7 Grand Steps: What Ancients Begat

I bought this extremely unique game over a decade ago, in my teens, and it marked such a before and after in my perception of what a game could be and who could make them with its engaging gameplay and simple but polished presentation that I thought it a massive success, a cornerstone of indie games that surely everyone must have stumbled upon circa 2013. I only found out that wasn't the case a couple of weeks ago checking the reviews, and I made a point to return back to it to see if it held up the way I remembered it to leave the 300th (counted) review. It not only holds up, it's plain amazing. Where in 2013, despite it feeling frustratingly hard at the time, I spent hours upon hours trying to get my family to survive the copper age, today, after 13 years, I found out that you can play well enough for the game to actually crown your family and continue to the next age. I'm in the bronze age now, gazing in horror upon the fact this game left an indelible mark on my heart and I'd barely even seen what it had to offer. The one frustrating mechanic I recall from playing as a teen was memorizing the patterns for the adventures, and I'm still not a fan at all since it seems playing th…

An interesting concept at its core but it eventually gets rather repetitive. Potentially more enjoyable as a multiplayer game, but single-player it feels very empty. You have a system of having two characters you use to make tokens and children, and use those tokens to advance in inspiration, adventure, discovery, and training the children, which is a neat idea at first. There is a good amount of strategy involved in balancing out when you want to make new tokens, and when you want to use those tokens to avoid getting eaten by crocodiles, or to get the beads needed for advancement. The problem is because the tokens you receive are dependent upon what you trained the children up as, it can potentially take forever to advance at all i.e. if you trained them up with pottery but neglected forging, then pottery will turn up far more frequently during token making. This causes the game to become a slow trudge as you desperately wait forever for one of the less frequent tokens to turn up to give to the next generation, and start to try and balance them out. Problem there is the generation will often end before you've sufficiently done so, and the cycle begins anew. Perhaps it's …

Better than it has any right to be; does indeed feel like a slot machine at times, but you have to do the best you can with what you have, and that might just be the lesson

The developer made the effort to add Steam Trading Cards, but couldn’t be bothered to add Steam achievements. That’s a shame because there are plenty of things that could have been turned into achievements across the different generations and ages. The game also becomes extremely repetitive, with the same board-game mechanics repeated for hours, while the random story events can feel confusing and give you little indication of why your choices had certain outcomes. An interesting concept, but it feels like it could have used a lot more polish and Steam support.

This is a very nice and relaxing game. You start with a lowborn character, form a family... and try to raise it to reach a better status, eventually to the aristocracy, the senate and beyond. Game is really special. Not many like these

Come for the weirdly satisfying coin slots, stay for the multigenerational emotional damage.