Humanity feels too half-baked

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Humanity (Reviewed)

Developer: tha ltd.

Publisher: Enhance

Released: May 15th, 2023

Price: $30 USD

Humanity is, in its most basic form, a platforming puzzle game that follows the story of a Shiba Inu who is entrusted with leading crowds of humans through a story mode campaign of stages.

The game varies from a range of difficulties, in which they can be very time consuming and frustrating to down right Childs play. I would like to emphasis that I did actually enjoy a fair amount of the puzzles presented in this game, with some grievances towards some of the other elements.

Gameplay

The puzzles are good

The core gameplay is satisfactory. Some of these puzzles have quite interesting solutions, that make you think outside of the box. It draws inspiration from games like Portal 2 (without the portals) and turns it into something interesting.

However, the first four hours of gameplay felt like one long tutorial and honestly it still does, stage after stage, trial after trial. A little too much hand holding for my liking, compared to other of the more hard puzzle games I've played in the past.

There are several entities called cores that help you understand the game by bestowing powers to you. Some of these are more difficult to grasp than others.

What makes the game as a whole difficult is the need to move obstacles around and leveraging terrain and effects to complete a stage with all gold humans.

Otherwise, going from point A to point B is simple and takes no effort at all.

Custom Maps

If you're a creative type, you might want to try your hand at making your own levels. Some of these are quite good. When you finally figure out the mechanics underlying the challenge, the experience becomes even more rewarding.

Baby Mode

Having difficulties? You can use the solution video area of the menu to get tips or to show you the whole method to completing the stage.

However, you will still need to use your brain to figure out how to earn the goldies, which frequently require an entirely other set of setups to obtain. This may not appear to be very challenging until you understand that some stages will limit you to a limited number of uses of a specific power, or a few powers.

Issues

Feels unfinished

The game does not appear to be worth the price given. This is because there are so many distinct faults with the aesthetics, audio, tempo, and other elements that make me wonder where the concentration was placed in development.

It's as if the developers felt that putting all of their resources towards the puzzles and marketing the game with fantastic music and humorous flow would make more sense, as they sneered at the game as if it were their son or daughter asking for a their weekly $5 allowance. It's not as relaxing as some claim it to be.

Visually

I didn't mind it, but it got boring after a while. All of the skyboxes you're in are static. When entering stuff like water or altering the stage with switches, it's unremarkable and a little jerky with the performances, common with unity.

I would have loved it more if it hadn't looked so monotonous and repetitive of the previous 20 stages. It would be wonderful to have some variety instead of an empty stagnant world where you have to solve pretty decently made puzzles.

Auditorily

A persistent slowed-down humming tune or melody that will continue until you leave that particular "trial." You can, however, change the tune at the beginning of a stage, but the catch is that you can only listen to songs that you have already unlocked, making it unpleasant and a little too annoying to be calming or restful.

I haven't had this much of a headache when playing a video game and listening to music since Hylics and Hylics 2 which was due to psychedelic nature of it.

In a nutshell, the music was dreadful. Because 96% of the tracks were just unending repeats of the same few chords, I thought that muting it completely was the best solution. There was the occasional half-decent tune, but they all felt like royalty free music. They were subpar in compared to the marketing videos.

No Rewind

Failed a stage because you misplaced the gold humans and killed one of them? Get used to watching the past 5 minutes over while hitting "fast forward."

It is not difficult to implement such a mechanic in a puzzle game. It would provide a lot more accessibility to individuals who don't want to waste hours watching something they could have fixed with the press of a button and 2 seconds of their time. This could be more of a personal bias due to how I perceive things.

Consider doing a jigsaw puzzle and accidentally inserting the wrong piece. Instead of picking up the piece, you break it all up and start over from scratch.

While the game allows you to "restart with commands," it still wastes too much critical time to be a feature that should be included. Rewind I feel is necessary.

Conclusion

There are better fleshed out puzzle platforms out there

While the primary gameplay has its ups and downs, it works well as a puzzle platformer with a variety of solutions to help you reach the end of the stage.

However, when combined with the lack of audio decency and the incredibly bland and monotonous skyboxes and landscapes. It leaves a lot to be desired from the one playing, because there isn't much here for what is being charged.

So, while I think the game's puzzles are largely well thought out and interesting, everything else detracts from the game, bringing it down to a lower quality than I would anticipate for the price. You're basically looking at a game that's worth about 15-20 dollars and is more early access than full release.

The reward scheme felt equally dumb. Apart from a few human alterations and the opportunity to unlock stuff like the music selection, you don't get much out of collecting the gold humans, which can be very difficult and time consuming.

This concludes my views of this game; while my opinions may be met with criticism, that is what distinguishes gamers; you don't have to like the same things as others, nor do you have to agree with them.

If you want to catch me on one of my streams or locate me on social media, you may do so at the following locations, I'm always playing something new.

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- Pawkt