Humanity – oh no! more humans (pic: Enhance)



The publisher of Rez and Tetris Effect presents a brand new puzzler that is one of the best, and strangest, games of the year.



After having played a game like Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom for over a hundred hours, whatever comes next risks being a considerable disappointment. You certainly wouldn’t want to play another open world adventure straight away and so in that sense alone Humanity is the perfect palette cleanser. The name may sound grandiose but swap it for Lemmings and you instantly get a better idea of what it’s all about.



We’re not sure how popular Amiga classic Lemmings was in Japan, or if younger gamers today know what it is, but for a more modern comparison, Humanity is also faintly similar to the puzzle sections from Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart . Humanity also recalls the golden era of 90s and early 2000s puzzlers in general – a time when major puzzle games weren’t just the reserve of indie developers and mobile games and could be just as weird and imaginative as other titles – often more so.



Like any good puzzle game, Humanity sounds a lot more complicated when you explain it, than it actually is in practice. The premise and story are also pretty impenetrable and yet none of this is a problem once you start playing, and you realise that while the idea of controlling a ghost dog leading streams of people to the light makes little obvious sense, it is the basis for one of the best puzzle titles of the last decade.



Humanity does have a story mode but there’s no voice-acting and it’s all told through subtitles, which are frustrating easy to miss when they suddenly start up. The gist of it is, though, that you start the game suddenly aware that you’re a dog – which seemingly comes as a shock to your character. You are then trusted with guiding a never-ending stream of people who have ‘lost their sense of purpose’ towards mysterious pillars of light.



Despite the obvious afterlife connotations that’s not exactly what’s going on, and your doggy-self acts less like a psychopomp and more like a traffic cop. The game works by disgorging humans from a portal-like door, at which point the humans, like lemmings, mindlessly walk forward with no regard for their own safety (although they appear to die if they fall too far or off the side of the stage the game implies they’re immediately reconstituted to come back out the door again).



Your goal is to get them to one or more pillars of light, by barking and telling them to move in a certain direction. The stages are set out on a grid, so despite all the window dressing with the dog what you’re really doing is laying down arrows that point in one of the four cardinal directions, which all humans will follow no matter what.



That’s the basics but the game quickly starts to add in additional commands, such as to jump or shoot, to split the crowd or even mess around with gravity. There’s quite a list by the end but only a small number are ever used on the same stage, so it never gets overwhelming. Instead, it feels almost Nintendo-esque in the way it keeps adding new ideas, that are then explored and dissected over a small subset of levels.



Humanity – you never know what’s coming next (pic: Enhance)



The abilities of the humans also increase over time, starting with special surfaces that they can climb, to the ability to swim and push blocks. There are also collectible ‘Goldy’ characters who do not reincarnate and are supposedly the manifestation of earthly ambition. At the same time, some stages only give you a finite number of people to work with or introduce rival characters that your humans have to fight for control of a Goldy.



The level of creativity is hugely impressive, as the game evolves from what at first seems like a simple, throwaway puzzler to something that soon begins to defy description, becoming increasingly unpredictable in terms of what new feature or design wrinkle it will throw at you next.



There are some minor problems with the difficulty curve, which can be quite uneven but, surprisingly, every level has a video solution built into the game. It won’t tell you how to get a Goldy, or any other secrets, but it’s essentially impossible to get stuck – with no need to ever visit YouTube.



While there is a large element of trial and error to the game, when you reach for the restart button to try again your commands remain, so you’re not starting from scratch and can just retune your strategy as needed. Which shows someone was thinking carefully about not only how the game works but how it will be played by ordinary people.



Beyond the story levels there’s also an impressively powerful level designer (and an optional VR mode). It’s indicated as only being in beta but there are a number of stages you can download already, we assume from the developers, and every hope that once it launches officially a thriving community will rise around it, as this is every bit as compelling a design experience as Super Mario Maker or LittleBigPlanet.



In the end, perhaps there is a connection with Tears Of The Kingdom after all, in that Humanity goes to such lengths to exploit its features to the very fullest, creating endless unexpected puzzles and concepts that surprise and delight in equal fashion. Humanity’s fumbling narrative won’t tell you much about the human condition, but it does have an awful lot to say about fun, imaginative game design.






Humanity review summary In Short: A fantastically clever puzzler that would be perfectly welcome if it was just a 3D Lemmings clone, but it soon evolves into something far more imaginative and unpredictable.
Pros: The central concept is weird but instantly accessible. Impressively varied stages and a constantly increasing range of options. Neat visuals and a fully featured construction kit.
Cons: The difficulty curve isn’t the smoothest and the storytelling is not engaging.
Score: 9/10





Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), PlayStation 4, and PC Price: £24.99 Publisher: Enhance Developer: tha ltd. Release Date: 16th May 2023 Age Rating: 7









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