In Humanity, vast groups of people are guided through increasingly difficult tasks. You won’t be able to put the controller down while working on an amazing puzzle game.
Publication Date: 16 May 2023
Studio: Tha
Publisher: Extend
Available on: PC (Windows), PlayStation 4 and 5 (Trial)
Player: 1
Age Limit: 7
Games played for rating: 19 hours
A good puzzle game is much more than a series of brain-tickling tasks. This is what comes to mind when playing the fresh “action-puzzle game” Humanity. It is such an inventive game that after playing it you feel like it has raised the bar for all future puzzle games. In the future, I will forcefully compare puzzle games to how well humanity is designed.
In the game developed by the Japanese Tha-Studio, the idea itself stands out from the crowd. The basic idea is that the player guides endless hordes of people through real playgrounds. The game character is a glowing Shiba dog, which by barking sets off different commands throughout the game level: turn this direction, jump here and so on.
However, this is just the beginning. The developers of Humanity are not content to build the game only on certain mechanics and make the tasks more and more complex. Instead, the game continually introduces new modes of play, mechanics, and features as it progresses. Just as some of the levels start to sound similar, the game does something different. However, the mechanics rely on each other and their combinations create not only new puzzles, but new ways of creating puzzles.
The game levels are organized into a series of around 10 tasks, each with its own theme. For example, in a chain related to fate, all orders must be given in advance, and once the flow of people has begun they cannot be changed. Then comes the competitive crowd, which again completely changes the game. And soon humanity will also invent weapons, and then sport will show its claws!
I don’t even feel like disclosing all the features. After all, humanity pleasantly surprises you at times when you get to do something you might never have thought of in the first place.
The theme and new gameplay features are tied to the story of humanity, which is… ambiguous. In the beginning, the player wakes up as a dog in this strange reality where a strange voice speaks to him. The goal is to gather people in a void called the Testing Grounds, but you’ll find out what it’s really about as the story progresses.
if you can make it! The story connecting the levels of humanity is such a strange metaphor for humanity that everyone can have their own interpretation of it. Somehow it still works, and the story offers many exhilarating and confusing moments.
The story and puzzle solving come together in a delightfully close way, but above all, humanity is exquisitely balanced. Its new challenges are sometimes bizarre, but never unreasonably difficult. There may be obstacles on some levels, but even on those, you can’t let go of the controller. The game constantly tempts you to try new solutions: but if you first push that box to the left, go around there and then onto the conveyor belt and… and… and…
The levels also have a few different solutions. You can go straight through them or collect Golden Goldies (which, according to the game, represent a person’s hopes and dreams or something like that) planted on the levels. You need some Goldies to advance, but collecting them all is a kind of extra challenge. Some of the most difficult levels are even set as side quests, so you can come back and solve them later if you want.
As an added solace, the game also provides solution videos for the tasks. I personally did not consider it necessary to resort to them, but in this way it is possible to “cheat” a difficult part in humanity. The player is free to choose whether he wants tips or not.
Humanity is also a long game (there are no less than 84 levels!), and then to top it all, the option to create your own playgrounds and levels shared by other players has been added. These features are still beta versions at this stage, but the structure of the levels and the challenges developed by other players bring in more things to do even when the main game is over.
It is difficult to find fault with humanity. The steering feel is sometimes a bit too “slippery”, so the dog often falls overboard or into potholes. However, this has no consequences, so it’s only annoying in difficult game situations. Sometimes even the camera angle seems to be against the player, but these are only a few of the situations.
Visually, Humanity is designed to be practical rather than decorative, but there’s beauty in the minimalist style and gracefully flowing streams of people, too. Of course, it is difficult to assess how a crowd of thousands of people copes with a light iron or PS4, but at least with the new PlayCar, the number of people is amazing to watch.
Overall, Humanity is a very good puzzle game. It’s relentlessly inventive, long but not long, and challenging but not unreasonable — and most importantly, downright entertaining. The story and its themes then take the gaming experience to a higher level than solving puzzles.
Humanity grapples with the big questions of humanity, such as free will, competition, war, technology, and endless evolution. Again, what does this say about them is a very difficult question to answer. But while thinking about it, you might as well try one more time to save all the Goldies. And then one more time…
humanity
“Humanity is a mind-blowing, perfect puzzle game where a dog leads the course of all of humanity.”
