Humanity Review

thesixthaxis.com:

“I awoke one morning to find I was a dog,” is an intriguing opening line for any story, and that’s exactly how Humanity, the new puzzle game from THA and published by Rez Infinite and Tetris Effect creators Enhance, begins. It’s not only that you are a dog, you have also been transported to an ethereal plane in which humans stream from doors and will tumble into a vast abyss of nothingness without your help. Voices in your head tell you that you must guide the humans to the glowing pads on each map, thus releasing them from the plane and moving them to… somewhere else.

The game takes it’s cues from the likes of Chu Chu Rocket, Pikmin, Lemmings and more. You, as the glowing Shiba Inu, can place icons around the map that influence the humans. You can make them change direction, jump, infuse them gas so they float higher over fans, split a stream of people in two, hit and shoot things. Each map has obstacles to overcome, whether it’s blocks to push, features to traverse, the simple absence of ground, or occasionally large cubes of water suspended in mid air that you can swim through.

The controls are simple to grasp and you will need to zoom around each map at the start of the level to discover all the nooks and crannies, some of which hide Goldys. These are larger humanoid figures who you must get to the exit to unlock new controls, cosmetics, and crucially, later stages.

Completing a level will unlock the next one, but to pass the final lock on the stage you must have rescued a certain number of Goldys. This means you might have to backtrack and replay some levels and work out where you can solve the puzzle and rescue the golden humans at the same time, effectively doubling the puzzles per level.

As the story progresses – and