Quick Look: Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

^ This.

I will pick this up when it drops to around $20.

This game looks really interesting and I'm resisting the urge to finally create an Epic Store account.

That said... Jesus Christ what a mess of a quick look. How none of the three people presumably looking at the screen managed to catch any of the tooltips that were popping up explaining exactly what to do boggles the mind. It's like 30 minutes of the infamous Cuphead journalist tutorial thing.

That poor, poor baby monkey, screaming it's head off for 4 days straight.

@zoofame: They all missed the first objective, which was on screen for like, 2 seconds total and what appeared to be no way to actually see what the objective was again. Everyone, except maybe Abbey, was questioning if dairy were eggs on whatever playdate that was. Jesus christ y'all get mad at Dan over the smallest things.

i was intrested in this till i seen some other coverage of this a few months back on GI, now watching this dan has renewed my intrest in it for better or worse... i MIght have to wait on a price drop but i still wanna have a go of it.

Brutal

I’ll admit, I’m usually a Dan detractor, but he wasn’t THAT bad in this Quick Look. The game’s mechanics are rather inscrutable compared to most other games today, and Dan is not the only games journalist to notice this.

That being said, this QL is Dan at peak Paul Ryckert. Dan’s certainty that the game is confusing, and his related irritation, comes off pretty much the same as Dan’s story about his dad insisting that no one understood The Matrix and if they said they did they were lying. Dan gets very petty and dismissive about every little thing when a game is either objectively bad or just confusing, and it’s pretty unattractive behaviour. Like here, he went on and on about how he was about to show us what full tutorial and full HUD looks like. The buildup wasn’t worth it: there WAS a minor tutorial and there IS a HUD. They might not communicate as much as you would like, but the menu option works as described. Once Dan decides he doesn’t like a game or it’s just too confusing to be for him, he gets very nitpicky over things that both do and do not warrant it, and I think that’s what is getting the comments section so rustled.

When Dan said he had never seen that cutscene before of him finishing the games first objective of bringing back the child and then remembering he said he had played this game for 8 hours before. No wonder he has no idea what is going on in this game or how to play it he had not even done objective 1 in 8 hours.

This is the kind of game I want to like, but it just seems really rough around the edges. Tutorial issues aside, Dan expressed a lot of the same issues Patrick did on Vice/Waypoint. And I skimmed a few others that also had those problems

Maybe it is just a lack of the right field of knowledge (I can imagine people getting pretty lost in Kerbal whereas that is "intuitive" for others), but it seems like the kind of game where you need to think like the devs. If you do that, then you'll have no issues augmenting the right stuff into the right things and it will become all about steering evolution/society in the way you want. If you don't then it is going to be a LOT of limping and waiting to bleed out.

Starting to become as cliche as the Switch, but I think this would be a great gamepass game. Grab it, play it for a few hours, and then either fall in love or uninstall it in a mighty rage.

I'm really digging this game.

Dan really, really needs to stop saying "Monkey Sex"

@gundato: The game reminds me of Tokyo Jungle, which I would similarly describe as a good PS+ game so you can try it without having to buy it. Tokyo Jungle has its own weird take on animal life cycles that is less simulation and more gamified, but hey, it also has animal boning and then you can start playing as the offspring who inherit some levels or something from their parents.

All three of you missing the objective the game gives you turned this into a bad QL.

Maybe you should check in again later, the game seems interesting.

It's hard out here for a chimp.

Abby yelling "drifting!" as the dead fish is floating down the stream lmao

"I know they are not monkeys, they are apes; but I will call them monkeys."

That amount to saying; "I know your name is Mike, but I will call you Carl for the next 2 hrs."

At what point in the game will we be able to go Bowling ?

I can't wait to experience this for myself. What a weird game.

Very cool of everyone to jump up Dan's ass on this video. Extremely warranted because everything was so clearly laid out and self-explanatory.

Wow comment section. You're being overly harsh. Acting like Dan deliberately wanted to sabotage the quicklook because he thinks it's bad and therefore tried to make it look bad is an ridiculous idea.

