Crowd control puzzler Humanity is out now
Only a Shiba Inu can save us
Humanity has been released. Not from our inevitable march towards eternal slumber, but the puzzle game wahey. It's being published by Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Enhance and it seems shot through with the same mixture of the silly and the sublime as that designer's Rez and Tetris Effect, as you play a Shiba Inu who commands crowds of humans around large abstract architecture.
Here's the launch trailer, which follows past trailers by riffing on the vibe of early PS1 and PS2 Japanese TV commercials:
There's a little of Lemmings to it, as you lead the crowd around levels and drop markers telling them when to stop, turn and jump. The levels look more like something out of Sony Japan Studio's Echochrome, though, and a big part of what Humanity offers is a toolkit for creating those levels yourself. You can follow a story mode if you just want to play the official levels, or download hopefully hundreds of others created by players.
Although published by Enhance, Humanity is developed by Tha Ltd, a design studio led by Yugo Nakamura and bnest known for website and brand design work outside of video games.
Earlier trailers for Humanity sent me down the rabbit hole of watching this supercut of old Japanese PlayStation adverts. Which in turn filled up my YouTube recommendations with the Ridge Racer 4 soundtrack. I regret nothing.
Much like Mizuguchi's other recent games, Humanity can also be optionally played in virtual reality. If it seems like you're thing, it's £25/$30 over on Steam.