32 | New Scientist | 25 January 2020
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L^ GAMESJacob Aron is New Scientist’s
deputy news editor. He has
been playing video games
for 25 years, but still isn’t
very good at them. Follow
him on Twitter @jjaronAN APE-LIKE creature examines
the skeleton of a warthog. As
horns swell and drums beat, the
animal picks up one of the bones
and begins crashing it around.
Then it raises a fist to the sky and
slams the bone into the warthog’s
skull, smashing it to pieces.
This iconic and spine-tingling
scene from the film 2001: A Space
Odyssey is an attempt by director
Stanley Kubrick to distil the
moment our distant ancestors
took their first step to becoming
modern humans. The game
Ancestors: The humankind
odyssey attempts to go one
further and depict millions of
years of human evolutionary
history – but it falls flat.
You can’t fault lead designer
Patrice Désilets for his ambition.
He helped create Assassin’s Creed
and its sequels, which put players
in historical settings from ancient
Greece to Renaissance Italy. “I
went, let’s do the very beginnings
of it all, the beginning of the
odyssey. Not 10,000 BC, let’s go
10 million years ago,” he says.
The game opens with an ape-
like creature carrying her child onher back, ambling through a
jungle in Africa, before being
suddenly killed by a giant bird. You
take control of the child and find a
safe place to hide, and then the
game shifts to put you in control
of another ape, who must now
attempt to find the lost infant.
My odyssey didn’t start well.
Within a few minutes, my ape had
been eaten by a crocodile, and I
flashed into the body of anothercreature from the tribe, only to be
poisoned by a snake bite, attacked
by a warthog and flee in fear.
The experience is baffling, by
design, as the game explains very
little. Just as our ancestors had
to figure out everything for
themselves, so do players of
Ancestors. You can use the ape’s
senses of smell and hearing to
search the environment, and
interact with all manner of plantsAn odyssey too far Games are great if you want to leapfrog a building, grow to a
giant size or outpace a bullet. But their superpowers evaporate when tackling the
epic story of evolution, finds Jacob AronGame
Ancestors: The
humankind odyssey
Panache Digital Games
PC, PlayStation 4
and Xbox OneJacob also
recommends...Book
Evolution
Stephen Baxter
Gollancz
The best fictional treatment
of evolution I’ve read,
because it gets across the
absolute horror of what
millions of years of genetic
mutations will do to our
species. Baxter’s elephant-
like post-humans roaming
the ruins of modern
civilisation haunt me still.and objects in an attempt to find
a use for them. Désilets says
they studied the latest science to
inform what went into the game.
My most satisfying experience
while playing was when I realised I
could take a stick, strip the leaves,
then use it to poke a beehive and
retrieve honey. Then the bees
attacked and I nearly died again.
The game progresses as you
complete new actions with a child
in tow, generating “neuronal
energy” that you can use to
evolve new skills. You can then
choose to advance a generation,
locking in some of those skills,
and eventually evolve, passing
hundreds of thousands of years
in the blink of an eye.
It is an interesting view of
evolution, but rather Lamarckian:
the idea that animals can gain new
traits during their lifetime that
can be passed on biologically. This
view has been widely discredited,
as it goes against the accepted
theory that what we pass on are
the genes we are born with.
The trouble is, the game is quite
dull. After you evolve, you find
yourself in the same jungle
location – others, such as a
savannah, are available, but I never
made it that far into the game. I
just kept doing the same things,
hoping I wouldn’t randomly die.
Other attempts to capture
evolution in a game, such as the
galaxy-spanning Spore or quirky
platformer E.V.O.: Search for Eden,
have also flopped. Maybe when it
comes to compressing millions of
years into a single experience,
only Kubrick’s dramatic genius
will do. Ancestors felt more like an
infinite supply of monkey gamers
hammering relentlessly at a
genetic keyboard. ❚Enjoy it while it lasts: the
primate protagonists of
Ancestors try not to dieThe games column
“ My most satisfying
experience was
learning how to
retrieve honey. Then
the bees attacked”