Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is the first game from Panache Digital Games. While this is Panache's first time up to bat, you may recognize its co-founder, Patrice Desilets, as the creative vision behind Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed II, and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood—not to mention Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Ancestors (which I will try to not refer to as Ancestors Creed now) is an episodic third-person action-adventure survival game, probably "survival game" in the truest sense of the word, since it takes you back 10 million years. To Africa. This is before man invented agriculture. Before the first human tools. Before any missing link. Ancestors takes Darwin's naturalist time machine back to the evolution and story of our species. You want a prequel? You want an origin story? Well, guess what.
This video's pre-alpha footage (of pre-alpha homo sapiens, ha!) has got condors, saber-toothed cats, crocodiles, warthogs, elephants, and apes. These are creatures that string a visual, if not biological, thread from Earth's dinosaur days to its contemporary zoos. This is where Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection takes us. And at the end of the video, when you see that ape go from crouching to standing up straight, you can't help but think Ancestors is going to take us on a pretty wild ride. Eat your heart out, Far Cry Primal. Not a ton to see, gameplay-wise, but we could be spending as much time in the trees as on the ground. Verticality will be a big point, I'm sure. And with Ancestors being episodic, I can't help but wonder if we're going to travel millions of years between episodes, so that perhaps (?) each episode tackles each step of that classic side view of man's evolution. You know, the one where each silhouette is crouched over less and less until you see a man standing upright at the end?
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is still crawling out of its primordial state, and there's no info yet on release dates or which platforms it's coming to.
