Quick Look: Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

I think that Monkey Ball remake is coming out this year too? (In Japan at least)

Man this game looks like id enjoy it -- but seeing the Breath of the Wild stamina circle gave me bad chills though. i HATED that stamina system...

On one hand, Dan is putting in extra effort to sabotage a really cool looking game by relentlessly resisting to learn its basic features and mechanics. On the other, y'all seriously let Dan cover the science game and I love you for it.

The comments on Dan QLs are always the fuckin best. hahahah

I sometimes wonder if GB makes some choices just to troll the audience. If so, I tip my hat to Mr. Caravella.

Anyways this looks very cool. I was luke warm on Ancestors, I suppose it doesn't trailer very well, but after sort of seeing it played I'm super curious to give it a shot. Seems clever.

I too wonder why Dan was chosen to play this game!

Dan led QL's have not been enjoyable to watch lately.

This was frustrating and uninformative. Please do better.

Sad that it's gotten to the point where they have to shush Dan to make him write his ignorant thoughts in a journal.

I am absolutely fascinated by this game. There's a lot of games I'm interested in coming out in the next month or so so this will have to wait.

Patrice Desilets has been very open that Ancestors is a very experimental game that won't be for everyone. It seems like a big risk without much potential return on investment. I want to support that.

The game looks interesting. The first 35 min of this quick look however was incredibly frustrating to watch. Please pay more attention to on screen text and audio cues in the future. Love you guys

Dan is simultaneously the best and the worst person to do this quick look.

Read the GS review and yeesh...I guess if you get far then your whole clan gets killed there is no restart with everything that you learned. So if you fully lose your tribe you literally start the game over again. I guess they had a tiger randomly spawn near their base and they had zero weapons and all of their 8 hour game progress was wiped because of it. Seems super not fun when all your progress can disappear because of a random spawn...

Much like Vinny I am really curious to see a big shift in generations and like how far it can actually go?

MONKEY SEX!

(Should be Apes but...)

What I find fascinating about this game was you apparently can advance a set group of hominids to be THE basis of hominins, rather than the ones that existent Homo finally crystalized out of. I'm glad I started hearing time markers, like say , 10 million years back or more For us, it's been hard to fill in the gap between Australopithecus and flat-ass apes, though they have a few. This is dealing in that greyed out time period, so it is a fun concept to play with. And the resulting 'we', would not be neccessarily exactly us.

i feel like this is mostly a Dan thing

Cool concept in theory but I don't like ANY of the HUD stuff. Too Ubisoft-like.

@max_cherry: They don't. They only harvest "advanced" organic life. The point, as revealed in ME3, is not to exterminate organic life, but just the opposite. It's implied that the creators of the Reapers believed that, if allowed to advance continuously, any organic species would inevitably create artificial life which would seek to supplant all organic life. Thus they created the reapers to cut down each civilization before it reached this level and reset the clock. Organic life, in general, would be spared extinction, but no race would be permitted to advance beyond a certain point.

i would love to see a dumb feature arounds this game

I was interested in seeing what this game was as I'm a fan of Patrice's previous work but after watching this quick look I lost all interest that I had.

"Did you discover shame?" - Vincent Caravella

"I don't think so" - Dan Ryckert, 2019

(Also, this game looks actually really intriguing but the survival mechanics kind of put me off unfortunately. Wish there was more narrative as opposed to just another riff on ARK but hey, I'm sure in a year this will have an audience and be really intriguing to see what people have done with it.)

I have watched three different people try to play this. None of them were competent enough to learn the basics mechanics or use all of the buttons the screen tells them after multiple hours into it. And now I'm here to watch this.

I love ya Dan.
But no.Just no.You're doing the dismissive thing again.

A couple of seconds in, I don't get the impression Dan likes this game. Let's see how that turns out.

Finally the Dr. Stone video game I've been waiting for!

Dan if perfect for this QL. Too many people taking this waaaay too seriously. I'd pay to watch a full playthrough of him figuring it out, much like the "monkey" he is playing

Looks like a fascinating game, and it's unfortunate GB didn't pick the right person to spend time with it to show this off.

If your action inspires a baby to learn, how were you inspired to do that action

just to add to the people have already mentioned the baby you find is the one you play at the start. the dead ape in the nest is the one that the bird kills.

Dan was not the right person to lead this quick look...

Can Dan just be restricted to pick out really bad games (Mario Sunshine, Mario Party,...) to build a feature around them?

Starting a game he claims he's played for 8 hours, but still not recognizing and also ignoring the tutorial? And complaining the game doesn't explain anything but ignoring every prompt?

Sure, this game might not explain things very well, but if almost every comment is by people that have never played the game and probably only saw this one video about it; and yet they still understand the game better than someone who has played it for 8 hours? This is not the games fault.

