DLCAncestors: The Humankind Odyssey Official SoundtrackLoading store offers
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
For a survival adventure built around developing a clan over time, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey combines exploration with generational change. At ≈ $6.72 from 
Kinguin, this Steam PC game is categorized as single-player, and your choices shape which skills and knowledge pass on. At $7.99 from Kinguin, you can compare the offer directly with Steam, where the game costs $7.99.
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $0.002025-03Current Low Across Stores~ $7.99JoyBuggy
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
DLC
01About Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a third-person open-world survival game about exploring Neogene Africa, growing a clan and guiding it through generations. The Steam PC version has 81%% positive reviews from 9,861 player reviews.
Credits
DIRECTOR
Patrice Désilets
Canadian game designer
Developer
Panache Digital Games
Publisher
Fictions
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$0.002025-03-25 · JoyBuggyBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | — | — |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | — | — |
| English | Yes | — | — |
Show 10 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| French | Yes | — | — |
| Italian | Yes | — | — |
| German | Yes | — | — |
| Spanish | Yes | — | — |
| Arabic | Yes | — | — |
| Japanese | Yes | — | — |
| Korean | Yes | — | — |
| Polish | Yes | — | — |
| Portuguese | Yes | — | — |
| Russian | Yes | — | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-20
02Before you buy
Play style
The Steam PC version has full controller support and is categorized as a single-player game.
Interface languages
Interface languages include English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
03Frequently asked questions
What do you do in the game?
Explore Neogene Africa, survive its dangers and develop your clan across generations.
Can I play solo?
Yes. The Steam PC version is categorized as single-player.
Does it support controllers?
Yes. The Steam PC version has full controller support.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
Reject humanity, become monkeShow moreShow less
14.5 hours at review1,195 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Amazing concept for a game and to get it at half price? Im sold! Until I played The movement mechanics are so frustrating and dont get better as you play, you walk near any wall or tree and theres a 50/50 chance youll start climbing want to sprint? well sprinting is the same button as jumping with no real explanation of how to do either want to escape a predator? pythons will climb 90° rocks and crocs will lunge at you from 20 ft. away There are some positives, the tree swinging mechanics are super fun and although I noticed other people struggling with it I found catching branches easy (although maybe will catch a different branch than expected) I love how you have to discover the world with little help and slowly progress your species and overall just the slow progression of the species is such a good idea that probably just needed a bit more work before release So no, I dont recommend this game, at least for now, get it at a good sale or if the devs make small tweaks to improve quality of life and just game mechanics in generalShow moreShow less
1.7 hours at review622 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
This is a very hesitant thumbs up, and even then I'm not sure it's correct. I'd only suggest picking this up if it's heavily discounted. If you're not sold on the theme, skip over it entirely. Somewhat amusingly for a game about evolution, the biggest problem Ancestors has is that everything follows a rigid formula. I don't think the devs finished making the game. There's no story, no objective, no purpose to evolution. It's super shallow. It's also kinda fun, but this might be 'fun to watch a car crash' style fun? I'll try and break down what went wrong, and why for some reason I still enjoyed bits of the game. The game also adamantly refuses to use terms like 'skill tree', 'experience points', etc. For the sake of the review I'll use them, but note the game uses confusing terminology throughout. First, the controls. Oh heck the controls. The game has too many actions for a typical controller, so it ends up using a context-sensitive system. However the buttons used are not ideal. For example (using a 360 controller), holding A will sprint. Releasing A whilst moving will jump. Releasing A whilst not moving will cancel a jump. Pressing A whilst falling will grab onto something, if there's something to grab. Pressing A near an item will pick it up/interact with it. Pressing A whilst holding a consumable item will consume it. Pressing A whilst standing in a body of water - with no items in hand - will drink the water. Pressing A in combat will dodge OR attack (I'll get to this soon). It should be obvious how this system breaks down. What if I want to drink water whilst near an item? You can't, you grab the item. You equally might just jump off a cliff by mistake. This happens far too much. I was fighting against the controls the entire time. The core mechanic of Ancestors is evolution. Take a bunch of hairy people, and progress them from sitting in poop to