HUMANITY: Review

This game was reviewed on Playstation 5.

Reviewed by: Nikola Hristov

I have been playing video games since the age of 4, and puzzle games have never been my favourite, and I'm certain I'm not alone when it comes to that. Most of us would just prefer to follow an interesting story or go ham in an action-based experience and combat our way to entertainment. To this day, I still don't enjoy the puzzle sections in every game…and yet, I would be a fool if I didn't acknowledge that what Enhance Experience and tha Ltd. have brought us here is nothing short of special.

Humanity is a game that is incredibly simple, and it is part of its charm. You play as a Ione Shiba Inu, A.K.A. a spectre Japanese dog, which suddenly starts hearing voices from inside its head. They tell you to guide the Humans into the light, which very clearly becomes your objective in almost every single level. By using commands and the environment, that's exactly what you end up doing. But although it sounds easy, there's so much more to this experience than your objectives.

The main selling point of the game is of course the puzzles. As the doggy you control runs and jumps around, it can place commands on every tile, which the humans will follow. You start off the game with simple ones such as being able to turn the direction of the humans' movement, and making them jump. As you progress the story, you're introduced to more and more abilities, such as a higher and longer jump, splitting the direction to left AND right, and my personal favourite – combat commands, which are used in some of the most fun levels of the game. Every level also has semi-optional objectives that you can collect, called Goldys. They are harder to obtain and you need a specific amount of them to progress to the final level of every story sequence. But they're also incredibly rewarding – they give you abilities such as being able to fast-forward time, change your music track at the start of each level and even customize your followers with many different model choices. However you don't have to collect every one of them, which is great, as some of the levels towards the end make it much more difficult. The developers did include short videos that show you how to solve each level as a Goldy reward, but I didn't find them especially helpful, as they're quite fast and skip the optional objectives. So if you struggle on a level, YouTube is probably where you'll find yourself.

An aspect of the game which shouldn't be underestimated is the story. I won't say much about it, but it really has a deeper meaning hidden behind the names of each sequence. There is a reason behind why you're helping these humans, and it's obvious that care and passion went into the making of this game. The campaign isn't even that short – it takes about 20 hours – so you better pay attention to understand the meaning that the devs were trying to achieve. But if the story isn't enough for you, then the level creator and user stages that other players publish will give you many more hours of great fun.

The performance of the game is pretty much flawless. I did not experience any problems whatsoever, which is surprising, because the game has some very heavy and intense-looking scenes, with many models and effects on the screen at once. I should mention that although I played on PC, using a controller is definitely the way to go, which is what I went for soon after starting my playthrough. And one more thing – the game fully support VR and PSVR2, so if you have it – feel free to enhance your experience!

Though simple in its graphics, Humanity creates an incredible atmosphere, and makes you feel like you're inside some sort of Matrix world, where only you and the so-called 'Cores' (the voices inside your head) have a functioning mind. The simple looking characters and enemies may not captivate you at first, but as I mentioned earlier, many of the cutscenes will leave you pleasantly surprised with the game's gorgeous cinematography. An aspect which I don't want to undermine is the music – similarly to other puzzle games, it has this eerie techno feel to it, which fits the brainless never-ending amounts of humans you're commanding.

All in all, I cannot recommend this game enough. The studio has obviously put their heart and soul into creating this experience and it's well worth your time and money. Both easy and addicting, Humanity is a game you probably won't forget for a while.

Reviewed by: Nikola Hristov