Humanity (PS5)
If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you jump off after them? While this question is often a retort against conformity, it is human nature to go along with a crowd. It is safer to stay in line, but if no one in the group has a sense of direction, you can be sent walking right over a cliff’s edge. In the puzzle game Humanity, endless processions of people march forward without much thought, content to walk right off a ledge and to their doom. It falls on your shoulders to guide these groups to a safe exit, but amusingly enough you are not even a fellow human looking to help them out.
Humanity has you playing as a glowing white Shiba Inu, and it seems they weren’t always a dog either as they find the situation they’re in quite strange. A voice urges them to try and assist a group of humans walking to their constant doom, and as you begin laying down instructions across various areas to guide humanity to safety, you gradually begin to learn about the grander purpose behind your work. You are participating in a sort of a development process, helping these featureless humans who lack free will regain the vital sparks of life that makes humankind so unique. You’ll eventually start learning more about what necessitated this process as well, and while Humanity doesn’t lay out all the answers to the questions it brings up, it does like to get a little philosophical. Progressing in human development isn’t just about learning more about why you’re doing it in the first place though, the game using its later scenes to craft some visually impressive displays that tap into this game’s most striking feature: it’s ability to display hundreds upon hundreds of moving people all at once.
In most levels of Humanity, a glowing doorway will appear that humans constantly spill out of in a forward marching line. It’s okay if they all tumble to their doom or otherwise meet their end, the supply usually not running out and the game well aware what this could mean for how populated its stages can end up being. Even for the simpler puzzles a level can easily hit over one thousand humans walking along all at once, but this isn’t the only thing they’ll end up doing. They can be made to jump, swim, climb, and eventually even handle weapons, their functions still straightforward and focused but you can have loads of people all walking around a space doing a range of actions. The somewhat simple appearance of humans helps this be possible to render, the PS5 not seeming to struggle at all with even enormous crowds, and one of the most satisfying elements of Humanity is just seeing all the people in motion. Most levels keep things fairly condensed so there aren’t many extraneous areas to send people marching off to, and while this serves its purpose in keeping you considering a more manageable set of variables, it also easily sets up the captivating scenarios where you can watch lines of people weaving around each other with beautiful precision. Rivers and rainbows of mindlessly advancing people certainly make the level’s final solution fascinating to watch unfold, the ant-like marching making levels gorgeous despite the minimalist presentation.
Your part as the guide dog is to help humanity make its way safely to a level’s exit, the player gradually unlocking different commands that facilitate this work. Things begin rather simply, a turn command you can set on the ground to make the marching lines shift direction, a jump command so they can cross gaps or get up a ledge, and even a float tile you can place that will help those who cross it jump higher or survive falls. Humanity’s early levels are essentially about plotting out a course for the humans, and it’s not too surprising when some of the early levels give way to ones where the humans don’t even start marching until you’ve told them to. In those levels, you must place all your commands before activating the glowing doors, the game otherwise allowing you to adjust your command placement on the fly and eventually making it an outright requirement as new concepts enter the picture. Sometimes you’ll want to split off a group to push blocks into place or weigh down buttons, levels growing more complex as active management of your human resources becomes necessary to success.
Humanity conceives of a lot of brain-bending puzzles that involve guiding its human crowds properly, but there are also extra objectives in the form of Goldys. For the most part, the humans you’re guiding are a faceless horde, the player able to unlock new designs for their generic shared appearance but they’ll all behave identically. Goldys though are tall golden beings who are floating in place when you enter a level, the player needing to guide the marching humans towards them so the Goldy can activate and move along with the group. A Goldy can be lost, requiring a level reset if you want to try and earn them again, and some levels do actually require you to grab a Goldy or the level exit won’t open up. However, you don’t need to acquire every Goldy or even clear every level to finish Humanity’s campaign. Goldys do go towards unlocking features like the different skins for humans or being able to see your performance stats, but they also present more advanced challenges within a level, especially as new elements are introduced over the course of the game.
Humanity’s basic puzzle solving premise is effective but can start reaching that point where you have to plan so many moves ahead it can start to be a little too complicated, but thankfully Humanity has a remedy that prevents later levels from being hard rather than entertaining. While Humanity’s early stages introduce new mechanics like different commands to place down or new level pieces like fans that can blow the people around, eventually it starts to mix in entirely new ideas that serve as strong refreshes to the ways you approach levels. One of the biggest changes is in the introduction of Others, a group of humans wearing dark clothes that are out to get your humans and more importantly, your Goldys. Goldys can be made to switch sides if they Others touch them, and the Others are actually what leads to guns and swords being tools you can give your humans, later levels becoming battle puzzles where you need to figure out a battle plan for how you’ll charge your mindless humans into the equally mindless Others. Reacting and adjusting become much bigger parts of play compared to earlier levels where you could slowly plot things out and even make little traps to keep your people busy as you figure out the puzzle, and then even later you can earn a Follow command where the people will actively walk with the dog so you have even greater control of how they can navigate the world.
