I just bought this videogame. Signed up to Steam specifically to buy it then got it.

I'm not usually a videogame person but for obvious reasons this one grabbed my attention. I saw that it had been released on Steam the other day, read some reviews, mulled it over then spent thirty bucks because even if it's not a conventionally styled videogame it's like someone read my mind and came up with a game custom made to appeal to me personally.



https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/p ... stors/home

Last time I tried anything like this many innocent Kerbals were needlessly killed.

Hopefully these digital proto-hominids will fare better than the Kerbals did.

I'm amazed they developed a game with that premise, it doesn't seem as marketable as all the sci-fi gun games that are all the rage, like Overwatch, Halo, Fortnight, etc.

Looks interesting.

Narrator: It is not.

I thought I might find the premise interesting, but I know myself well enough to know I'm really looking for an open-world hack-and-slash inspired by Roland Emmerich's 10,000 BC. I'll be interested to hear what you think of the game.

I loved 10,000 BC as well. It's such an underrated film.

I'm not a videogame guy at all - I lost interest when they stopped making game cartridges for the Nintendo 64 way back when and never got heavily into anything apart from Second Life which is basically a chat room with 3D graphics and not a conventional videogame with missions, etc.

This is fun, though, for me. The version I have, released via Steam, is an updated all-new and improved version apparently. I like it so far, but am only at the beginning. I'll have to buy a controller though, as I am terrible using the keyboard.

You start as a baby chimp being carried on his Mum's back. There's a whole intro video with various animals devouring one another - a preview of the dangers you'll face with crocodiles and various predators all roaming the forest. Mama ape has caught a fish from the river that she's about to take a bite out of when a giant bird swoops down and grabs her, then carries her (and you) to its nest. The huge bird stabs her through the chest with a razor-sharp beak and as she dies her final act is to knock you out of the bird's nest and into the tree branches below, saving you from being supper.

You then have to find your ape clan. It's night and there are weird noises. The game has a 'sense mode' where you stop moving and engage your senses - you can see sound waves emanating from the jungle in this mode, and by using your sense of smell you can see ghostly shapes in the distance. It's a bit like how they used to portray Daredevil's powers in the comic - stuff is rendered visually that conveys info the other senses are picking up on.

There's no map and you have to use your own memory. You have a sort of 'advice' screen you can look at but it's minimal. There's also a mode where you can get varying degrees of info in-game (I switched that on to full assistance mode, obviously) and it's all very complex and mysterious. The jungle looks amazing and so do the creatures.

I managed to find my way back to the other apes by listening for their sounds (I have a logitech G533 headset which has surround sound so it's pretty easy to concentrate on the audio of the game) and then calling to them. The other apes are searching for you in the jungle. Calling to them obviously reveals your location to predators and they're after you, too. I almost got eaten by a python and I was also chased up a tree by some hyenas at one point. There are all sorts of noises and stuff in the jungle and you can climb anywhere as you're an ape. Up cliffs, trees, anything. It's fun. Every preview/review I watched said you'll die a lot, but I guess I was lucky. I'm sure I'll die a lot more often as the game goes on. It's extremely complex and I'm not even doing it justice with this description. I wasn't sure I'd like it this much, but it's amazing.

I then went to the next stage where I was an adult ape, apparently the alpha male of a troop of apes living near the bottom of a huge waterfall in a valley. I think I'm the little ape grown up. I have a mate and two ape kids (you can select whether you're male or female at the start of the game). I had to make a sleeping spot for the night with some ferns and stuff for the wife and kids. At this point I stopped as that first stage was sort of mentally exhausting. You go from the whole 'that poor little chimp' experience to being the chimp and basically running for your life. It's intense in a weird way, especially with your senses engaged to pinpoint where threats are and so on. You have to climb somewhere safe, stop and listen and smell, look around, then move toward the sounds made by the other apes who are somewhere in the jungle while moving away from the other animals that all want to eat you.

In short I love it, which is no surprise. I'm not really interested in the standard third-person shooter category of games - I overdosed on Goldeneye, Perfect Dark and Turok the Dinosaur Hunter on the old Nintendo 64, along with Mario Kart and Donkey Kong Country, Ocarina of Time, etc. Once the N64 was gone so was any interest I had in games. I enjoyed playing with a group of people in a room, just having fun. The N64 was perfect for that.

This is going to take me ages to complete but that's what I wanted - a thing I can go back to whenever I want to that isn't reliant on other players. Like a game of chess you have going that could take months or years to finish.

You also form neurological connections as you learn stuff - when you do something new you gain knowledge and you see a little cut-scene where your brain literally makes connections inside itself indicating that you're becoming more intelligent, so you can pass these evolutionary improvements onto your children. The game prompts you to have as many kids as possible to ensure that your lineage survives and your neurological/evolutionary upgrades are passed on...although I haven't gotten that far yet.

Like Hanzo, I'm amazed this thing got made as well, but I'm happy it did. It's as if someone read my mind. It's got so many of my favourite fascinations in it I couldn't resist trying it out. I'm into it already, and you can create multiple 'lineages' so you could have six different game son the go at once. I'll stick with one for now. Hopefully the Simonpithecus lineage will manage to survive and evolve.