stabbing elephants with a pointy stick. Alright, I'm interested. It's a novel premise that hasn't really been explored before. Immediately this starts out good. New skills are unlocked rapidly early on, and they make a difference. Mobility goes from feeling clunky to (somewhat) fluid. New food options can be adapted to by sucking it up, eating them, and suffering with the ill effects. Learning to walk can be done by forcing yourself to stand up, walking a few steps, then falling over. Keep trying, you'll get it! I loved this. Skills work on a two-tier unlock system: first you have to learn the skill, then you have to pay XP to acquire it. I also enjoyed this as it both captured the spirit of evolution, and mechanically felt great. However, evolution became less cool over time. By the end I was actively resenting it. There's two major problems here. The first: in order to evolve you have to reset the skill tree, but you get to make some skills permanent. The amount you can lock down varies by how many kids you have, and RADIATION FROM METEORITES (yes, literally). Once an upgrade is permanent it's permanent for all future generations. Everything else is lost - you still have the skills available, but you need to pay xp to get them back. This could work in theory, but in practice it's painful. Skills unlock by holding a button for 5-10 seconds, once per skill. The game makes you do this hundreds of times. This was at least an hour of real time. On top of this, there's an RNG mechanic where some babies will generate new permanent skills after evolving. This is why you're forced to reset the skill tree, because you can't unlock much without the special baby skills. This leads to a boring mechanical meta: have 6 kids, pass a generation, repeat, evolve, go back to step 1. Repeat until it feels too gamey, then go stab a rhino or something. The second problem is the world itself. Whilst your own species evolves over time, the simulation does not. It's the same in the first minute as it is in the last. Even weirder - when you pass 'millions of years' during evolution, the simulation doesn't change. It just force-respawns all items and animals, but otherwise continues from the same second. This leads to nonsensical situations, such as my stockpile of raw meat which was still fresh after 6 million years. This also means evolution serves no purpose; it's viable to survive without unlocking a single skill, and each skill makes the game a little bit easier. Evolution doesn't grant access to new mechanics, nor new areas to explore. It's just evolution for the sake of it, and the more I evolved the more boring the game became. The first few hours were incredible (also terrifying): I didn't understand the world, and everything felt more powerful than me. By the mid-game I ran past everything because I had no reason to engage with it. There's no objective, no story, no narrative, no evolution of challenge. The later areas feel rushed and unfinished, with no reason to explore them. On the subject of locations, oh dear. What happened here? The game starts off in a confusing jungle. It feels claustrophobic, menacing, almost an extinction level threat. But it also offers verticality, plenty of different routes to advance forward, and lots of hiding spaces for nasty snakes to jump out of. Then it becomes an open lake, when the tribe has no swimming ability. Then, as you start to learn how to swim, it changes to large grassy plains and never has swimming again. Then it's a wide open savannah, and finally a wide open desert. There's a few minor changes between these, but that's essentially the layout. The problem here: there's nothing to do in an empty plain! In the jungle you can climb trees, swing from vines, scale rocky cliffs, swim through lakes, and so on. In a wide open plain all you can do is run. This actively took away gameplay options. Whilst it was nice that the map became more open as my species learned how to be bipedal, it also became boring. There was nothing to do except sprint between points of interest for exp. The jungle has snakes and alligators that are terrifying threats early game. The lake/grassy/woodland areas serve no purpose and should have been cut. The open plains has a full menagerie of creatures: snakes, rhinos, elephants, sabre-tooth tigers, jackals etc. Unfortunately these all have the same AI. They sit around in a pack doing nothing, then attack you if you go near. That's it. The map design is also too formulaic. There's 6-10 'oasis' locations in each biome, and these always have 100% of your tribe's survival needs in them. There's no reason to explore or take risks when there's no reason to leave your oasis. Why become an omnivore when you have infinite edible plants in every oasis? Why migrate when you don't need anything from the savannah? Ancestors could be amazing if they fixed this aspect of it. If the plants didn't respawn you'd have a reason to become an omnivore and fight for food. The game needs some kind of extinction-level threat that forces you to adapt or die, rather than adapt 'because there's no gameplay if you don't'. There's also combat in this game, but dang it's awful. When an enemy attacks the game goes into bullet time, then you have to hold A, and then either point the left stick at the enemy to attack or away from them to dodge. That's it. Congratulations, you now know how to beat every creature in the game without exception. You might lose if you don't have a pointy stick, but you will always win if you do. To make up for it, all sticks break after exactly one use. This system sucks. When you attack you get a cool cinematic cutscene, and these are visceral as heck. You'll stab a creature in the gut, jump on its back, then pummel it in the head with your fists until it dies. This is awesome! I just wish it was me pulling it off, and not a scripted cutscene triggered by me pressing A once. There's a few more mechanics to the game, but this review is hitting the character limiShow moreShow less