Rather than relying on increased complication, Humanity continues to innovate as you make it deeper into the game, leading to the game having actual involved boss battles in between the puzzle play. The 90 levels featured end up being a more robust package because of the introduction of ideas with radical changes to how you approach the play, but it is still ultimately about guiding humans around properly, even if sometimes you only have a limited amount or it ends up more of a follow the leader situation than laying down commands for them to blindly follow. Humanity’s challenging campaign isn’t where the game has to end either, as there is the ability to make custom levels and share them online that can further explore the potential of the concepts introduced in the story. With a host of creative designs already found in the main game, you can definitely feel satisfied with just what it offers you, but there are definitely some inventive stages that won’t even require you to dig too deep into the player levels to uncover.
There is a bit of a small quibble to be had with Humanity though, and it does connect back to the ambitious idea of the constantly moving crowds of hundreds of people. For the most part, even when there are huge lines of moving humans on screen, they’ll follow whatever directions you give perfectly, but there is a small chance for variance in their behavior from time to time. A person might somehow break away from the pack and potentially cause an issue by doing something like hitting a switch. You can sometimes restrict walking room for the marching humans that leads to them finding their own way to move forward by going off to the side a bit, but it does seem this can just happen on its own as well. You can never controls the Others, so when I saw one break away from the marching group, hit a Goldy, and lead it astray, it not only demonstrated this issue can arise without your own influence, but it showed that a little variance can sometimes have a catastrophic impact on your ability to clear a level. These deviations from the norm were ultimately quite rare but still annoying to see happen, especially since Humanity lacks what could have been cushioning features. There is an option to pause all movement and get an overview of the level, but you can’t place commands or move your dog avatar around during this. There is no rewind feature that could easily undo such small errors, but this at least might just be a reality of the fact the game can’t possibly be expected to keep track of what thousands of characters did over the course of a level. You can at least reset the level and keep any placed commands on the ground, but Humanity does often feel like it’s a game about reliable behavior from its systems so seeing them go a touch awry even once could potentially lead to a longer level becoming unduly frustrating.
THE VERDICT: Humanity’s human guiding puzzles are challenging to solve but satisfying to see in motion, but it’s willingness to go beyond just issuing commands to the crowd is where it really flexes its creative muscles. You’ll still be trying to manage mindless humans as the game advances, but new ideas like active guidance and combat with Others livens up the puzzle solving and allows it to remain engaging rather than it taking the safe route of simply making more complicated trials for its basics. It can be a touch unforgiving at times since you can’t undo mistakes, but the inventive evolution of its command issuing play makes advancing in its story compelling beyond just the impressive sight of seeing so many humans marching along in unison.
And so, I give Humanity for PlayStation 5…
A GREAT rating. Even a short term rewind or undo option could help patch over the few moments Humanity’s impressive simulation goes awry, but it is already remarkable to see the huge marching hordes move with such clean precision that the rare breakaway can’t really kill the gratifying sight of a puzzle fully solved. The puzzles in Humanity definitely know their visual component is part of what makes them so enjoyable to complete, but they aren’t pushovers just for the sake of a pretty arrangement, most levels always more complicated than they first appear but wisely kept condensed so you can start to figure them out with experimentation. Humanity gets some good mileage out of the basics of its command system at first, ideas like limiting player commands or forcing you to commit to placing them all before a level starts a natural evolution to the concept, but Humanity really finds its footing in iterating in expansive ways like introducing the new set of mechanics that the Others and Follow command bring with them. The game always remains focused on the idea of guiding people around, but not settling too deeply into only doing that through one common methodology means Humanity appropriately evolves in the same way its mindless human hordes are meant to in the story. The custom levels also give a canvas for diving a bit deeper into even the basic systems rather than having the campaign mire itself in levels that could be more difficult than clever, Humanity mostly having a good sense for things like how far ahead the player is meant to think while compartmentalizing steps of its larger levels to make them more manageable.
While a deft eye for ways it can set up impressive visuals definitely gives the otherwise minimalist Humanity appealing sights, the core of its ideas would work even in the plainest of presentations. Guiding the large groups around is challenging but manageable thanks to easily understood systems at play, and when a solution you attempt fails to work, it’s usually pretty easy to spot the problem and begin thinking of alternatives. Some ideas like how to handle the more active play the Others necessitate can take longer to learn, but Humanity’s constant march forward into newer ideas never stretches the puzzle design to its breaking point.