Humanity is a puzzle game, and sometimes a very strenuous one. In this case, I like to dig into the menus and watch video walkthroughs for the specific level I’m encountering. It’s a lovely feature, but watching these videos is almost always a terrible mistake. That’s because, exposed in this way, the sheer amount of work you do among humans to solve difficult problems can quickly feel overwhelming. I have to do all this? ! The brain froze instantly.
So at times like this, I turn off the walkthrough video, sadder than I started. But then something magical happened. I went back to beating my puzzle and started tinkering a bit. If I do, then what? What if I start south instead of north? It’s more like that now. All of a sudden, I started to see where I was going wrong, and I started to see, among other things, what I had to understand if I was going to start right. It’s not human nature to succumb to tinkering, exactly, but I think the game wants you to be in a playful state where all possibilities are valid. It’s happy, even happy, to let you solve puzzles by interacting with its mechanics for the sheer joy of them and their own. Understand by playing. This is human nature.
Let’s recap. Tetris Effect, the last Enhance-released game I played, has a killer opening screen. Load it up and what do you get? Some kind of golden feather blown away by the wind, fluttering in the universe. Look closely, and it might look familiar. This, yes, is Laniakea, the immeasurable heaven in which I am typing and the Milky Way supercluster you are reading, for we are all steadily drawn to the Great Attractor.
That’s the confident way to start, and Humanity — well, I guess Humanity started with a variation on a theme. Load up the game and we’re all there, but we don’t see it from polite interstellar distance anymore. Instead, there was a large group of us, mixed together, attacking each other and attacking each other. This is the characteristic Brownian motion of people, a group of people are suspended in the bell jar. All of us, swinging back and forth, heroic, stupid, waiting to be told what to do.
Telling them what to do is what the game itself is about. In short, Humanity is a puzzle game about guiding people to an exit. They swim into the 3D level like a flood of humans, rushing forward like an endless river until something makes them change their course. These people can be killed – fell into the abyss, crushed to death by blocks – but it doesn’t matter. The river continues to flow, usually – but not always – in a steady stream. So get involved. guide them. separate them. Have them depress the pressure plate and push the movable scene.
You do this in the form of a ghostly puppy that you can swim around the place and listen to their gasps of delight. As the dog, you place the command disc on the tiles of each 3D level. Things start off simple: turn left, turn right. Then you will jump. Then there are various jumps. Floating then affects the jumping properties of the tiles. Then there are tiles that allow you to divide endless rivers of humanity, turning the puzzle into a sort of real-time strategy game.
Each level sets the kinds of tiles you can use, sometimes restricting you to a specific amount. So maybe you have a level that can only change direction. Maybe you have a level where you use three or four jumps and that’s it, which means every gap, every change in height that you want your traffic to handle, has to be considered very carefully. Humans get a lot of fun out of it. I can see the exit and I know how to get there, but I don’t know how to get there with what I have. So as a god, as a dog, I need to rethink and question my fundamentals. I need to figure out what elegance looks like here.
Now that I’ve written it down, it doesn’t sound like fun, but it’s my responsibility. In fact, even on this simple level, human-crafted challenges are often delightful in their own right. The levels look like playground sculptures made of the kind of dark smooth stone that Banks of Los Angeles is so fond of. Dogs and Crowds are either delightful comedy or startling horror, depending on what’s happening to them. It’s a fascinating world. Then humans start distorting things.
Puzzle games have one thing they have to do – they have to add to the basics in the hope that the additions add to the fun without breaking clarity. Humans do this in a few ways: you can use new powers when commanding your flock, which is fine, but there are also gimmicks that show that almost everything in the design is considered a variable. Puzzle maker can change and mess up everything. It’s all about learning!
Again, I didn’t make this sound like fun, but it was! so. What about fans and moving walks? How about those pressure switches and blocks you can climb and other blocks you can push? How about starting with a few people and collecting more on the way to the exit? How about a whole set of levels where you have to place markers once and then have to sit back when the humans pour in and you can’t change anything at all? How about the other way around, in levels with paths where you have to reprogram on the fly – you guys go here and now I’m changing the path for everyone behind you to go somewhere else? How about a level where the game has so little content that you can barely see what’s going on? What about the crowd of competitors? Where are the bosses? What about the end gates you need to unlock with special characters?
Throughout the process, there are a few basics that are not touched. Most of the levels have giant characters called Goldies scattered around, they are treated as bonus objectives – take them to the exit and you will work towards unlocking the final level of the current challenge suite, throwing them off a cliff, you might want to To start over. And what I’m starting to think of as the human mentality. It’s a game about human rivers, which means it’s also about queuing, and humans love seeing a nice, intricate queue meandering across the planet in uncanny ways. While playing this game, I thought a lot about loops, figure-eights, and bullbows. I thought about sequencing, which part of the puzzle to do first, and which part to do next. Sometimes, it reminds me of sheet music, and those first and second bars. I haven’t thought about this in twenty years!
Cor, it’s all cute. I need to tell you that, outside of the campaign, there is a level editor, which is very powerful and offers a near-endless number of user-customizable levels at your disposal, many of which required my complete, hopeless thinking. There’s also a VR mode, which Ian will write about on Sunday. I can’t test it.
All the way to – that title. It’s a cognitive nail bomb, isn’t it? human nature. Are we going to take this seriously? Are we here to guide or to observe? Is this a game about heroism, toil or stupidity? Are we gods or dogs? If so, what kind of gods do we want to be? (What kind of dog do we want to be?)
It was a lot to think about then, and thankfully, a lot of the thinking boiled down to a series of generous, fun, DIY puzzles. It turns out that human nature is very great.
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