Humanity is a very unsettling game. The premise of the puzzler is simple - you must create a path from the start of a stage capable of reaching the end, employing techniques like jumping, climbing, and swimming, while also flicking switches to manipulate pathways and find new routes to avoid potential dangers. Problem is that you're not controlling something inanimate like a ball, or a single loveable character who pops right back onto the screen if you accidentally make them fall off the edge, but a herd of mindless humans who will tumble off the edges of buildings lifelessly at your command. But then, maybe that's less of a problem and more of the point.
You play as a dog who appears to be working for a secretive celestial organisation. Set inside a featureless grey room with a white glowing door that humans pour out of, you must direct them to another white door. They don't literally follow you, but you place arrows, jump pads, and other directives in their path. Along the way, there will be taller golden humans, called Goldys, who remain still until they are caught up in the crowd, then will take the same directions. All of this is already bizarre, but in between levels you receive cryptic messages explaining your power and telling you these people both deserve to die and cannot feel pain anyway, so watching them fall to their presumed deaths is meaningless.
Inevitably, some of these humans do spill over the edges. We are told they are unharmed, but the fact they disappear into a grey void of nothingness, the mindless way they move, and the booming voices from on high telling us to disregard their fate makes it seem cruel. My wife, while watching me play, remarked that the game would be very upsetting if your father had just jumped off a bridge. That's obviously not going to be the typical player experience, but it's telling that someone with no knowledge of the game's context or story saw a two-second clip and knew it was supposed to be an upsetting experience, not a fun one.
It feels strange to be previewing a puzzler and only getting to the puzzles four paragraphs in, but you it's a testament to Humanity's commitment to its storyline that they feel like an afterthought. Not in terms of their design, but their overall importance. I wanted to reach the end with all the bonus objectives because I wanted to see what would happen next, not just for the raw satisfaction of solving them.
As with any puzzle game - any game at all, really - things will get tougher as you progress, but from what I played Humanity will have you gently scratching your head, not pulling out your hair. It's more New York Times Wordsearch than New York Times Crossword. These droves of humans you lead around are endlessly regenerative, or so the game tells us, so you can get things wrong as often as you want. You can also deliberately lead some astray, which is where Humanity comes into its own.
There’s a lot of room for creativity. I completed a puzzle by syphoning off a section of my humans and making them walk around in a circle in order to keep a switch pressed down. Once I unlocked a new power, I headed back into the level to try it out, after finding it tricky initially. The powers don't work retroactively, so I still had the same toolset, but this time I was able to beat the level with a much more simple method that involved leading the whole path over the switch. Still, the fact the game rewarded me for letting me figure it out my way sets a positive tone for the tougher puzzles to come.
As for the puzzles themselves, they're a decent mix between convoluted and simple, with the solution usually feeling straightforward once you figure it out but taking a little bit of thinking to get there. Since they can be endlessly retried and reset, with the option to wipe the slate clean or keep your markers down and restart, it does a lot to alleviate the usual stresses of puzzle games. You can also progress without the Goldys, if that's proving a little too tricky.
Overall, Humanity is an odd game because I think the full version will be judged more by its story than its puzzles. I was concerned from the reveal that the dogs and humans and Goldys were just surreal imagery for the sake of being strange, but now I think this might🌃 be a game that has something to say. I look forward to hearing the rest of it.
