legs: all of these are there to be learned and locked in for future generations via an upgrade screen, which displays a fizzing network of neurons, to be sparked and expanded as new chimps are spawned and the torch is passed. The goal of Ancestors is to grind tirelessly through the travails of early man, exploring and learning, jolting forwards periodically through evolutionary jumps. And so to Ancestors, which grasps at the facts of life – we are told, in case there were any dregs of doubt, that the game is ‘inspired by true events’ – beginning with a group of apes who live, as Thoreau put it, ‘sturdily and Spartan-like.’ And, true to form (I imagine), life is high-stress, aimless, bewildering, boring, and progress is gained, rather fittingly, as it would be waiting for Shakespeare from a room full of monkeys and typewriters. ![]() ‘I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,’ he wrote, in Walden, in 1854. So, what gives? Why the long wait and how come we find ourselves flung so far back into the past? It struck me, at first, as the game design equivalent of Thoreau, when he went into the woods. We start with desolation, but it isn’t long before we get Désilation. ![]() But before long, you have a special vision mode, the screen is scattered with icons, and you’re clambering up into the canopy to get your bearings. Minutes in, you take control of a lonesome chimp, dropped into a dark jungle and surrounded by nature at its nastiest. No missions or maps, no buildings to shimmy up, and the first blades you see are hardly hidden – they are stuck proudly in the cheeks of a sabertooth. The land is filled with fierce green: lizards writhe, leaves sway, and dirty water whirls through it. This time, the 15th century isn’t far back enough his new game, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, is set 10,000,000 years ago, in Africa. Nine years after his last game, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Patrice Désilets has turned back the clocks again. ![]()
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