38.2 hours at review1,144 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
A couple things make this game a 'no': 1) The game is supposed to be about evolution, but you start as a monkey with a stick, and you end as a monkey with a stick. You don't even get to make fire. 2) The evolution mechanic is a silly mini-game. After jumping a million years into the future, nothing in the world changes: the coconut is still where you dropped it, the same palm trees are growing right where they were, even he same saber-tooth that was stalking you continues to stalk. Nothing else evolves or changes. Just you, kinda. 3) I thought the game was glitching at first, but no, once you get your final evolution, the game just stops. The whole point of the game is to evolve to the first human. Kinda thought I'd be able to, you know, run around as an awesome human and finish out the last few Feats I hadn't collected. Nope. Game over. This game does one thing really well: it perfectly captures running up and down jungle trees, swinging from branches, and dodging prehistoric wildlife. The rest of the game falls short.Show moreShow less
160.6 hours at review503 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
reject humanity return to monkeyShow moreShow less
41.9 hours at review1,003 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I was really excited for this game to hit the steam store. I liked the concept a lot, but after playing it for myself, the execution is very poor. I played to the point of passing a few generations, but have yet to evolve. I understand that when evolving, things get better as you can do more, but the early game is really rough and it can be improved. **Edit: A lot of the comments I have seen say to just "play with a controller, it's better." The problem with that is that this game is a PC port, it should already have support for the keyboard. I changed bindings around to make it less of a pain. I have tried playing with a controller. Playing with a controller isn't something I like doing so I rather use keyboard and mouse. You shouldn't dis-miss this review because "you said keyboard controls bad, use controller." I looked around at other reviews/recommendations for the game and a lot of them insult people who don't use controllers. You shouldn't tell people not to play a game if they don't like using a controller. It's their personal preference and choice. And in this review I didn't "rip" on the controls. Only saying its unusual to have sprint/jump binded to one control.** Pros: -Tree swinging is fun, though after reading other reviews, a lot of people have trouble with it. -Discovering your environment is really cool. -Crafting and altering is cool. -Slow progression make sense and it's actually really fun to think about what you need to do next and how you can make a sharp stick, etc. -Reinforcing your neuronal traits with generations is interesting, yet you should be able to reinforce a lot more traits instead of just 2 or 3 here and there. I always traveled with 2 children yet I only ever seemed to be able to reinforce 3 traits every passing of generation, even though my neuronal tree was pretty filled out. Cons: -The control scheme. Jump and sprint are the same control (called "body movement"). If you play on keyboard you hold the space bar to sprint. Tapping space bar is for jumping. Confusing right? In order to stop sprinting, you must stop moving, otherwise if you let go of the space bar while moving, you will jump anyways. -The lack of your clan members having any personality or brain at all. I found myself doing a lot of my own thing in the tutorial, so I developed a lot into the neuronal tree. This tree doesn't make your clan members also have the same traits as you. So when trying to move settlements with your clan, if you get attacked by a tiger, its over for them. You can try to do a clan intimidate to scare the predator away, which almost 100% of the time guarantees you getting out of this encounter, but for some reason they just kept coming back and attacking my clan members anyways. Not only was that a problem, but having to micro-manage your clan all the time is frustrating. You need to show them how to eat, drink, and sleep. Now this would be easy and cool if you had to do this just once, that would make sense, but having to show them every time is frustrating. If you see me drink water, that means you can drink that water. If I leave and you need water, can't you just drink the same water again? Do you really need me to show you a second time that you can drink water? -The dodging system. If you're in an encounter with a predator and you try to escape from this encounter, you will most likely climb up a tree or a rock wall. Now if you're not fast enough