Nah, survival games like this are huge. Not Fortnite huge, but massive fan base. There are too many of them even, I'd say. I don't know of any that make you a primitive and evolve quite like this one, but the basic premise of open world and hunter/gatherer games are a big market. Even big franchises like Fallout and Assassin's Creed have added limited bits of this to their more recent games.

Pretty cool stuff. I used to dream about games this good as a kid and now that I’m an adult, I couldn’t care less.

It's made by the same people who made Assassin's Creed, apparently. I've never played that (or anything else) but the movement and everything is really easy to understand, even for a novice like myself.

I'm going to buy a controller, though. I think it'll make things easier in the long term, and this game is going to do exactly what I wanted it to do - occupy me for hours on end when I can't sleep.

So far I haven't done any of the evolutionary jumps or stuff like that. You can switch between different apes in your clan, and there's this Wold Newton aspect to it that surprised me: various meteorites fall to earth in the jungle. You carry a baby ape with you most of the time (so that they learn stuff as you do and they can pass it on to the next generation when you finally do an evolutionary jump - it's complicated to explain) and when you do find a meteorite, any baby you have with you gets mutated by the meteorite's radiation! So you can use the meteorite rock to make weapons and stuff but when you initially find it and use the 'inspect' mode, any babies you have with you (or any carried by the others in your clan who you've asked to follow you into the jungle) get these mutations that can, potentially, be passed on to their children. The meteorites can speed up your evolutionary progress and that seems to be the main objective; eat, sleep, fight off predators, learn skills, reproduce as much as possible, recruit other apes who have been outcast by their clans and are eking out a lonely existence in the jungle ('outsiders') and 'evolve faster than science'. There are two bars that represent your progress and the progress of humanity's ancestors as understood by modern science. You have to make sure you're evolving more rapidly than the scientific consensus says humanity actually evolved.

The game environment is massive, almost overwhelmingly so at times, with jungles, valleys, waterfalls, plains and savannah environments. I love it - I wasn't sure if it would live up to my expectations but it's exceeded them by a huge margin.

There's also no problem with messing up and starting again. You have five 'slots' so you can have multiple lineages going at once. I'm only doing one right now but I can see myself spending ages doing more.

TLDNR: Well worth the cost of purchase.

I've managed to teach my apes to use rocks to sharpen obsidian into hand axes and dead branches into sharpened spears for fishing and self defense. I've found various minerals and made different tools from them. I can eat honey and use it to cover wounds to stop bleeding (after narrow escapes from predators). I also know which mushrooms and snails can heal you if you're bitten by a venomous snake. If you're unwell, the screen goes all blurry and you lose vitality more rapidly when you climb or run.

It's very involving and I'm heavily into it. I've actually ordered a gaming controller so I am not having to use the mouse/keyboard combo. That should make combat easier. So far all my apes can use tools (one has to teach the others by having them mimic actions they perform), and when a saber tooth appears we can intimidate them for long enough to jump into the trees (the predators have memories and as you advance they learn how much of a threat you are). I can also catch fish and crabs (with the sharpened stick) and butcher snakes for meat (with the hand axes). There are lots of food sources but you need to try everything and part of the game is that your apes will get sick and sometimes the older ones will die as they age, or because they eat something that the younger ones can adapt to but that they're too old to adapt to. It bothers me when the older ones die, but there's no way of stopping it.

The other thing is recruiting 'outsider' apes to your clan. You'll meet other apes in the forest who are outcasts from other clans (whom you never meet, or not yet anyhow). If you can figure out what their problem is (usually they've been poisoned by a snake or by eating something they can't metabolize) and help them, they'll join your clan. This gives you more genetic diversity, and the more babies you have the more neuronic energy you get to evolve various traits. It's interesting, but online opinions are divided - people either love this or completely hate it.

I'm managing to evolve at the same pace as science said the apes did so I suppose that's something.

It's a lot more fun than I thought it'd be, which is good.

I used to love any of my primitive video games if they had any exploratory elements. I remember a very crude whitewater game -- you're steering a kayak or something down a river, trying not to hit the rocks. Stick man level graphics, kind of like Pitfall. But you could get out of the boat and go over to the edge of the screen. Every now and then, we players found a glitch -- some screen where you could walk your guy one more screen over, and see a screen that seemed to have no game purpose. It was magical -- like we were exploring a world.

Now they have games that actually seem like the world and I couldn't care less. Even a passing thought about them, and all I think is what a huge burner of hours I don't have to spare, nor would I spend them doing that if I did have them to spare.

Memory lane! I just found a youtube video of the game I was talking about above -- I spent hours playing this game. It felt sort of like I was exploring a river.

An Intellivision game!

I always loved that system, even though we had an Atari 2600. The Intellivision seemed more cutting edge to me as a kid.

I find the ape game engaging. More engaging than reading or watching TV, movies, etc. It's keeping my brain working somehow. I don't go out much so it's like a little holiday for me.

I enjoyed that video, by the way. I was sorry it ended that quickly.