After about 20 hours of tutoring hundreds of thousands of quirky dwarves through countless imaginative puzzles, I’m left with a childlike delight, and at least my problem-solving skills are better than they were in the first place. I gained a little confidence in playing humanity. Each map is so simple that it can be solved in 10-20 minutes, but it always incorporates platformer elements, immersing you in real-time strategy, stealth action, and even arcade shooters. Its inexplicable possibilities are as limitless as an endless swarm of human minions, and thanks to the extensive yet effortlessly simple Stage Creator, it’s approaching Little Big Planet-level open-ends and inevitably You’ll be back for months, if not years.
Let’s take a step back and explain exactly what humanity is. teeth. This is a puzzle game from the team behind Enhance Games’ Tetris Effect and Rez, and it explains why it looks so weird and cool. You play as a ghostly Shiba Inu who has the power to make humans follow his orders, and your objective is basically to guide your followers through each map, usually manipulating time and physics to find the right path. , and so on. No, thin stories don’t make sense. Like Rez, it’s not a big focus. But Humanity loosely points to an interesting metaphor about human nature, which somehow helps explain some of its wildest moments. …don’t ask about it. You have to play yourself to match the pieces.
It’s like a modern version of Lemmings, but if you’ve played Ratchet & Clank Lift Apart, you might remember some of the sequences where you run around as Clank guiding your own infinite clones. . That’s basically what he does with Humanity, but with far more flexibility and far more tools at his disposal to alter the fate of his endless human followers.
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This means you’ll run and jump around the map yourself, placing commands like turn, jump, and shoot. It was a lot of fun watching the initial strategies and mechanics fail until I miraculously figured things out each time I progressed to the next level. Because trial and error is fun when failing is so much fun. It’s nice to be able to restart the map at any time without resetting existing commands. This allows you to rethink your steps on an iterative level without throwing away all your progress each time you make a mistake.
There’s also quite a bit of action, sometimes requiring you to run around the map like a manic puppy and change commands you’ve already placed when certain conditions are met. For example, in one level, you can organize a group of humans to push blocks into place, and another group to push another block together so that both groups can jump over and escape from an encroaching mob of enemies. to create a passage. This is just one example, but it shows the basic assumptions of humanity and how each of its mixed systems gives way to seemingly endless challenges.
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Playing as a Shiba Inu works really well here. Especially since its small stature and quick movements allow it to weave between groups of humans deftly, sprinting, hopping, and even leaping through crowds using its own minions. This was all great in action, and it all came together beautifully as the DualSense controller thumped in my hand.
Seeing potentially thousands of people flying around on a TV or in a VR headset at once is wild, and many of the individual scenes of humanity are amazing. It’s both due to the bewildering technical magic of managing this crowd, and the way it uses amazingly imaginative scenes to burn moments of gratification into my brain. One of the early puzzles required me to create my own state machine. This is a logical mechanism consisting of thousands of individual humans flying in an infinite loop between his four platforms, straddling pressure plates. This allowed another group to climb the ledge and jump to safety.
You might think it would be confusing or nauseating to have too many moving objects running around the screen at once, but Humanity’s camera system handles very well in and out of VR. so you can control what you see most of the time. When you need to zoom in to see more, or zoom out to get a bigger picture, it’s smooth and easy to focus where you need to and adjust your view.
In some cases, these endless loops continue even after you reach the victory screen, giving you a taste of the literal importance of your problem-solving skills. Again, this is just one potential example of how these mechanisms work together to create interesting challenges. Frankly, this was one of the simplest challenges I encountered. Humanity’s open-ended nature means that it rarely slows down or adds repetitiveness, and solving its many clever puzzles feels like a whole new experience with a uniquely satisfying feel each time. I can feel it. Without watching the conveniently included solution video, you’ll know the basic solution, but don’t overdo it or ruin secrets like how to unlock optional objectives on specific maps. is not.
These secret goals are the backbone of humanity’s progress system, and each deed requires unlocking a certain number of goals in order to progress. You can’t just do the bare minimum of moving a human from point A to point B and expect them to pat you on the head. This game requires a little more thought. But it’s never too much of a hassle as they aren’t that hard to find or unlock, and usually just add an extra layer of satisfying challenge while giving more experience points along the way. was. Just knowing that the way I solved the level wasn’t necessarily the only way makes it much more replayable.
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It has a nifty progression system that levels up as you complete secondary objectives, unlocking timely rewards such as new cosmetics for your human minions and new gameplay features such as the ability to reduce time. increase. Alternatively, you can access the hidden stats page from the menu. This will tell you exactly how many humans spawned during your entire journey. The best part is that you can use the same rewards when you finally start creating your own puzzles and maps. Share with the world at the touch of a button.
Once you’ve played enough custom maps in User Stages mode, or earned enough support for your level, you’ll earn XP in a completely separate set of progression systems that are complementary, but wholly unnecessary. Gradually unlock cool avatars to increase your social influence, but these systems wisely avoid impacting your gameplay. Either way, the user stage mode is already packed with interesting levels that extend Humanity’s toolbox of mechanics well beyond what Enhance thought most people would be comfortable using in his campaign. and it is easy to navigate directly to that level. View the best player-made levels through a convenient indexing system. I could easily spend hours here and avoid the campaign entirely if I had discovered the user stage mode in the first place, but as a super advanced level tutorial people are making I’m glad I got to play it. .
And all this is made even better by Humanity’s VR compatibility that works with either PlayStation VR headsets or PC VR. This is a perfectly viable way to play any level, but unfortunately the VR mode is not yet tooled to work with the Stage Creator tool itself. Still, we’re happy that Humanity gives you the option to enter full-blown VR mode from the main menu, allowing you to get directly into the action. Alternatively, you can stick to PS VR2’s theater mode and play lying on your couch on a virtual flat screen. Both modes work fine with the DualSense controller, but I was less impressed when I tried it with the PS VR2’s Sense controller. Considering I’m controlling a little dog with a thumbstick instead of doing anything with motion controls, it didn’t feel like a natural fit. Admittedly, that’s a minor issue compared to the fact that, aside from his one accidental crash in VR later in the playthrough, I’ve encountered very few notable bugs.
Humanity also includes a great vocal synth-driven score layered with piano and other synthetic elements. atmosphere. Its melodies are simple, repetitive, and sometimes even a little silly, but each song properly relaxes and sets a gentle rhythm for brainstorming puzzles. Even during the relatively energetic parts of the soundtrack, namely boss fights, it has a steady drone that sits comfortably in the background.
