At PlayStation’s 2019 State of Play, Enhance (the developer best known for Tetris Effect), announced Humanity in collaboration with Tokyo-based design studio tha ltd. It was received with much confusion as to what the game was actually about. Now we have the demo, we know it’s a physics platformer where you, a glowing Shiba Inu (really), command massive, marching crowds of people to goals so they can get sucked into the sky (really). Its 2019 reveal trailer shows masses of human bodies pushing blocks, swimming through large, static blocks of water and fighting each other, and little clue as to why.
The 2023 trailer, also revealed at a State of Play, implies a larger narrative underpinning the game’s story mode. It calls Humanity a tale of ‘hope’, ‘conflict’, ‘chaos’, and ‘order’, and shows grey-skinned figures dressed in black called ‘the others’, who look starkly different from the colourful humans you lead around. Immediately, the storytelling seemed heavy-handed, far too obvious to tell whatever story it was trying to tell in a nuanced way. A demo for the game was released that day as well, so I dug in to see what I could glean.
Unfortunately, it didn’t tell me much. You wake up as a dog, which implies you did not use to be a dog – a voice in your head tells you it’s time to fulfil your duty. Where in our world, we walk dogs, in Humanity, dogs walk us. In a PlayStation Blog, tha ltd. founder Yugo Nakamura says that people in the world of Humanity have ‘lost their purpose’. As the dog, you must issue commands to the people you’re herding with barks, which tell them where to walk, when to jump, even to float in midair.
Each level features different obstacles, restricting what the people you’re herding can do. Some levels require lots of planning, others quick reflexes. Some feature ‘Goldys’, large golden people who follow your flock and can unlock endpoints or count as extra, optional achievements. The people do what you tell them, even if it means death. If this was a regular puzzle platformer without a story, this wouldn’t be quite as dark, but there’s a level in the demo where you have to crush some of the people you’re herding with a giant ball in order to win. Knowing that these are people you’re tasked to lead makes this feel especially painful.
The mechanics of the demo are fun, sure, and the soundtrack is undoubtedly a bop, but there aren’t many indications of the story the game is teasing – until you get close to the end. It introduces the ‘others’ shown in the game’s trailer and says that ‘Humans and Others have never been able to have a dialogue. Not once.’ The game then explains to you that both Humans and Others love Goldy, and if they come into contact with yours, your Goldy will follow them instead. In one level, you steal their Goldy – in another, they come in droves to try and steal yours.
In that same PlayStation blog, Nakamura says that they may look alike, but the Others ‘live according to entirely different principles’ and that their commonalities are what put them in conflict with each other. You can, apparently, try to ‘avoid conflict’ with them, or ‘confront them head-on’, but the game later transforms into ‘battles on a massive scale’, presumably leading to a change in gameplay.
The trailer and demo seem to be implying that the game is about what separates us, that there is an in-group and an out-group. In a world so divided by class, race, nationality, and political beliefs, it’s so far been ambiguous enough to mean anything and everything, though I suspect it may be about money because of both groups’ preoccupation with Goldy. The game bifurcates good from bad almost carelessly, and I worry that the full game will do the same with brute force instead of delicacy – how much nuance can a game have if it ends in all-out battles between two groups of mindless husks? Who is supposed to see themself as the human, and who is the other?