Humanity is a Surrealist Spin on Lemmings in the PS5 and PS4 demo

To be honest, when Humanity was announced back in 2019, we weren’t really sure what we were looking at. A series of delays has made it even more uncertain. It wasn’t until the recent reintroduction during State of Play in February that things started to fall into place. The game comes from Tetris Effect studio Enhance Games and the Japanese experimental team, and now that you’ve played the limited-time demo, we can finally tell you what it’s all about.

Essentially, this quirky game shares its core concept with Lemmings. In each abstract level, your job is to direct a stream of people, marching in unison, toward the goal. You control a dog (a shiba inu, to be exact) that can literally bark commands at thoughtless humans, ordering them to change direction, perform jumps, and more to get to the exit. That’s kind of it.

It’s a simple idea, but the hundreds of people on the screen and the 3D levels make it look more complex. Fortunately, the demo presents things quite well, letting you access different commands as you progress through the ten stages. However, we will say that the difficulty is somewhat inconsistent; The fourth level, Loop the Loop, is a jump over the previous three, and is not the only hike among the selection. Of course, this is just a demo, so we expect the challenge curve to be gentler in the full game.

At least the ten levels give you a good idea of ​​how Humanity uses its simple mechanics to build some interesting and surprisingly challenging puzzles. Optional collectible characters named Goldy, fans who can push humans away, blocks they can push, and more add small but effective layers to the design. Some levels make getting from A to B a real head-scratcher, but it’s clearly a great feeling when you find the solution.

Once you’ve completed the main stages, you can move on to a level generator and a browser for user-made levels, both of which are in beta. The editor is simple and easy to use, and it comes with a decent set of tutorials if you need some guidance. As with games like Super Mario Maker-You need to complete your stage before you can download it. Meanwhile, anything created and shared by other players can be found in the browser. Naturally, there aren’t many of them at the time of writing, but they’re neatly organized into different lists, such as “Easier Go” or “Rise Up for a Challenge.” The quality here will vary, but it’s a nice feature that will likely extend the life of the game – provided you can find a community to keep the game going.

We played the demo on PS5 and mostly on TV, but Humanity also supports PSVR2. It operates identically, with controls remaining the same whether you’re using a DualSense or VR Sense. While the VR version provides a good sense of depth to the game, turning each level into a diorama that you can examine from all angles, the perspective ultimately doesn’t seem to add much to the gameplay itself.

We walked away from the demo of humanity fascinated by the gameplay even more. It’s unusual, with a unique atmosphere, some blips of story below the surface, and neat, uncluttered puzzles. If I can get the difficulty balance right, we could be looking at a game going blindly from left field into cult hitting status.

Humanity Demo is available now on PS5 and PS4, with both PSVR2 and PSVR supported, but will only remain playable until March 6, 2023. The full game is set to be released in May. Did you play the demo? What do you think of humanity (the game, not the world’s population)? Walk straight to the comments section below.