Humanity Review: Puzzling It Out

We really don’t get enough great puzzle games nowadays. So much of the genre has moved over to mobile that I had a hard time finding a cool new puzzle game to mess around with on my Steam Deck shortly after it came out. Yet we can seemingly always count on Enhance under Executive Producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi to create something interesting. These are the same guys who gave us Lumines, Rez, Every Extend Extra, and, more recently, Tetris Effect. They know puzzle games. Humanity is their latest, and while it’s perhaps not their greatest work of genius, it’s an incredibly interesting puzzle game well worth checking out.

Humanity puts you in the control of an ethereal Shiba Inu who wakes up one day and is told by a strange light that they need to guide hordes of human souls to their destiny. Sure, that makes sense. Ignore the attempts at a story here; they don’t add much to the game other than perhaps contributing to the overall vibe of the experience. At its best, Humanity is a pure gameplay experience.

Go Into The Light

Each level of Humanity has you trying to get some of those souls into a glowing light so they can be freed. That involves manipulating a group, who at least in the early going generally come out of magical doors of light, into doing what you want them to. These souls will, by default, just walk straight forward, whether that means walking into a wall or right off the level into the void below. You’re told early on not to worry about that, that any souls that fall off the level will simply reemerge from the doors and come back, but the game certainly tracks them, and I generally preferred to keep souls on the level when I could.

You’ll manipulate these souls to go where you want them to by using a variety of powers. The most common power, and the one you start with, is simply the ability to turn them. Put an arrow facing the direction you want the crowd to follow down, and they’ll head in that direction. It’s like Lemmings meets Chu Chu Rocket.

Going Deeper

You’ll soon find levels where you need a lot more than turns to reach your goal—giant gaps, pools of water, fans, and, eventually, an enemy faction that you need to manage. You’ll get a lot more powers, though, to help you accomplish these goals. Each level is unique; this isn’t a situation where once you have a power, you’ll have it every level, but powers like jumping, long jumping, the ability to make the souls lighter so they can jump further, even guns. You also find that souls will do some things on their own, like climb specific types of walls or swim, which you’ll also need to manipulate.

It all seems simple, and at times it is, but the levels quickly start picking up in complexity with different groups of souls and different goals to accomplish. Even the more complex levels are incredibly intuitive, though. It’s the sort of game where when you look at a level, it feels complex, and when you first start analyzing it, things still seem complex, but when you figure out the solution, it all feels so incredibly simple. A great puzzle game makes you feel like an idiot at the start and like a genius by the end, and Humanity accomplishes that perfectly.

Go For The Gold

You’ll have a few more goals beyond just getting your crowds to the end of the level. Each level also has special goldies, larger souls who are littered around the level. They just stand there until you direct the crowd through them, and then they follow along. These goldies definitely don’t return if they walk off the level, either, so you’ll need to keep them safe. While goldies are technically optional, you want to get them. Collecting enough of them unlocks rewards. Some of them are just cosmetic, like the ability to put hats on your souls, but others are helpful gameplay features, like the ability to stop time which I used all the time to good a good look over a level or evaluate my tile placements. You’ll also get the option to restart levels while keeping your tile placements which is great, though, in later levels where you have to modify these multiple times throughout the level, that’s less useful.

My biggest complaint with Humanity is the lack of a rewind feature. It’s so easy to mess up minutes of progress on a level because of being a few seconds late in putting down a tile. You can push a necessary item off the level and have to start the whole thing over. It’s incredibly frustrating when this happens, and while I can understand wanting some form of consequence for how you play, this is a game that’s supposed to be a cerebral exercise, not a twitch-based one. Knowing the solution but needing to try it for the third time sucks. There’s also a VR mode here, but it’s fairly basic and doesn’t really take advantage of the medium, which is a real disappointment from the crew that gave us Tetris Effect and Rez Infinite.

Conclusion

Despite those issues though, Humanity is never less than an engaging puzzle game. Wrapping my brain around these levels was a joy, and the fact that players can make their own levels means I’ll be checking back in periodically to see what new ways players have found to twist my mind into pretzels. Humanity might be a second-tier game from Enhance, but that still puts it far ahead of most of the puzzle genre.

Final Verdict: 4/5

Available on: PS5 (Reviewed), PS4, PC; Publisher: Enhance; Developer: Enhance, thd ltd.; Players: 1; Released: May 15th, 2023; ESRB: E10+ for Everyone 10+; MSRP: $29.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a retail copy of Humanity.