Humanity is an upcoming puzzle game where you play as a shiba inu and guide humans towards a beam of light.

It’s a lot to take in, but aside from the insane premise, Humanity is actually a fantastic puzzle game. Real time lemmings in an abstract environment with calming music in the background somehow equates to a really calming puzzle experience.

The game’s puzzles consist of telling the humans where to go through floating arrows, eventually being able to tell them to jump or long jump. The shiba inu can also attach weird properties to the humans, like making them float so they’ll be able to jump even further.

Each map has this humanoid golden figure called “goldy”, he walks alongside your humans but is usually out of the way, picking him up is optional in most maps.

The best puzzle type so far is the one where you need to set all of your commands before pressing play, making the player map out their steps very carefully.

This mechanic of queueing your actions is something I’ve only seen in extremely niche titles like the Deception series, and I didn’t know how much I missed something like this.

Planning everything and trying to take into account the terrain changes while also not overlapping commands is quite difficult, but seeing it all play out perfectly after you are done is immensely satisfying.

Every few chapters we get little pieces of the plot, the current mystery is how the shiba inu ended up in this situation, since the game’s introduction states he was a human once.

The game also has a group called the “others”, another group of humans who seek to steal your goldy, a stage in the demo has you placing a huge fan to blow them away, making it so you can pass without losing your Oscar lookalike.

You can watch me play through the full demo below:

Despite being a really relaxing game, Humanity has a surreal feel to it, there is a bit of commentary on the fact that the humans cannot get along with this other group, despite being virtually identical.

There is also something about the imagery of thousands of people walking single-file to their doom because you forgot to place an order, the demo plays around with some commentary but keeps it really vague, most likely to avoid being preachy.

The game’s absurdist visuals kick in full force at the end of the demo, where you see a giant glowing ball of people floating around.

The demo currently only consists of 11 levels, with some really straightforward puzzles, but something tells me the game will get much more complex in its full release.

The game also has a really robust level creator, which is already being used at length by the community. Players can make and browser other levels made in the demo, and these user-created levels feature a lot of mechanics not seen in the story mode yet.

Humanity is a fantastic and relaxing oddity of a game, I can’t wait for the full release.

Humanity is set to release on May, 2023, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PlayStation VR/VR2 and Microsoft Windows (through Steam).