or you're still low on the tree trunk/wall, the game will force you to fall straight to the ground and try to dodge the "incoming attack". This is really annoying and I'm not sure if it's a bug. -Jumping from tree to tree. In the beginning of the game I've had to stay mostly in the tree tops to be safe from predators below. This make sense, but sometimes when jumping from branch to branch, even though you are centimeters away from it, you can still fall straight to the ground instead of just grabbing it with your hands. I'm not sure if this can be developed into a "motor skill" later on, like reaction time, even though we already know dodging. There were cases where I would jump to a tree branch directly in front of me and still fall down to the ground. -After exploring and discovering everything in your environment, there really isn't much to the game. The full price tag swayed me away from buying it at first, but when it was finally released on steam, it was 50% off. I figured I would get it and play. If I bought this game at full price, I would be extremely disappointed. There should be more content added to this game. Conclusion: If you're still interested in this game after my review, buy it when it's on sale (60% off or even higher) or do some more research. Watch game play but don't watch any creator sponsored by Epic Games, as they will most likely shill for the game since it was an Epic Exclusive for a year. It's not worth the $50CDN price tag. If the devs made a bit more content to the game, make some more of the early game tutorials detailed (I get the point of you're supposed to learn it on your own, but if I don't know how half the controls work or what some of the abilities do, how am I supposed to progress?), and if they fix the dodging system, I would recommend it. In it's current state I cannot.Show moreShow less
9.6 hours at review487 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
monkeShow moreShow less
28.7 hours at review925 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Loved the concept hated the execution. Essentially this game could be best described as a crafting survival simulation where you have to craft the crafting tree. You do that by "experimenting" with what you start with and grow from there. Experimenting is in quotes because as a video game you're limited in what you can do by default and really you'll not so much experiment as do everything with everything. New item? Hold X to inspect. New food? Eat it. When it says experiment it means hold the X or A buttons, maybe swap hands and smack item A with item B. While thematically it makes sense its a routine found in every crafting game. The concept of fear is lack of familiarity but becoming more familiar again involves routine which again makes sense but isn't fun. You investigate for things you've already discovered, eat some food, etc. and you become less fearful of new areas. Its as if you were crafting courage because functionally its an in-world crafting tree just like "experimenting" is. Evolution is one of the least explained mechanics in the game to the point that 30 min after I left the menu during the tutorial for it I forgot how to access it. There's no way to refer to tutorials after they're gone and the controls menu has no evolution menu because all the controls are contextual. I can't fathom why the game doesn't let you refer to tutorials later as now I would either have to google how to do something I think should be easily accessible or start over. Which I pretty much was at that point anyway because two or three of my clan members died due to one hit kill tigers. Everything about my 90 min of playtime was interesting for sure. Of that I won't deny. But was it fun? Nope. Was it challenging? Nope. Given my clan is the most important thing in the game its a shame none of them have a personality but they do have a name I have to navigate the intelligence menu to access. I have no motivation to see any of them survive and death is passed off as you immediately switch to another clan member. If you have no more you must start a new game. Where you start crafting the crafting tree all over again. One held button press at a time. I expected to do more than hold buttons in this game.Show moreShow less
1.5 hours at review467 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
YOU'RE FINALLY AWAKE! THAT FALL LOOKED REALLY BAD. INDUSTRIALIZED SOCIETY? HUMANS? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? LETS GO EAT ANTS.Show moreShow less
0.4 hours at review635 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Feeling super betrayed that I suffered through hours and hours of extremely repetitive gameplay only to find that the game's goal to evolve into the missing link is a 10 second cutscene and then a reversion to your last save.... You do not get to play the last evolution. Even after the credits. You get reverted to the previous species. Like, you seriously could not be bothered to code in the entire reason for playing this game? Unreal... After a certain point the game becomes EXTREMELY repetitive and you have to suffer a lot of tedium to stick it out and finish the game. Getting to play that sweet final evolution was well deserved. TLDR, you will never escape, you will always return to monke.Show moreShow less
47.2 hours at review377 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.