Humanity (PS5) Review | Plus PSVR 2 impressions

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you awoke in the body of a Shiba Inu (the ‘Doge dog’), directing the mindless spirits of fallen humans around various maze-like stages as you guide them into the light? If you have then you’re in luck as Humanity is about to bring your dream to life!

Not only is Humanity a challenging and very satisfying puzzle game, but it’s also a beautiful mix of gorgeously simplistic visuals and a mesmerising and outstanding soundtrack, as you’d expect from developers Enhance (Tetris Effect, Rez, and Lumines). From the moment I started playing, I was hooked and couldn’t put down my controller – it’s a fantastic experience that the vast majority of people are going to get to play for ‘free’ upon launch (it’s in PS Plus Tiers 2 and 3 day-one).

But, what makes this ‘simple’ puzzle game so special? Let’s take a closer look and see why I can’t stop playing it despite having ‘killed’ literally hundreds of thousands of people (401,360, to be precise!)…

Just an ordinary day…

Humanity has a story, something I didn’t really expect as I thought it was just a series of stages with no link other than progressively getting harder. As stated above, you awoke in this strange heavenly world as a Shiba Inu dog, or at least a glowing spiritual representation of one. A disembodied voice explains that your sole duty is to lead the people into the light as they have no free will other than walking in a straight line until instructed otherwise.

Not long into your divine duties, you encounter the ‘Goldies’, or as I call them, ‘Doshin the Giants’ (Who’ll remember that?!). These giant shiny individuals refuse to move unless touched by a human (literally, not emotionally), thus following them to the edge of the world (and over it, if you don’t stop them). And so begins an ongoing secondary task from your unseen instructor, save every Goldy along with the souls of the humans.

After a few more chapters you’ll encounter ‘The Others’, a group of opposing humans that will stop at nothing to steal the Goldies from you and forcefully eliminate your human followers and destroy their spawn portals (doors), thus effectively killing your immortal buddies! There are also giant bosses which you have to defeat using skill, strategy, and lots of perseverance!

So yeah, despite looking like a simple puzzle game, there’s a lot going on which all flows nicely as you get introduced to new abilities and hazards.

It looks frantic… and it is!

Gameplay
Humanity is a rather unique puzzle game. Instead of simply controlling a cursor as you set commands and interact with the humans, you run around the stage as a small radio-active/glowing dog. As such there’s quite a bit of platforming and even catching a ride inside of the humans as they leap over gaps you can’t manoeuvre on your own. It’s quite unique and interesting, making a simple puzzle concept into a whole new experience.

To begin with, you’re granted a few abilities. You can lay down directional arrows or jump pads, these divert the mindless horde of humans to change direction or take a leap of faith in the direction they’re facing. Then you’ll start unlocking new abilities such as making them float so they can fall from heights without dying (Lemmings, anyone?) or jump much further, and you’ll even unlock close and long-range weapons to help out when facing The Others.

Each stage only lets you use certain abilities, so you can’t apply the same strategy every time. Some even limit the number of uses they have such as only giving you a few direction arrows or only giving you the chance to howl and get people to follow you once (with this one, if everyone following you dies, it’s basically a game over as you can’t howl to get others to follow you).

Some stages take a lot of planning!

Humanity really pushes your logic and problem-solving skills, I personally found myself just staring a some of the puzzles for ages until I’d discovered a possible solution, only to try it out and then find it didn’t work and needed tweaking! Trial and error is a big part of the game, hence why it lets you restart the stage whilst keeping the markers you’ve placed, so you don’t have to remember what you just did. 

Then we come to the paused stages – these almost broke me! Whereas most stages are played in real-time, allowing you to constantly change the actions for your humans on-the-fly and see what impact they have so you can adjust them if needed, these are very different. In these stages, you have to place all your commands and then hit the ‘play’ button. At this point, you can’t do anything but watch what happens as you’re locked out of adding or changing anything. If you need to make adjustments, you have to restart the stage, change things, and then hit ‘play’ again.