Like some of you make it sound like he was dancing around a big arrow on top of the screen wondering what to do, when all that happened was the one time the game showed a clear objective, they all 3 missed it. Which was unfortunate, but not unfathomable to miss. Then Dan wanted to showcase how you advance your tribe through sex & the evolution screen, which he was locked out of because he didn't finish the tutorial yet. I bet in his initial playthrough, he didn't miss the objective and immediatly opened up those options, but after 8 hours of mostly unlocked gameplay, he simply didn't know that he still had to do that tutorial to make these options appear. Maybe he even stumbled through the tutorial by accidently picking up the baby, not realizing that that was a tutorial. Who knows.

This game looks kind of rad in a Rainworld-esque way. Uncompromising, but if you stick with it something truly special reveals itself. I do wish the camera was a bit better. At times it was like the entire screen was filled with Demonic energy & an ape boob,while an animation plays out. During combat sequences, it was hard to see what was really happening. It's also hard to see what you're holding in each hand. This is definitly one of those games that people will be wistfully think back on in 5 years i think. Can't wait to see what this game looks like 20 generations in. It could be really cool to end up with human-likes that are completely different from our abilities.

I'm so glad Dan was the one to show this off.

Monkey SEX LUL

I'm not mad at Dan for being confused.

I'm mad at the rest of games journalism for hyping up how confusing this game is.

Because, man, compared with Conan Exiles or Rust this thing is straight up hand-holdy. It's actually pretty well balanced and tutorialized, provided you play on the most verbose setting. I mean, maybe not the levelling up part, but you'd probably figure it out eventually.

I'm digging it so far, but the whole "it's deliberately inscrutable" thing that a bunch of reviewers have going on is pretty irritating.

Not Dan, though. Dan's here for this. Dan somehow managed to figure out the basics of this thing while thinking eggs are dairy, so the rest of the people covering this game should be ashamed of themselves.

Despite the game being inscrutable, I feel like the gang made a fun quick look out of it. Informative..not AS much? But I had a good time watching them riff.

So this is a guerilla war survival game?

Whoa, this game is crazy and fascinating. I like seeing new ideas for games that don't fit into any genre.

Man, some of y'all get so twisted over Dan. It seems like it would be an exhausting way to take in GB content.

In fairness to most games writers, aren't the majority also thoroughly perplexed by games like Rust? At least here, I distinctly remember people complaining in the comments about that game too because they didn't "get it".

@maxxcanti: That's not the staff, that's Dan. He prides himself on his ignorance and stupidity. It's not funny and makes me hate Giant Bomb more and more with every moment Dan flaunts how much he loves not knowing extremely simple basic things.

Luckily everyone else has finally started to catch on and just tell him to shut the hell up instead. Vinny and his notebook really shows how they finally are having enough.

is this a new tail of the sun?

This game seems super ambitious but also kind of frustrating? Years of having our hand held in games is probably the main fault.

Also, I've read other sites coverage on this and GB isn't alone is being confused by this game. It also seems like it could be very annoying with the discovering. Just finished reading Patrick's review over on Vice and it's sounds like the industry as a whole is having trouble grasping this game.

But still, this game seems pretty unique. I'm curious to know how ends up. I'll check it out when it hits Xbox. I can see this game being very awesome if it evolves to actual humans and the caveman era. Very interesting indeed.

Watching this makes me long for a new Tokyo Jungle

Looks like a neat game, but not suited for quick looks. I suspect much of teh game benefits from a careful methodical sweep of your environment to find all local items to discover, pass on the knowledges, and complete missions.

This was honestly a joy to watch. Good crew dynamic. I love Dan’s “oh god that’s the *goal*?” when it says “advance faster than our ancestors did.”

Donkey Kong got weird.

This game seems like a lot of these games where it doesn't have the mechanical chops to convey what it wants. Great QL though!

Okay after watching this I bought it. Played maybe 5 hours. Not as crazy as everyone says but definitely not straightforward. I like it. I like weird.

One big big problem, though: the follower AI. Your companions will CONSTANTLY fall to the jungle floor and you have to save their dumb asses from snakes and tigers, which ends up getting me hurt in the process usually.

I understood this game more watching Brad play it on UPF, even as he had trouble with it too. Benefit of a live chat to help.

As a paleontologist I sort of want to play this game - and its aesthetic is very the kind of thing I would be in to - but if it's meant to be accurate it fails. The very first bird you see is Hesperornis and by this point would be long extinct. There is nothing discovered that really fits the hominid shown here.

Of course, this is all nothing compared to the concept that a species needs to discover what water is, or how to sleep.

kinda wish Alex played this one

Dan "we came from monkeys" Ryckert