Game Pass is finally getting a little Humanity, which is releasing for Cloud, Console, & PC. Released to rave reviews last year this is a puzzler like few others. You are a ghostly Shiba Inu leading lemmings-style humans through increasingly difficult puzzles. They follow your every command and you’ll need to lead hundreds of thousands of them to various stage goals by barking out commands. It’s wacky, sounds great, and is a ton of fun.
The Premise
The fate of all mankind is put in your hands, and you’re a magical Shiba Inu. The game takes place in the void, where a disembodied voice guides you through over 90 levels as you attempt to guide the vestiges of humanity through various brain-bending puzzles. The twist here is the mix of action-platforming as your ghost-dog can jump incredibly high and even inhabit the bodies of those mindlessly following your commands.
Every level has one or more entrances where humans will walk out of in a straight line, directly to their deaths. Don’t worry though, every time they die they’re instantly reborn and come right back out the door. Levels have intricate layouts with multiple ways that most can be completed. Where things get more difficult are the goldies. These are floating larger humans that you must have your swaths of humanity walk/jump/float through as you guide them all to specific square patches of land to “ascend” from. Unlocking the goldies gets you various ability unlocks and you’ll find yourself replaying levels repeatedly until you get things just right to snag them all.
The Layouts
Humanity comes with over 90 base campaign levels and a simple but powerful level designer. If the game clicks for you I could easily see 100+ hours being spent crafting and playing other user-generated content. The game works on a basic grid structure. You start out with simple abilities like turn, jump, float, etc. I played the game on console and PC, with PC offering up an additional VR mode that was cool to play through. It’s the same game but now you get to move around the level as a living camera.
Humanity is chaos, beautiful, and baffling. As I progressed through the title things went from tricky, to clever, to outright nuts. If you find yourself stuck the game will gladly help you out with solutions though, and while I never used them I greatly appreciated them being there in case I wanted to. The controls on console felt great, better than mouse and keyboard for me. You’ll spend your time as a dog running and jumping throughout each level as you bark commands that then float over that piece of land.
The majority of them will be simple turns or jumps early on. The game does an excellent job of ramping up the difficulty. I never felt overwhelmed by new moves being given too quickly. The longest I spent on a single stage was roughly thirty minutes or so as it had a lot of goldies and I needed them to unlock one of the more useful passives. Early on you’ll get a “keep your moves on restart” passive that is incredibly useful. Instead of having to reset every single ability each run you can keep what’s working and quickly try and change what isn’t. There is a fair amount of timing that requires platforming skills so if you’re not big on controls like that it can be a big challenge.
The Graphics and Audio
Humanity is a basic-looking title with an incredible style. There are hundreds if not thousands of people walking, running, swimming, jumping, and more on stage at any given time and I never experienced slowdown. You can dress up humanity in various outfits as well, which was a fun little bonus. While most levels are just set in a void the layouts vary a lot and the solid controls let you appreciate just how vast some of them can be. You’ll have multiple levels with specific walls that humans can climb up. You can’t reach the highest heights without crowd surfing so it adds extra difficulty and timing to the puzzles as you try to logic them out.
The audio is typical for enhance, in that it’s absolutely brilliant. Sound effects and music work together to create an audio scape that matches the vibes the graphics set. If you played Tetris Effect Connected you’ll feel right at home. While there isn’t the same level of vocals it’s instantly familiar to their previous work in tone and skill. Bug-wise I had no issues on console or PC. Everything just worked, which is a nice thing to get in this day and age.
Wrapping Things Up
Humanity is an excellent blend of puzzle and platformer that has an enormous amount of content. It’s one that will be in my Quick Resume for a long time as I jump in for a quick puzzle or two. It’s in Game Pass at launch on Xbox and I highly recommend anyone interested give it a spin.
Humanity
Played on
Xbox Series X (Primary), PC & VR
PROS
- Great Vibes
- Fun Puzzles
- Controls Well
- Lots of Content
Not my type of game, but that trailer is is pretty good.
Game looks fun. I’m always interested in puzzles, not so much in platforming though…
Might be interested in trying, it’s nice to see a newer style Lemmings idea.
it’s not super hard, early on
Is there no cons at the end of the review ? I can’t see them.
I couldn’t think of any in particular, the game sets out to do what it wants really well.
Game is awesome. Getting the Goldys can be quite challenging and creative
Had no expectations before starting this up yesterday. Finished the prologue and a couple of trials and now am a believer.