After about 20 hours guiding hundreds of thousands of these strange little men through more imaginative mysteries than I can count, I’m left with a childlike joy and at least more confidence in my problem-solving skills than when I first started playing Humanity. Each of its maps is simple enough to be solved in about 10-20 minutes, yet it never stops playing with platforming elements, diving into real-time strategy, stealth, and even occasional arcade shooters. Its bewildering possibilities are as limitless as its endless swarms of human minions, and thanks to its comprehensive and effortlessly simple creator, it comes close to open-ended Little Big Planet levels that will inevitably keep me coming back for months, if not years.
Let’s back up just one second and explain exactly what humanity is He is. It’s a puzzle game from the brains behind Tetris Effect and Rez at Enhance Games, which explains why it’s so weird-looking and awesome. You play as a ghostly Shiba Inu with the ability to make humans do your bidding, and the primary goal is to guide your followers through each map, usually doing things like manipulating time and physics to clear a suitable path. No, the thin story doesn’t make any sense – it’s not much of a focus, just like in Rez. But Humanity loosely references some interesting metaphors about human nature, and that somehow works to explain some of its wildest moments. …don’t ask about it. You have to play it yourself to make the pieces fit.
It really is a modern take on Lemmings, but if you played Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, you might remember some sequences where you run around as Clank channels infinite versions of yourself. This is essentially what you do in Humanity, but it’s much more flexible, with far more tools at your disposal to alter the fate of the endless stream of human followers.
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This means running and jumping around the map on your own, placing commands like Turn, Jump, Shoot, etc. I’ve had heaps of fun watching my initial strategies and mechanics fail until I miraculously figure things out every time I progress to the next level, because trial and error is fun when tinkering is fun. It’s great that you can restart the map at any time without resetting your current commands – this allows me to rethink my steps on an iterative level without throwing all my progress away after every miss.
There’s quite a bit of action too, as sometimes you need to run around the map like a mad puppy and change orders you’ve already placed when certain conditions are met; For example, in one level, you organize a group of humans to push a block into place while another group pushes a block apart, working together to create a path that both groups can jump across to escape an encroaching swarm of enemies. This is just one example, but it illustrates the basic premise of humanity and how each of the interlocking systems gives way to a seemingly limitless number of challenges.
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Playing as a Shiba Inu works well here, especially considering that your small stature and quick movement give you the ability to deftly weave between groups of humans, dashing, jumping and even using your minions to fling yourself through crowds. It all feels great in action, and with the DualSense controller pulsating and pulsating in my hands, it all came together beautifully.
It’s bizarre to see thousands of individuals flying through my TV or inside my VR goggles at once, and so many jaw-dropping individual sightings of humanity. This is due to the bewildering technical wizardry of managing this crowd and the way it uses eye-catching fantasy scenes to burn every moment of contentment in my brain. An early puzzle had me creating my own state machine, a logic mechanism made up of thousands of individual people jumping between four platforms in an infinite loop, skipping pressure plates. This allowed me to send a separate group up a ledge and hop their way to safety.
You’d think lots of moving objects running around the screen at once would get confusing or even sickening, but the Humanity camera system handles so well both in and out of VR that you’re always in control of what you’re watching. When you need to zoom in to get a closer look or zoom out to get a bigger picture, it’s easy and simple to adjust your view to focus where you want it.
Sometimes, these endless loops continue even after you hit the victory screen, allowing you to enjoy the literal cuteness of your problem-solving abilities. Again, this is just one potential example of how these mechanics intertwine to create interesting challenges, and honestly it was one of the simplest I’ve come across. Humanity’s open-ended nature means it never slows down or grows too often, and discovering each of the many clever puzzles feels like an entirely new experience that’s uniquely satisfying each time. This is especially true given how challenging they can be if you don’t look at the conveniently included solution videos that help you with basic solutions but don’t go overboard or spoil any secrets, like how to unlock optional objectives on any given map.
These secret goals are the backbone of humanity’s progression system, and you need to unlock a certain number of them in each action to advance. You can’t just do the bare minimum of hauling humans from point A to point B and expect a pat on the head; This game requires more thinking from you. But it was never a burden since it wasn’t too hard to find or unlock, and it usually just adds extra layers of satisfying challenge while giving away more experience points along the way. Just knowing the way you solved the level isn’t necessarily the only way that adds a lot of replayability.
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There’s a nifty progression system that levels you up as you complete side objectives, unlocking timely rewards like new cosmetics for your human minions and even new gameplay features like the ability to speed up time – or visit the stats page hidden from the menu that tells you exactly how many humans have spawned during your entire journey . The best part about all of this is that you can use the same rewards when you eventually start creating your own puzzles and maps – which you can share with the world at the press of a button.
If you play enough custom maps or get your levels rated enough in User Stages mode, you’ll get XP in a bunch of completely separate progression systems that feel complementary but never essential. You’ll gradually unlock cooler images of social clout, but these systems wisely avoid affecting gameplay. In any case, the User Stages mode is really packed with interesting levels that extend Humanity’s toolkit of mechanics beyond the limits of what Enhance thought most people would be comfortable with in the main campaign, and it’s easy to navigate directly to the best player-created levels through an indexing system. easy to use. I could easily spend hours here, and might even have avoided the campaign altogether if I’d discovered User Stages mode first, but I’m glad I played a tutorial of the super-evolving levels people create. .
And all of this is enhanced by Humanity’s VR compatibility, which will work with either a PlayStation VR headset or PC VR. It’s a perfectly viable way to play any level, although the VR mode is disappointingly not geared up to work with the Stage Creator tool itself just yet. However, I’m glad Humanity gives you the option to enter a full VR mode from the main menu, which puts you right in the action – or you can stick to PS VR2’s Theater mode and curl up on the couch and play on a flat virtual screen. Both modes work comfortably with the DualSense controller, though I wasn’t quite as impressed when I tried it with the Sense controllers in PS VR2. They just didn’t feel like a natural fit, since you’re controlling a small dog with a joystick rather than doing anything with motion controls. That’s certainly a small issue when compared to the fact that I encountered almost no noticeable bugs minus a stray crash that happened in VR later in my play.
Humanity also includes a wonderful vocal-synthesis-based score with some piano and other textural elements that can only be described as vibration. Its melodies are simple, repetitive, and sometimes a little silly, but each note is appropriately relaxed, and sets a nice pace for brainstorming. Even relatively active parts of the soundtrack, namely during boss fights, have a steady drone that makes them sit comfortably in the background.
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