Cro Magnon

Cro Magnon is an Early Access survival and strategy game set in the prehistoric era, developed and published by Thor Gaming. Players guide a tribe of Cro-Magnon people through the challenges of early human existence, focusing on raw survival mechanics like resource gathering, tribe management, and development. The game, built with the Unity engine, features a 3rd-person perspective and a point-and-select interface, placing players in a world where they must respond to community feedback to help shape the game’s ongoing development.

Cro Magnon: A Cautionary Tale of Ambition and Abandonment in Early Access

In the vast and often unforgiving landscape of video game development, few stories are as simultaneously intriguing and disheartening as that of Cro Magnon. Released into the wilds of Steam’s Early Access program in 2018 by the small indie outfit Thor Gaming, this real-time strategy title promised a brutal, unvarnished journey back to 39,000 BC. It offered a vision of primal survival, clan dominance, and the twilight of the Neanderthals. Instead, it became a stark case study in the perils of premature release, unfulfilled potential, and the quiet, unceremonious death of a project that once held a glimmer of promise.

Development History & Context

Thor Gaming, a studio with little to no prior public footprint, embarked on an ambitious project with Cro Magnon. Developed on the Unity engine, the game was conceived as a gritty, survival-focused RTS in the vein of titles like Banished or RimWorld, but set against the uniquely harsh backdrop of prehistory. The vision, as articulated by Lead Developer Mathias Carlsson on the Steam forums, was to create a game where “mercy is for the rich and prosperous, for a Cro Magnon clan struggling to survive it will more often than not be counterproductive.”

This vision was born into a specific and challenging context: the Steam Early Access ecosystem of the late 2010s. This was a platform crowded with hopeful indie projects, all vying for attention and player investment. Thor Gaming’s strategy was unorthodox and, in hindsight, deeply flawed. They chose to release the game at a remarkably early stage of development. As Carlsson himself admitted in a pivotal August 2018 post, “We’ve chosen to release the game as Early Access fairly early in the development process (and with some features disabled).” The stated goal was noble: to involve the community directly in the creative process, allowing player feedback to shape the game’s evolution from its foundational systems upward.

However, this approach came with immediate and significant caveats. The developer openly warned potential players that the game was “low on actual content,” missing basic quality-of-life features like a “quick start guide,” and that those expecting a near-complete experience would be “disappointed.” This radical transparency, while commendable for its honesty, ultimately served as a deterrent rather than an invitation for collaborative development.

A Ghost from the Past: The Other Cro Magnon

Adding a layer of historical irony to this tale is the existence of another, entirely different game of the same name. As documented on the Cancelled Games Wiki, a Cro Magnon was once conceived in the 1980s by legendary animator Don Bluth. Planned as an interactive LaserDisc game in the style of Dragon’s Lair, it would have featured a caveman protagonist “battling fierce creatures and ultimately defeat[ing] an evil warlord.” This project was a casualty of the great video game crash of 1983 and budgeting issues, never moving beyond the concept stage. The resurrection of the name decades later for a small-scale indie strategy game is a curious footnote in gaming history, linking two vastly different failed ambitions across three decades.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

On paper, Cro Magnon‘s premise was its strongest asset. The game is set in Europe, 39,000 BC, a period of profound ecological and anthropological transition. The player commands a clan of Cro-Magnon humans, a group synonymous with the dawn of modern humanity, who have just discovered a fertile valley. This setting is not an empty paradise; it is a contested space, already inhabited by Neanderthals, who are presented as “fighting a losing battle for survival of their species.”

The potential for a rich, thematic narrative was immense. The game could have explored themes of migration, displacement, the brutality of necessity, and the ethical cost of survival. The official description frames the world in stark, Darwinian terms: “It is a cruel and brutal world. Only the cruel and brutal will survive and ultimately dominate.” This establishes a clear thematic throughline: the sacrifice of humanity for the sake of humanity’s future.

Yet, in its released state, these themes remained entirely theoretical. The game launched without a narrative structure, character development, or any form of storytelling beyond the overarching premise. There were no characters to speak of, only generic units designated by role and gender. The dialogue was non-existent. The profound historical moment—the co-existence and eventual replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens—was reduced to a simple combat mechanic, a “remove or be removed” gameplay loop stripped of its narrative weight.

The most fascinating insights into the game’s intended thematic depth come not from the game itself, but from the developer’s discussions with players on Steam. A player named Séamus engaged in a detailed dialogue with Mathias, suggesting implementations that could have given the game immense thematic richness:

• Inter-clan Relationships: Proposing tribal hierarchies, roles for elders as teachers, and the societal impact of such structures.
• Spiritual Development: Suggesting the inclusion of animistic shamanism, vision quests, and rites of passage to explore the dawn of human spirituality and its tangible effects on community cohesion and fertility.
• Technological Progression: Moving beyond simple tools to traps, clothing, and shelters, charting the course of human innovation.

Mathias responded thoughtfully to these ideas, acknowledging their value and even outlining basic systems for social hierarchy and rites that could grant “prestige, special abilities or increase certain stats.” He confirmed that a basic tech tree was present, allowing progression “from sticks to clubs to bone axes to stone axes,” alongside improvements in housing, planting, and animal husbandry.