It might be a bad game, who knows, but watching this video sure didn't help showing it. Like others have said, this is very much Old Dan, hell bent on showing what a terrible game he thinks it is.

It's as if I would review an Madden game: "look how dumb this is, what are all these people doing, what are all those weird words, american football is just dumb, why is this complicated drawing shown if I just want to throw a ball; I better ignore it, why do the other guys don't run to where I am going to throw the ball, why is my team suddenly a bunch of other guys, why can I throw the ball forward that's not how rugby works"

I like how the guy who doesn't know how eggs work, if pirates are bad, what butter is made from is the one playing the evolution game.

Presumably the corpse he finds in the nest is the older hominid from the introduction; I'm surprised none of them put two and two together with that.

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That the game is too opaque to just pick up and play is definitely a valid criticism (though not a damning one), but even in those terms I'd suggest Dan is probably too impatient. One minute he's complaining about injuring himself out in the wilderness and having his life expectancy drastically reduced; the next one of his endless unnecessary wild leaps of faith leads to him breaking his leg. Entertaining for the QL, sure, but if that's the kind of thing that's soured him on the game, I can't help but suspect he's not really given it a fair shake.

Then again, this isn't a review, and it seems plenty of people in the comments are still interested, and perhaps it actually is terrible, so I'm taking it too seriously. And I don't mean to be too hard on Dan; he seems completely sincere in his reaction, and there's nothing wrong with that. I just find it a frustrating way to learn about a game which seems to ask for a different kind of attention.

Wow, I did not know human ancestors lacked genitalia.

Patrick at Waypoint also had a ton of trouble with this. Not to defend Dan but it's easy to miss what little tutorialization is in this game it seems.

It seems like an incredible idea for a game though, it has some of the energy of Will Wrights original Spore concepts, which were abandoned because they would be complicated and potentially not fun. I'm glad someone tried it though and hope it finds a dedicated audience.

I don't know, from reading the comments, sounds like Dan is the one you want for this QL, depending on what your looking for. Next I'd like to see Dan play, and explain, a Big Bang simulation game.

I don't know why, but the confusion makes me more interested in this one! This seems super neat, if a little flawed (which is exactly my jam).

This game seems real cool. I wonder how much is there.

This Is The Run: Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

Dan never fails to showcase Vinny's impressive parenting skills.

They are called the reapers because they are cyclically harvesting civilisations not purging the entire galaxy. They wipe out all organic life on developed worlds, but the galaxy has billions of stars so most worlds are totally untouched by the harvest. For there to be another harvest in 50,000 years they need to ensure there is primitive life of sufficient development and that mass effect technology is within reach.

They may even have their servitor races spend some time altering the relay network or guiding evolution after each harvest, otherwise they risk flying in from dark space finding nothing and having to hibernate within the galaxy. I would also speculate that by moving the mass relays around it keeps the current cycles species from interacting with too many primitive species and uplifting a bunch of them. Because each species finds a mass relay in their system and becomes dependant on it for FTL most never bother venturing outside the network, so the Reapers are using the relay network topography to control which worlds, resources, and species are involved in each cycle.

This QL went about as expected, having watched Dan play Tail of the Sun for Game Informer's Super Replay.

"Eggs are not dairy. Eggs are not dairy."

Has GBeasts video setup changed recently? something about this and the quick look for Control don't look quite right...

I wonder what these simians would do if they realized all their hard work just leads to a civilization of people who are mad about a video of Dan playing a video game

I would say that I found this QL to be mildly frustrating/disappointing, but not worth the Sturm und Drang that some folks are bringing to the party.

I'll probably pick this game up on console when it inevitably goes on sale.

Thus is one of the funniest quick looks they've ever done.

Also after reading these comments I now know Why Dan can't find a stick in the game. Because it's in y'alls butt.

Does this game become anything other than a sort of survival game with primates? If so I'd like to actually look into this game at some point.

@max_cherry: They only wipe out species that have activated Gateways and are capable of interplanetary/interstellar travel, or that would gain that capability during the time of their purge (or soon after). We know this because the Prothean Javik knows what Asari, Turians, Humans, and Salarians are, so they clearly existed in primitive societies during the time of the Prothean Empire.

The Reapers purpose is not to eradicate the galaxy of all organic life. The Reapers purpose is to prevent organic life from advancing to a point where they are able to create synthetic life powerful enough to permanently wipe out all organic life and rule the galaxy (the irony is intentional). The point of their purges is to periodically set back organic life technologically so as to prolong its existence. Eradicating primitive organic life and microbiota doesn't make any sense in that context. Even if you assume that their goals have shifted to instead make their top priority procreation, the sooner organics develop the sooner the next harvest can occur. And hibernating in deep space is probably boring.