Humanity game review — can a dog save us from ourselves?

What is Humanity? Whether you’re experiencing a moment of metaphysical doubt or wondering about the new action-adventure-puzzle game from Tha Ltd and Enhance, the answer is more or less the same: Humanity is a mindlessly stubborn mass of beings who sometimes need a bit of guidance from a higher power. If that higher power happens to be a dog, of the shiba-inu breed, so much the better.

“I awoke one morning to find I was a dog,” your shiba inu-shaped protagonist reflects in the game’s ethereal opening moments. Through an otherworldly portal, a crowd of faceless humans walks in. They proceed, dronelike, in a straight line across the Minecraft-meets-existential-crisis landscape with no regard for the vast drops that surround them. That’s where your little dog comes in. Your job is to use barked commands to set these people on the right path and guide them to the exit. If you succeed in delivering a certain number of souls, you’ll complete the stage and move one step closer to finding out what on earth is going on.

To start with, your commands will simply change the crowd’s direction. As you progress, you can grant them the ability to jump, or follow, or fight. Crucially, you’re not giving these commands from above, like an omnipotent deity. No, Humanity is as much 3D platformer as it is puzzler, so you’ll need actually to reach the places that you want to place commands.

There is a seemingly infinite supply of humans, so you needn’t feel bad if a few plummet into the abyss — or so the game insists. Death isn’t too permanent a concept in whatever dimension this is. It’s an odd proposition, visually, like some kind of PlayStation 3 tech demo that never quite found its groove — but you’ll be grateful for the clarity of the aesthetic as the problems get more complex.

And they do get more complex. There’s the introduction of the “Others”, aggressive antagonists. But Humanity works because there’s more going on than just cold, hard geometry — there is intrigue, absurdity and a brilliantly escalating set of game mechanics.

Before you know it, you’re the canine commander of an army of humans wordlessly fighting their way through a cross between Squid Game and Takeshi’s Castle. It’s a highly original format, one that oscillates between deeply satisfying and satisfyingly frustrating. But when you finally align three simultaneous streams of humans so that they’re arcing over one another, hurtling towards salvation, there is a bizarre, balletic beauty to it all.

There is a curious poetry to the game’s premise, too. Twice in history, thanks to the careful efforts of humanity, the shiba inu has narrowly avoided extinction as a breed. Now, evidently, it’s time for the dog to take the lead.

★★★★☆

‘Humanity’ is available from May 16 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and PC