This exchange highlights the tragic gap between Cro Magnon‘s potential and its reality. The game possessed a framework upon which a deeply thematic, culturally rich survival sim could have been built. Yet, these concepts never evolved beyond forum discussions and the developer’s internal “testing” phases.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

At its core, Cro Magnon was a top-down, point-and-click real-time strategy game. The core loop involved managing a small clan of prehistoric people, directing them to perform essential survival tasks: gathering food, hunting animals, constructing basic buildings, and defending against threats.

The systems, as described by the developer and evidenced by the game’s achievements, were rudimentary but functional:

• Resource Management: The primary resources were food and people. Clan members had to eat to survive, and population was managed through birth and the grim realities of death from starvation, animal attacks, or conflict.
• Combat: A simple system where designated “warriors” (exclusively male, a point of contention) were used to attack Neanderthal camps and rival Cro-Magnon clans. Achievements like “Survival of the fittest” for eliminating a Neanderthal camp and “Conqueror” for removing a neighbor confirm this PvE and PvP combat focus.
• Progression: A linear tech tree was in place, unlocked through gameplay. Achievements such as “Armourer” (Build a Bone Axe), “Weaponsmith” (Build a Stone Axe), “Farmer” (Learn to grow crops), and “Shepherd” (Raise a Goat Herd) map out a clear path from hunter-gatherer to early agricultural society.
• Unit Roles: The game differentiated between units. Men could be warriors; women were initially restricted to gathering and childbearing, a design choice Mathias explained was to make genders “different types of ‘resources’ that you would have to keep in some balance.” After player feedback, he conceded that women should likely be able to defend themselves at least against animals.

However, the overarching testimony from the developer is that these systems were a bare-bones “base game system.” The UI was undoubtedly basic, and the lack of in-game guidance made the already shallow mechanics difficult to engage with. The most damning evidence of the game’s unfinished state is its achievement statistics. Global unlock data shows that the most common achievement, “Hunter,” was only unlocked by 52.2% of players. More complex tasks like “Weaponsmith” had a 0.5% unlock rate. This indicates that the vast majority of players who launched the game found it so incomplete or impenetrable that they failed to engage with even its most basic systems for more than a few minutes.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Cro Magnon‘s world-building was almost entirely descriptive rather than experiential. The Steam description paints a picture of a “rich and fertile” yet dangerous land, but the actual in-game art, built in Unity, failed to realize this vision.

From what can be gathered, the visual direction was likely functional and minimalistic. As a small indie project, it would not have featured high-fidelity graphics. The atmosphere intended was one of constant, desperate struggle—a bleak and unforgiving world where every sunrise brought new threats. The sound design remains a complete unknown, with no references to it in any available material, suggesting it was either minimal, placeholder, or simply nonexistent.

The true world-building existed in the concept: the idea of a valley where three forces (your clan, other Cro-Magnon clans, and Neanderthals) vie for dominance in a time of ecological and evolutionary change. This compelling setup was a promise the game’s assets were never developed enough to keep.

Reception & Legacy

The reception of Cro Magnon is defined by one overwhelming fact: it has no official critic reviews. On Metacritic, the page for the game lists no critical scores. On MobyGames, the section for critic reviews is empty, with a prompt reading “Be the first to add a critic review for this title!” The game effectively slipped beneath the radar of the professional gaming press upon release.

User engagement was minimal. The Steam community discussions are sparse, filled mostly with questions about the game’s status and a few hopeful players offering suggestions. The most active thread is the one started by the developer, which became a de facto post-mortem.

The game’s legacy is not one of influence or commercial success, but of caution. It serves as a textbook example of how not to approach Early Access. Releasing a game in a profoundly incomplete state, even with the best intentions of community collaboration, is a tremendous gamble. In this case, it resulted in a lack of player engagement, which in turn starved the project of the feedback it needed to grow. The developer’s admission in January 2019 that “development has been put on hold for now, since our coding resources are required elsewhere” was the final, quiet nail in the coffin. The game was officially abandoned, joining the long list of “vaporware” titles that haunt the Steam store.

Its legacy is also one of a fascinating “what if.” The dialogue between Mathias and the community proves there was a kernel of a truly innovative and thoughtful game buried within the concept. Had it been developed internally to a more feature-complete state before seeking player feedback, Cro Magnon could have been a cult classic for fans of hardcore survival sims.

Conclusion

Cro Magnon is a poignant artifact in video game history. It is not a game to be reviewed in the traditional sense, as it was never truly finished. It is a blueprint, a promise, and a warning. The ambition to create a gritty, historically set survival RTS was admirable. The concept of exploring the brutal transition of power between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon was ripe with potential. The developer’s desire to involve the community was theoretically commendable.

In practice, however, Cro Magnon stands as a monument to failed execution. Its release was too early, its systems too bare, and its content too sparse to attract or sustain a community. The subsequent abandonment of the project confirms its status as a curiosity—a game that exists not as a playable experience, but as a discussion point on the risks of Early Access and the harsh realities of indie game development.

The final verdict on Cro Magnon is that it is a fascinating footnote. For game historians, it is a case study. For players, it is a $0.99 reminder that not all early access stories have a happy ending. It is the ghost of a game that could have been, a vision of primal survival that never truly learned how to live.