There’s a lot of variety with the puzzles, even on stages that are similar – it all changes based on what abilities you’ve been given to complete the stage. I imagine it took the team many, many hours to come up with the long campaign (it’s around 80+ stages), they even put a bunch of new stages in the Creation mode along with their favourites from the beta a few weeks back.

Yeah, the bosses are HUGE!

Bosses
There are a few bosses who all present you with a different experience. The first, for example, is a blue orb in the center of four floating platforms. Each platform has a puzzle based on solutions you’ve just overcome in previous stages such as making use of conveyor belts and jumping around until you’re in the right position to push a block into the area where the orb lies.

I personally found these to be among the most challenging stages to complete – as you’d expect. One wrong move on the above stage and you’ll be forced to restart it due to no longer having the ability to move blocks into the correct place so you can complete it. The later bosses focus on combat, resulting in you losing all the humans at your disposal if you’re not careful and get hit by one of their attacks. I got very frustrated with a few of these.

Despite literally pulling my hair out as I replayed some of these over and over (I’ve done over 180 retries, and quite a few will have been on the bosses), they are a visual spectacle and I loved facing them. The later ones are basically orbs surrounded by literally thousands of humans, all squirming around as they form various shapes and then begin to drop out of the sky in an effort of trying to wipe out the ones you have recruited as your army of followers. Then, as yours attack, the ones attached to the boss fall and become your allies until you’ve amassed one thousand followers!

It’s all rather magical and fantastic to watch!

Some solutions take a while to work out.

Too difficult?
There’s one big issue with puzzle games, the difficulty. Some people would really want to play yet find they’re struggling and can’t progress – thus giving up or becoming frustrated. Thankfully, Enhance has thought of this and has provided the best form of help – walkthrough videos. 

If you’re stuck on any stage, simply press the Options button and there’s an option to view the solution via a short video – this will show you exactly what you need to do in order to complete the level. However, it won’t show you how to collect all the Goldies within the stage unless it’s a stage that requires you to save them for it to be classed as a success. So, although it will show you one of the solutions (there are many ways to complete each stage), it isn’t an easy platinum trophy guide.

Also, I’ve been informed that Humanity should have official PS Plus Help support, where you can view the same videos via the Activities on the PS5 console if you’re a PS Plus subscriber, but these didn’t show up for me. Sometimes they don’t go live until the game has launched, so I’ll check back tomorrow.

So, even if you feel the puzzles may get a bit confusing (as they do) or overwhelming (they are), don’t worry – there’s help within the game that doesn’t penalise you or stop you from completing the game and achieving all the trophies. The only ones you won’t get if you only follow the guides are the ones around collecting all the Goldies and completing certain tasks with set criteria (such as not letting anyone ‘die’).

Everyone loves big heads!

Incentives for saving the Goldies
I know most people would be happy simply getting the trophies around collecting these sacred golems, but Enhance has given us an even better reward for ensuring the gentle giants make it into the light along with the stream of lost souls. Basically, every time you save a few of them you’ll unlock a new ‘Goldy Reward’!

What are these rewards? Well, to put it bluntly, they are fantastic cosmetics and very helpful functions. The first few are essential features such as fast forwarding with R2, being able to pause the game and move about (basically photo mode), and retry the stage with all your placed commands remaining rather than being removed. But, then you start to get to the fun stuff!

Some of the cosmetics you unlock include dressing the humans in hats, making them into characters from the 70’s, enlarging their heads, and removing their clothes so they’re in their underwear. You can also turn them into blocks, balls, robots, pronoun words, teddy bears, or even make them all dogs in t-shirts walking on their hind legs! There’s even a random option you unlock so you get a different unlocked skin design every time you start a stage.

I love this as it was the main reason I was striving to save every Goldy, I don’t care about the trophies but I do care about dressing my flock of sheep humans in different styles!

