Humanity Review - Becoming A People Person

Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
Platform: PlayStation 5, PlayStation VR2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation VR, PC
Publisher: Enhance Games
Developer: Tha LTD
Release: 2020

Playing god is a familiar feeling for many video game genres, like action titles where your character is unstoppable or sims where you control everything. Roleplaying a god is rarely something I feel while playing puzzle games, but Humanity provides it in new and surprising ways. The unique style of puzzle solving uses directional signs and commands to guide droves of miniature people to an endpoint. The puzzles start simple, but Humanity builds on this core system throughout its 100-plus stages in exciting and challenging ways, pushing me to my limit while telling a heartfelt story about human nature. 

Humanity is an immediately striking game. Its visual style is minimalistic, focusing squarely on the 3D puzzle area. But soft and beautiful backgrounds spotlight my actions as I guide colorful hordes of humans across various challenges. I begin with one simple command: a direction. I place it on the ground, and when the line of humans crosses it, they follow that direction. My journey through Humanity introduces me to plenty more commands, like ones to pause actions completely, jump, and use lightsaber-like weapons and guns to take out the enemy – The Others – that sometimes work to stop my progress. These new commands keep Humanity’s puzzles feeling fresh, and it was especially interesting to see how developer Tha Ltd used challenges to change my perception of how a command can be used.

I often felt there was no way Humanity could up the ante as I marveled at my solution after spending more than 30 minutes on the most complex trials. But each time I doubt its ability to be even more challenging, Humanity introduces another wrinkle to its puzzle rules. And each time, I go from, “There’s just no way I can figure this out,” to feeling omnipotent 30 minutes later. 

Humanity is peaceful and relaxing on its surface, which is often the case, but it is a challenging game. That is, if you don’t want to use Humanity’s built-in solution videos. However, these don’t show you how to pick up the optional Goldy humans in each level, which unlock cosmetic changes for your humans and details like in-depth stats about your efforts.

 

These videos make it clear Tha Ltd wants all its players to experience the storytelling at play in it. Tetris Effect studio, Enhance, publishes Humanity, and like Tetris Effect, Humanity does more than provide satisfying puzzles. It serves up puzzles with a surprisingly human narrative about our nature as a society, how we can work together to progress, and how we’re all more connected than not. It’s sweet and simple but effective, especially after guiding thousands of humans across challenges toward the light. 

Despite providing solution videos, there are moments when Humanity feels like a chore to play. Because some puzzles have solutions that take minutes to play out as lines of humans walk in real-time toward the end, Humanity allows you to speed up what’s happening on screen by pressing R2. This doubles the speed, but when a solution takes minutes to achieve, I’m still waiting a while. And because I often had to restart puzzles from the beginning to see if a new command would fix what prevented my humans from progressing each time, I waited a lot.  

With trial restarts, you can keep your commands from the previous attempt, which helps dampen this issue, but waiting through all of your other commands to see if a new one at the very end solves the puzzle gets boring; in the back third of the game, I often grabbed my phone while holding R2, waiting to see if a new command works. Critically, the satisfaction I feel when successfully solving a puzzle always overrides the frustrations I have while solving it. 

Humanity features a level creator and a way to try out other players’ creations. While these seem like worthwhile efforts to continue the puzzle fun, I’m not creative enough to make my own. And after playing through Tha Ltd’s handcrafted levels in the story, I am well satisfied – enough that I don’t have the urge to dive too deep into someone else’s puzzles. But level creation might provide the additional, longer-lasting fun someone else might want from this game. 

Humanity strikes a delicate balance between challenging me at every turn and allowing me to feel like the god its narrative props me up to be. It’s an imaginative experience that provides a rush I imagine computer programmers feel when dozens of commands and lines of code finally work together to create a desired outcome. Its puzzles come wrapped in a beautiful package, from its minimalist visuals to its excellent clicky electronic beats. And best of all, these elements work together to emphasize a simple but effective message about what it means to be human and why life’s most intricate puzzles are easiest to solve when we work together.

