Stoned Ape Hypothesis

I’m actually a bit familiar with the theory behind SAH, by virtue of having some entheogen enthusiast friends in college – the idea, as I recall it at any rate, is that human cognitive evolution was occasionally bootstrapped by an adventurous Cro-Magnon snacking on psilocybin-containing mushrooms, with concomitant increases in creativity, perceptual acuity, social engagement, de-prioritization of self, and so on. I was and am skeptical, not least from observing the behavior of said friends while high (I kid, love to you all) but it’s a fun idea, right up there with “our corpus callosum used to be less effective so gods and miracles were just the two halves of our brain not being able to play nicely together.”

SAH doesn’t do too much with this setup, but it does provide a structure that lends a nice progression to a fairly standard series of puzzles. You play a (nameless, but I suppose that’s appropriate) early human who wanders around a small map, resolving such era-appropriate problems as cutting wood, making fire, and obtaining clothes. Intermittently you find and snack on a hallucinogenic mushroom which, in a neat touch, makes the prose of the game grow more sophisticated to represent your increasing mental acuity (though I only really noticed the first shift – there was an opportunity to expand this a bit more, I think).

Oddly, most of your attempts at mastering your environment are prompted by seeing other, more advanced humans wear clothes and make fire. The reason why they’re more advanced, and you’re still flailing around with the basics, wasn’t explained as far as I could tell, and I think this was a misstep – because you’re just playing catchup, and doing things that the player can grasp in an instant, this feels less like guiding a pioneer into a new age of cognitive development, and more like helping an utter thicko learn to take care of himself.

The puzzles themselves are fine so far as they go, though playing tic-tac-toe feels a bit silly, and I struggled with the implementation of mancala, with some confusing ASCII art and what might have been non-standard rules leaving me flailing (I still won even though I thought I was trying to put my stones in the wrong bowl, which suggests the AI opponent is not trying to put up much of a fight). Overall, it’s the Stone Age environment, including reasonably well-detailed depictions of tool use in an early society, that are the highlights here, providing a fairly unique backdrop to the otherwise quite standard adventuring.