Humanity’s solutions are more triumphant than its puzzles

polygon.com:

Humanity’s biggest draw is not mechanical. Almost all of the game’s dozens of puzzles would work identically if the player directed streams of liquid or colorful marbles or a few nondescript automatons. But Humanity’s defining feature, the gears of its puzzles being made up of thousands upon thousands of individual human beings, serves a purpose higher than simple gameplay novelty. The graphical splendor of Humanity doubles as its path to the profound, its sheer visual scale elevating its otherwise traditional challenges.

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There’s a scene in Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low in which a room of detectives is briefed on an ongoing crime. Nothing too narratively vital happens in this sequence. But the scene is framed to fit nearly 40 people, so that every reaction to new information in the scene is mirrored and amplified 40 times. The composition turns an otherwise straightforward script into a dense, sweaty, cinematic tour de force. The magnitude of people lends the scene a captivating level of visual engagement.

Humanity, a collaboration between Japanese creative firm tha and Enhance (Tetris Effect, Lumines), started out as a technical experiment with a similar goal: How many people could be rendered on screen at the same time? Before there was even a game, there was recognition of the same