Just what is Humanity? That isn't a philosophical question, it's regarding this game. Just what is this wacky, decadent world where I am guiding a mass population to some nebulous goals made by a giant floating orb?
Well, finding out means I have to participate in their experiments. Being the guiding shepherd of a lost flock, that is for some reason based on a silhouette of a Shiba Inu. All the meta storytelling, visual spectacle, and biblical bizarre stuff all round up in this weird, unique package with engaging puzzles that really did make me scratch my head.
From the guys who made Tetris Effect, and Rez: Infinite, here I play a game to find some grand sense of achievement or enlightenment, but still left to figure its ambiguous message. It got insane, and then it got zanier.
So, instructions laid before me that I should be careful about how I direct the flock to follow. The gods of this dimensional have tasked me to lead them in order to find the golden statues that look like Oscars but animated.
It turns out, these "Oscars" unlocks things, and are the main objective of these puzzle sections. So far playing, I've gotten these permanent abilities from fast-forward, pause, retry without resetting orders, dial up zoom, and so on. Levels tend to get more experimental, so unlocking these helps a ton.
The puzzles in later levels got more complex, and trickier to solve. They also have different orders specific to these levels. So from telling them where to turn, I'd tell them to jump, high jump, or long jump, float, ones specific in solving each levels.
And the experimental plays in each level are also trial and error at times, I would lose the golden guy, and had to restart either with resetting orders or not. The humans that follow, can fall off and come back, and it isn't the case where I can just leave orders on one place and easily move on.
Like, micromanaging these guys is a lot. They sometimes make dumb mistakes by going off on their own, and become anomalies from their created trajectory. The sandbox has me moving boxes to a certain point, I have to order them to move back, stopping anyone from messing it up.
New abilities became difficult to obtain, and the gold guys were more out of reach as I played through levels of later sequences. My first sequence was easy enough to obtain all of them. Now, there is freedom to control, and shift the sandbox however I can. They are fairly built, but later on gets trickier to solve as well.
The game later introduces stuff like boxes with fans, hardened grass where I can't move objects pass them, carousels with directions, and can be interacted to an individual degree or be used together to get through levels.
I guess I have to say that if puzzle solving leads me to find out about some hidden truths about humanity? I guess it was really well worth it. But no, that's not what I got. Instead of thrown into this Lemmings type, situation where I do one bizarre thing after another to amass power for these blue orb gods.
The Inu himself asks for more question and has good awareness as well as morbid curiosity about the whole ordeal. As the lead in the game, and voice of reason, much like me, we find out more puzzles are solved, delving deeper into understanding their main objective.
There's a lot of allegory and anthropological insights found throughout my playtime, but has this charm that reminds me of games like Black & White, and LittleBigPlanet. It doesn't just settle on actively managing the flock, as well as changing the sandbox as well. The only way to find out how is to keep pushing forward, which got harder to do, as later stages decided that since I was familiar with how the game worked, I had to do 4D mathematics on solving the ones from the 2nd sequence.
Humanity is just a stand in title for what this game is about. What it's really about is doing anything bonkers to either complete its goals, or just fumble around and finding out. Which has a lot to do with the sandbox of the game.
The later sequences after fulfilling the blue orbs wishes eventually transitions to being complete wack, as instead of solving puzzles, I was playing a strategy game. There are trials where deadly foes exist that would actually try to eliminate my humans (they can't die, they are spiritual in sense).
Other times, outside of leading humans into the right paths in carousals, am literally arming them with laser blasters, and they have to be paved in a path to blast off objects blocking their way before getting to the ascension zone. The changes in tone and outlook also affects the orders and abilities I'll get later on.
To add more incentive into playing this, there's even a custom mode for creating a stage and an online place for downloading user made stages as well. People who are into Mario Maker could have Nintendo give them a run for their money.
There are not many games that exist like this, and the ones that do barely get noticed after the hype. Titles like Dreams and such. Not me, though, I'll definitely come back for more.
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