Humans have come a long way over the last few millions of years, from crafting stone tools in caves to playing video games in air-conditioned apartments. Now we can finally come full circle and play a strategy game where we craft stone tools in caves from the comfort of an air-conditioned apartment, thanks to small Turkish studio GorillaSoftworks. They’ve just released an early access version of The Ancients, a turn-based strategy game inspired by Dawn of Man. In it, you guide a small tribe of early humans as they hunt and gather their way across realistically-portrayed Ice Age environments.
It’s not only the environment that’s realistic, either — you’ll hunt (or run away from) dozens of now-extinct but very real animals, and mostly live off of vegetables, just like our ancient relatives did in the days before grocery stores. As with any good survival game, making sure you have water is just as important as having food, and straying too far from a water source for extended periods leads to a very dehydrated (and shortly thereafter, very dead) tribe. The weather and season matter too, as you’ll have to base your choices around time of year — food rots in summer, tribe members freeze in winter without proper attire.
All the survival stuff is standard fare at this point, but where The Ancients sets itself apart is in the social and cultural aspects of the tribe management. You’ll often be confronted with events like animal attacks or encounters with other tribes, and the decisions you make will change your Tribe Values, such as Peaceful vs Brutal or Equality vs Hierarchy. In addition to serving as an indicator of how you’ve been running your tribe, these values provide different bonuses and negative effects.
There are also four different Tribe Culture trees, where you can make choices about how your tribe engages with religion, leadership, and morality, and what you do with your elderly and dead — will you exile your old folks to die in the cold, or keep them around for their wisdom? Will you bury your dead, or eat them?
You’ll control a single tribe at the start, though you can end up with more than one. Each tribe has a handful of action points you can use to move around, hunt and gather, or set up a camp. In camp, tribe members can be assigned to guard against animal attacks, craft tools, or gather nearby resources. It’s a relatively simple system, but how you spend your action points must be carefully considered, as death by starvation or saber-tooth is only a few poor choices away.
And it can be hard to tell what was wrong with your choices, at first — this is a game that requires careful attention to all the numbers and bars on your screen. My first few attempts at following the initial objectives of the campaign (which serves as a kind of extended tutorial) ended in disaster: if I wasn’t forgetting to stay by water, I was failing to escape from the predator attack events and losing my tribe members one by one. It’s generally unforgiving, and folks who don’t like struggling while they figure out how all the mechanics work might need to wait until there are more YouTube tutorials before diving in.
The game is still very much in early access overall — menus are sometimes hard to read or parse, the UI is often unintuitive, and some of the assets feel placeholder-y — but it’s already in a playable state, and is receiving regular updates. It’s also currently 10% off its 19.99 price, making it $17.99 until June 19th. It’s set to spend a year or so in early access, and the price will stay steady, so even if you aren’t ready to pick it up just yet, it’s one to keep an eye on if struggling to survive the winter is your jam.
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DanielD
Unabashed FromSoftware fanboy still learning to take his time with games (and everything else, really). The time he doesn't spend on games is spent on music, books, or occasionally going outside.
