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Review
Homo Sapiens is a BDB adventure in which the PC is one of the earliest members of our species. The player's goal is to survive and find a mate.
HS worked better for me than the previous BDB game I tried, The Wrath of Anubis, because HS's lore and goals and elemental qualities are all in alignment. Playing an unsophisticated character in a raw world of physical dangers is the kind of thing that suits a two-word parser well. Not that this is strictly two-word; the BDB adventures are built in Inform, but of course the source material is a 1980s two-worder.
Being close to pre-tools, the PC must mostly make good use of nature. Breaking things will involve scaling heights. Zapping things will involve exploiting bad weather. Animals can interact with each other to player advantage, and weather can change the environment.
HS is a short game but it has a good density of environmental variation in both the map and mechanics. It also has some of the less kind logic of early 1980s games. For instance, you can't just exploit any height, only the ones especially set up by the game, even though there are other high-seeming places. With a map of this size, that's not a big problem. And the HINTs don't go too deep but at least they're there.
The scientific opinion as I write this is that women probably were involved in hunting and stuff, too, contrary to most popular depictions of prehistoric people. This game is a retake of a 1980s game which was one of those popular depictions, but there's really no social scope here, not even an apparatus for one. HS's action is about solving environmental puzzles in a prehistoric world. Its focus on natural solutions is a point of interest. The moment the social level is broached, the game is over. I'm not going to hold that against forty-year-old source material about some poor prehistoric bastard seeking to scramble up a rung or two on the hierarchy of needs.
