lol the kotaku review for ancestors is basically: wow i can't believe this game is so punishing and i have to learn everything myself i had to restart the game 3 times because theres no faqs but at least you won't have to since it'll be out and not prerelease!!!
i played through this game blind for like 30 hours, and yes admittedly the game gets pretty grindy after the 20th hour because the rate of progress starts to slow as you get closer to the end, it becomes a lot harder to level up skills because things like walking upright and going from prey to killing sabertooth tigers takes a lot of time and it can start to wear you down a bit but if you focus on exploring and seeing new things and going for evolution feats instead of things like leveling up neurons it's pretty good at mitigating the tedium
but really, restart 3 times? that's your own fault then, he didnt even manage to beat the game either
i've lost like 8 people before because of a mistake (that's a fucking lot in this game, you can only have like 16 at most or something) and i came back from it in about 2 generations, if anything the game becomes tedious after 20 hours because it gets TOO easy to recover from failure because by then you're so good at dealing with hardship because if you DONT RESTART everytime you fuck up and keep going you learn more and the skill tree itself advances you so you do better next time
the best part is that the review opens with "if this is how humans started no wonder we're so messed up" like they had no concept of what actually living in nature as a prey animal is like
i know it's kotaku but for fucks sake man