Humanity was inspired by a throng of bodies. Specifically, the mass of people queueing for Comiket, the longstanding comic and pop culture convention in Tokyo. As its director Yugo Nakamura explains over a video call from the city, he was intrigued by the “orderly manner” in which these people were milling about. “We have our soul and mind,” he says, “but it was almost like they were moving without thinking.” The challenge the designer set himself and his colleagues at the award-winning Japanese studio tha ltd. was to simulate this gently surging crowd, the ebb and flow of the collective.
The resulting puzzle game does something unusual for the genre. Yes, it stretches your grey matter in ways that will make you feel like an idiot and then a genius, but its hundreds, sometimes thousands of people moving in unison are capable of stirring up surprising emotions: delight, awe, even fear. The setup is simple: direct an endlessly spawning mass of people towards the light in a series of self-contained levels. The execution is anything but: a luminous shiba inu dog is the pack’s leader, scampering about brutalist architecture suspended high in the clouds. You are given the ability to manipulate the group in different ways with commands such as turn, jump, and branch, which siphons the roving mob into two. When it goes right, Humanity is the stuff of dreams; one wrong instruction, however, and the game turns into a Freudian nightmare, its mass of figures tumbling into an infinite abyss.
This strange, compulsive game is the product of a collaboration between tha and Enhance, the video game studio founded by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, celebrated designer of 2001’s Rez (another game inspired by heaving bodies) and 2019’s Tetris Effect. Mizuguchi, who simply goes by “Miz” to most people who know him, first saw Humanity in 2017 while sitting on a judging panel at a Unity showcase in Tokyo, back when it was still just a tech demo. It grabbed of his attention and then wouldn’t let it go, inspiring a series of searching questions. “Where is this going? What is this trying to get to?” he recalls asking himself, over a video call from his Tokyo office. Six years on, the game elements of Humanity have been fleshed out, but its confusing emotional impact hasn’t changed. “Even today, when I see what we’ve come up with, it’s quite shocking visually,” he says.
Six years is a long time to spend making any kind of video game, let alone a puzzle game (for comparison, that’s how long the new open-world behemoth Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom took to produce). Nakamura admits sculpting the crystalline idea into a meaningful interactive experience was a fraught process. There was a loss in direction, a stutter in development: “To be quite honest … I didn’t even want to show up to work,” Nakamura says. Then Enhance stepped in to offer direction – how to make Humanity “interesting, fun, and entertaining to play”.
Mizuguchi is modest about his studio’s input, casually describing it as “helping out with level design”. Like some of the very best puzzle games in recent memory, Humanity gradually ratchets up its complexity. You navigate levels filled with inky blocks that can be pushed around, fans that suspend your minions in mid-air and then, later in the game, grey-skinned figures dressed in black called “the others”. A boldly metaphorical narrative unfolds alongside this symbolic gameplay. During one set of levels collectively titled Fate, there’s no way to alter the path of your followers once they’ve started moving, forcing you to think 10, 15, sometimes even 20 moves ahead. During these puzzles, humankind’s course is preordained.
That said, Humanity is more often than not a game of improvisation and creativity, not least for players who choose to take advantage of the game’s in-built level creator. As producer Mark Macdonald explains, this also contributed to the protracted development, a feature requiring not only the development of easy-to-use tools but an entire network within which fan-made levels could be hosted, shared, and rated. “It’s kind of like creating Netflix and Twitter at the same time,” says Macdonald. During the game’s demo period in March, inventive players made levels based on the recent hit Vampire Survivors, stealth classic Metal Gear Solid, and even baseball, ideas the development team would never have conceived – in other words, “exactly what you’re hoping to see”, he says.
Creating levels is as much of a puzzle as those found in the actual game. Both tickle parts of the brain that enjoy tinkering and experimentation – seeing computer software come alive thanks to human input. As such, Nakamura sees Humanity as an extension of the web design work that made his name in the late 1990s – then cutting-edge sites like MONO*craft, which took advantage of the era’s nascent Flash software. He speaks of the user coming into “touch” with a site, a “reaction”, and this generating an “aha moment”. Of course, websites tend to occupy their users’ attention for only a few minutes; video games have to sustain a player’s attention for many hours. This proved to be one of the biggest challenges for Nakamura. “I would feel that maybe [we had] enough to satisfy the user,” he says. “But I didn’t know what the upper limit was.”
Nakamura has used the medium’s length to produce a game that is both playful and profound, evoking two works that could scarcely be more different. On the one hand, Lemmings, the seminal 1991 puzzle game that sees you leading strange tiny humanoid figures through underground environments; on the other, Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 masterpiece Koyaanisqatsi, a cinematic tone poem that casts a panoramic, God-like gaze over humanity and its increasingly fractious relationship with Earth. Reggio’s film eludes a single straightforward interpretation, and Humanity will likely inspire similar existential musings.
For Macdonald, the Covid-19 pandemic, which occurred midway through development, cast the game in a new light. He recalls watching US coverage of the accompanying public unrest and demonstrations while working in Japan, “unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime”, he says. “Then I’m seeing these giant crowds of people [in the game] flowing, interacting, sometimes competing and fighting, and it’s surreal.”
Nakamura, meanwhile, speaks philosophically of social media and the ways in which it has distorted our perspective before zeroing in on a single question: “Why do things happen when suddenly we’re part of a crowd, part of a larger society, or part of a larger community?” In the surreal, visual story he has crafted – one that only a video game could tell – a dog leads a pack of humans who have “lost their sense of direction, and maybe even hope”.
Humanity is out 16 May for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PSVR, and PSVR 2