Score: 8.5

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Review - Such Great Heights

Reviewed on: Switch
Platform: Switch
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo
Rating: Everyone 10+

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is battling impossible expectations. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild represented a radical and successful reinvention of The Legend of Zelda – a series considered by many to be the apex of game design. Despite its numerous changes to Zelda’s formula, Breath of the Wild was a massive success and its legacy only grows stronger with time.

To give Breath of the Wild a direct sequel (a rarity in Zelda canon) is a dangerous prospect. The resulting game lacks the admittedly difficult-to-recreate, undeniable impact and newness of the prior game. Instead, it gives players a chance to revisit the world through a completely new lens with new abilities for a brilliant adventure providing players a staggering amount of agency in how they approach nearly every gameplay instance.

Tears of the Kingdom mostly takes place on the ground in Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule, but it doesn't feel like a retread. New traversal options that change how you explore the world combine with the passage of time to make this Hyrule different, like visiting the town you grew up in after being away for many years. You have a good idea of where things are, but they are different and exciting to explore when you get there. That balance of novel and familiar on the ground is well-executed, and the islands in the sky create wholly new, substantial areas to explore. Figuring out how to leap from island to island in the sky is consistently thrilling, and exploring Hyrule’s caves is dark and intimidating, creating potent exploration options to suit your mood.

Link's new abilities are the main draw of Tears of the Kingdom. Fuse, which lets you combine weapons, shields, items, and more, rewards experimentation and impressively makes every single item in the game – every rock lying on the ground, every plant you pick up, every Zonai technology-infused shield – have some value. It makes the act of collecting even more fun because you can ask yourself stupid questions like, “What if I attached an acorn to a bladed staff?” and arrive at answers.

Item degradation makes a return, which is a system I appreciate for making everything I pick up become something I actually use. Quality-of-life improvements also make managing your various tools much easier, and Fuse means you can collect and combine more weapons if you just hate the idea of leaving things behind.

Ascend, allowing Link to move through any ceiling within a certain distance, is impressive in its implementation and practicality. It’s one of the abilities that radically changes how you move through the sometimes familiar world. Recall, which makes objects in the world move backward in time, frequently had me questioning if something would work, only to discover that, yes, it absolutely works in joyful ways.

The king of the abilities, and frankly the king of Tears of the Kingdom, is Ultrahand. The simplified pitch is it allows Link to connect objects. I was intimidated by the new mechanic when it was introduced, and the controls do take some getting used to, but it did not take long for me to become Hyrule’s number one combination contractor and engineer, and I relished the title.

Combining objects to solve simple puzzles to creating complicated flying contraptions with a series of fans, rockets, and batteries is a delight without ever making you spend too much time on any one project. Tears of the Kingdom recognizes what you are trying to make in nearly every instance, which means simple acts like attaching a steering wheel to a platform with four tires works with little fuss. But it also accounts for much more complicated builds, and I was frequently surprised at what I could quickly create and implement into puzzle solving.

Ultrahand is the rare mechanic that sneaks into your brain and makes you contemplate it while outside of the game. The highest compliment I can give is that I dreamed about Ultrahand, rotating pillars and attaching them to boxes in my sleeping brain the same way I saw orange and blue circles in my dreams when I first played Portal. It is Tears of the Kingdom’s most significant achievement.

The adventure is full of other highlights, as well. The story begins with an engaging conceit and only builds to an excellent conclusion. It also doesn't repeat a big narrative issue of the first game: Where was Zelda the whole time? Thankfully, the story knows it's a sequel and acknowledges what came before. You can check in on characters and locations of the past to see how they have changed. The story does not step too far out of the bounds of what we have come to expect from a Zelda plot, but I liked the turns it took, and I was eager to see where it was going.

Structurally, Tears of the Kingdom is familiar with combat working functionally the same. New Shrines that are fun to solve and reward fast-travel locations litter the map, and there are a few traditional Zelda dungeons. The new dungeons are simplified but don't sacrifice puzzle design while being easier to understand. The new dungeons also have great bosses. I appreciated that they are more varied and allow you to lean on recently learned, specific abilities to claim victory.

