Playing God is a familiar feeling for many video game genres, from action titles where the character is unstoppable to Sims where you control everything. Rarely do I feel the role of a god when playing puzzle games, but humanity offers it in new and surprising ways. The unique puzzle-solving style uses signposts and commands to guide hordes of miniature humans to an endpoint. The puzzles start out simple, but Humanity builds on this core system in exciting and challenging ways throughout its 100+ stages, pushing me to the limit while telling a heartfelt story about human nature.
Humanity is a game that immediately catches your eye. Its visual style is minimalist and clearly focused on the 3D puzzle area. But soft and beautiful backgrounds highlight my actions as I guide motley hordes of people through various challenges. I’ll start with a simple command: a direction. I put it on the ground and when the line of people crosses it, they follow that direction. As I journey through humanity, I learn many more commands, such as pausing actions entirely, jumping, and using lightsaber-like weapons and firearms to take out the enemy—the Others—that sometimes serve to halt my progress. These new commands keep Humanity’s puzzles fresh, and it was particularly interesting to see how developer Tha Ltd used challenges to change my perception of how a command can be used.
I often felt that there was no way for humanity to raise the stakes as I marveled at my solution after spending more than 30 minutes on the most complex experiments. But every time I doubt its ability to be even more challenging, humanity adds another crease to their puzzle rules. And every time I go from “I just can’t get it out of my head” to feeling almighty 30 minutes later.
On the surface, humanity is peaceful and relaxed, which is often the case, but it’s a challenging game. That is, if you don’t want to use Humanity’s built-in walkthrough videos. However, these don’t tell you how to get the optional Goldy humans in each level, which unlock cosmetic changes for your humans and details like detailed stats about your efforts.
These videos make it clear that Tha Ltd wants all of its players to be able to experience the story taking place within it. Tetris Effects Studio Enhance releases Humanity, and like Tetris Effect, Humanity offers more than just satisfying puzzles. It offers puzzles with a surprisingly human narrative about our nature as a society, how we can work together to move forward, and how we are all more connected than not. It is sweet and simple but effective, especially after leading thousands of people to the light through challenges.
Despite providing walkthrough videos, there are moments when Humanity feels like a chore. Since some of the puzzles have solutions that take a few minutes to complete as towards the end rows of people are running in real time, in Humanity you can speed up the action on the screen by pressing R2. That doubles the speed, but if it takes minutes to reach a solution, I still wait a while. And because I had to restart puzzles from the beginning each time to see if a new command would fix what was preventing my humans from progressing each time, I waited a lot.
Probe restarts allow you to keep your commands from the previous attempt, which helps mitigate this problem. However, it gets boring waiting for all the other commands to see if a new command at the very end solves the puzzle. In the back third of the game, I would often grab my phone while holding R2 and wait for a new command to work. Crucially, the satisfaction I feel when I successfully solve a puzzle always outweighs the frustration I feel in solving it.
Humanity features a level builder and an opportunity to try out other players’ creations. While these seem like worthy endeavors to continue the puzzle fun, I’m not creative enough to create my own. And after playing through the handcrafted levels of Tha Ltd’s story, I’m very satisfied – so much so that I don’t feel the urge to delve too deeply into anyone else’s puzzles. But building levels could provide that extra, longer-lasting fun that someone else might want from this game.
Humanity strikes a delicate balance between challenging me at every turn and making me feel like the god that their narrative portrays me to be. It’s an imaginative experience that I think gives computer programmers a rush when dozens of commands and lines of code eventually work together to achieve a desired result. Its puzzles are wrapped in beautiful packaging, from the minimalist visuals to the excellent, clicky electronic beats. And best of all, these elements work together to convey a simple yet powerful message about what it means to be human and why life’s most intricate mysteries are easiest to solve when we work together.