This is about as close as you can get when playing in VR

PSVR 2
Humanity is cross-buy, granting you access to both the PS4 and PS5 versions. It also lets you play with PSVR in the PS4 version and PSVR 2 in the PS5 version. I don’t have my original PSVR set up anymore, but I do have my PSVR 2 plugged in – so I gave it a go!

First impressions are great, you’re basically looking down at the world as you control the Shiba Inu with the PSVR 2 controllers. Unlike playing in flat mode, you can’t zoom right in and get a good up-close view of your character and the humans, if you try then an invisible barrier around your head begins to cut into the world making the land and people vanish. It’s a shame as one of the things I love about VR is getting close to things and looking at them.

One thing the game does brilliantly is fully immerse you in the world. You really do feel like a god watching over the poor little dog trying to guide the humans to their safety from afar. Plus, thanks to the new dual-stick VR controllers, it’s very easy to control the camera and the dog as if you’re using a regular controller.

There are two downsides to using VR though. First of all, some of the button prompts are wrong. This isn’t a big deal, you just sometimes have to press R1/L1 when it says R2/L2 on the screen. The other issue is that the creation mode only works in flat mode, you can’t use it whilst in VR mode. I don’t know if that’ll change in the future, but as of launch, it’s not possible.

However, you can PLAY stages other people have made (whilst in VR mode), you just can’t make any.

Performance never dipped!

The Music
Where do I begin with the music? Enhance are well known for ‘enhancing’ their games with fantastic music, creating an experience you won’t find anywhere else – they literally turned Tetris into an emotional and truly unique experience which can only be fully appreciated within VR with headphones on. Every track is catchy, perfect for the gameplay, and memorable. My only wish is that they release the soundtrack on PSN as a downloadable app so we can put it on other devices as I’d love to own it.

Performance issues…
do not exist in Humanity!! Despite having literally thousands and thousands of humans on the screen, walking around like lemmings with no care whether they walk into gunfire, off a cliff, or simply spend eternity walking into a wall, I didn’t notice any slowdown or performance issues at all on the PlayStation 5. I even tried to push the console by creating levels simply consisting of thousands of humans jumping all over the place in a constant stream and it ran perfectly.

Creation
Speaking of making your own stages – this is one of the main reasons Humanity is launching day one in PS Plus Tiers 2 and 3, the single-player experience is great but the community levels are what’ll prolong the life of the game. Thankfully, the creation studio is very easy to use and comes with a decent tutorial which guides you through the basics of how to make your own stages

Each stage is essentially a floating island made up of simple blocks, but you can use them to create anything – I played one someone had made which was two giant sumo wrestlers who were spitting out humans! You also set what abilities the player has, if there are any enemy threats, and even what stage design you want in the background (there are a lot of them).

It’s a very simple yet robust creation tool which should lead to a lot of interesting custom stages.

Official Trailer:

Final Conclusion:
As with every other game I’ve played from Enhance, I was in love with Humanity as soon as I started playing it. The puzzles are challenging yet very satisfying when you work out the solution on your own, watching as hundreds or thousands of tiny humans shuffle around the floating stage following your commands religiously, even if it means they’ll end up jumping off the edge into oblivion. The incredible soundtrack enhances the experience and VR adds another level of immersion to this truly unique and mesmerising puzzle game.

Humanity is launching as a PS Plus Tier 2/3 title on the 16th of May 2023, it’s also coming to PC – levels created on any platform can be played on the other, so there should be a lot of custom content that’ll prolong the life of the game way past the 20+ hour campaign. I can’t recommend this game enough, especially if you love puzzles. 

A copy of the game was kindly provided for review purposes

Humanity

9.5

Final Score

9.5/10

The Good:

• Great puzzles which gradually get more difficult
• The music is fantasic, as usual
• I love that you're rewarded with new cosmetic unlocks for saving all the Goldies
• The VR mode is very welcomed and works great
• You can make your own stages and play ones created by people on any platform

The Bad:

• You can't get very close in VR mode

PSN