Video game sequels are often iterative on what came before them. It looks a little better, plays a little smoother, retains important mechanics while introducing new ones, and continues the story. Tears of the Kingdom checks most of these boxes, but getting rid of the Runes from the first game and giving players new ones to use in exploring a familiar but undeniably new world is ingenious. Nearly every encounter, whether puzzle, traversal, or combat, must be reconsidered. It makes you think in new ways. I didn’t get the same goosebumps exploring Hyrule as I did in the past, but I did experience new emotions both on a granular level from solving individual puzzles and on a larger scale by going back to one of my favorite video game locations. They say you can never go home again, but I adored returning to Hyrule with all new tools.

Score: 9.75

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Redfall Review – A Life-Draining Trip To New England

Reviewed on: PC
Platform: Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Arkane Studios
Rating: Mature

Redfall is my biggest disappointment of 2023. As a massive fan of developer Arkane Studios’ previous work, from Dishonored through Deathloop, my expectations were high for the company’s new release. However, this vampire-hunting first-person shooter is messy, plagued with technical flaws and head-scratching design decisions counterintuitive to the game itself. The result is an often-bland experience, made frustrating by occasional glimpses of potential, and it’s sucked the life out of me. 

The fictional harbor town of Redfall, Massachusetts, is overrun with vampires and their cultic worshippers. Your goal as one of four unique protagonists is to restore the haunted region to its former state. Standing in your way are the Vampire Gods, a wealthy group of scientists-turned-monsters whose backstories never impacted me despite the campaign’s surface-level attempts. That’s about as much as the introduction gives you before throwing you into the action.

 

After completing Redfall’s introduction, you conduct story and side missions from a centralized base of operations. The first few hours of the narrative follow The Hollow Man, a mysterious entity proselytizing from the town’s radio signals. The Hollow Man seems to have been everywhere you go, and his presence is unnerving. This stretch features Redfall’s best missions and locations, which require you to explore a dilapidated mansion and its gruesome past, fight a powerful enemy at a cliffside lighthouse in a lightning storm, and rescue hostages from a boatyard that The Hollow Man’s followers control. Unfortunately, the game tries to replicate its early hours throughout its remainder; hard-to-follow story revelations, repeating side activities, and a second, less-interesting map leave it feeling hollow and formulaic. Lastly, Arkane presents the Vampire Gods’ storyline via flashbacks in which you stand in an abandoned space watching vaguely humanoid ghosts speak to each other. The result is largely forgettable. 

On a positive note, I like the four launch protagonists: Remi and her robotic companion Bribón; a teleporting cryptozoologist named Devinder; Jacob, who is a marksman with a psychic eye; and Layla, a biomedical engineer who inherited telekinetic powers after a medical trial gone wrong. Each character has unique skills you can upgrade via a straightforward-but-sufficient skill tree, but with only three total abilities per character, you won’t use them nearly as much as your firearms. The experience could’ve been more interesting if I could pick and choose from the game’s 12 abilities to carve my playstyle, but sadly you must select one character and their pre-determined skillset for the entire game. 

Redfall’s shooting mechanics and armory of weapons are serviceable, with the heavy-hitting stake launcher and ultra-violet raygun – which petrifies vampires – being the highlights. You’ll discover new weapons as you explore the world and complete missions, each slotting somewhere into the rudimentary tiered-loot system. Despite guns having randomized perks, like increased damage to petrified vampires, I didn’t pay much attention to them because the loot system recycles the same dozen or so weapons repeatedly, with slightly higher stats each time. Notably, it does the same with enemy vampire types, too. I’d often fight the same kind of vampire frequently, but my character would remark that it was a new vampire simply because it had a different name. 

Looking at the world of Redfall, I become sad by its wasted potential. For every great location, there are a handful of forgettable ones. The result is an empty-feeling game with several puzzling problems, like a lack of proper stealth takedowns, a tedious quest and waypoint system, and the inability to pause gameplay in single-player mode. Rampant technical issues hinder brighter moments, including frequent server crashes during multiplayer, inputs failing to work, broken animations, and numerous other bugs that make playing Redfall a frustrating experience. For a game about fighting the undead, Redfall feels soulless in all the wrong ways.

Score: 5

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