Stoned Ape Hypothesis by James Heaton
I used to have some friends who were great fans of Terence McKenna, so I have a passing familiarity with his ideas. (One of them later found Jesus and told me that McKenna might have been a bit satanic, just in case you need to know.) But… well, actually Stoned Ape Hypothesis doesn’t engage with the theory in its title in any meaningful way. Rather, its basic premise is that you play a human(oid) with mere animal intelligence, whose mental skills increase every time he manages to eat a psychedelic mushroom. You learn to think coherently, to use tools, to play games, and finally to defeat a savage creature – which is your ticket into human company.
As you get the idea for an axe and manage to make one, it is hard not to be reminded of that famous scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the ape gets the idea of using a bone as a club. But where the movie makes a dark point about the link between technology and violence, Stoned Ape Hypothesis is pretty much a charming feel-good piece. It doesn’t seem that anything is lost in our transition into intelligence. Indeed, the ferocious beast you defeat is described as a being filled with hatred – a strange projection into nature of a human emotion that can surely only exist in the confines of civilisation. But this perhaps illustrates the rosy view the game has of the human ape.
The high point of the game is no doubt the implementation of the stone placement game (I’ve forgotten the name), which works surprisingly well. It also reaffirms the game’s fundamentally playful nature.