As if modern life wasn’t strange and bewildering enough, in Humanity you wake up one day and find you’re now a dog. Not only that, but you on some sort of geometric landscape with voices in your head telling you guide endless streams of humans to glowing portals through which they ascend to a new plane of existence.
As the dog, a Shiba Inu made of light, you can command the humans to change direction, jump, shoot, push things, and generally boss them around so they make their way to the light and don’t fall off a cliff in an endless void of nothingness. If you have played Lemmings then you will have a good idea of what to expect, just with more barking.
That’s the main game, and (following on from the limited time Humanity demo we previewed here) I’ve definitely enjoyed solving a good chunk of the 90 levels that will feature in the full game release, and the changes in tone as you start rescuing Goldies, encounter Others, lasers, and even some wild boss fights.
Alongside the levels created by the game’s developers, though, you can also enter a user creation mode and build your own levels, save them and let everyone else in the world play your fiendish puzzles.
Each level is built on a 40 x 40 grid with blocks that can be stacked up to 30 cubes high, so there’s plenty of space for those who want to create large complex landscapes. Through a simple menu system you can pick blocks of various and and sizes to build platforms and paths for the endless stream of humans to walk around. There’s not a huge range of shapes – this is more like playing with Duplo than LEGO Technic – but with a little creativity I’m sure there will be some amazing designs.
Once you’ve started building your platforms and paths you can then set to the start and end points before the real fun begins: making things as awkward as possible! You can place objects such as trees to block paths, set up conveyor belts to zoom humans to a quick death, use ball generators to do exactly what they sound like they should do and create large spheres that need to be pushed away, and more. You can also set up switches with parameters, so you may set up a switch that will unblock a certain section of your map, but only if twenty humans walk on it. To mix things up you can add fans to float the humans across gaps, or set cubes of water which they must swim through.
There are lots of other options to tweak as well, you can set which commands are available to any canine players, the music, the style of the level, the speed the humans pour out of the magic gate and so on. The user interface is really simple and it didn’t take me long to knock up a level and play test it. Once you have confirmed the level can be completed you can name it and upload it for everyone else to play.
I can see the level design mode really appealing to younger audiences in particular – there’s a touch of Minecraft to it with the blocky construction and it’s really quite simple to understand – but I had a lot of fun fiddling around with it myself and want to see what the wider community can create.
Humanity will launch for PlayStation 5 with PSVR 2 support, PlayStation 4, and PC via Steam on May 16th. It will also be added on day one to the PlayStation Plus Game Catalogue for PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium members.
