Lemmings meets Koyaanisqatsi: Humanity, the dream-like puzzle game that inspires delight and unease

A collaboration between famed designer Yugo Nakamura and gaming auteur Tetsuya Mizuguchi has yielded one of the strangest, most compelling puzzle games of recent years

Humanity was inspired by a throng of bodies. Specifically, the mass of people queueing for Comiket, the longstanding comic and pop culture convention in Tokyo. As its director Yugo Nakamura explains over a video call from the city, he was intrigued by the orderly manner" in which these people were milling about. We have our soul and mind," he says, but it was almost like they were moving without thinking." The challenge the designer set himself and his colleagues at the award-winning Japanese studio tha ltd. was to simulate this gently surging crowd, the ebb and flow of the collective.

The resulting puzzle game does something unusual for the genre. Yes, it stretches your grey matter in ways that will make you feel like an idiot and then a genius, but its hundreds, sometimes thousands of people moving in unison are capable of stirring up surprising emotions: delight, awe, even fear. The setup is simple: direct an endlessly spawning mass of people towards the light in a series of self-contained levels. The execution is anything but: a luminous shiba inu dog is the pack's leader, scampering about brutalist architecture suspended high in the clouds. You are given the ability to manipulate the group in different ways with commands such as turn, jump, and branch, which siphons the roving mob into two. When it goes right, Humanity is the stuff of dreams; one wrong instruction, however, and the game turns into a Freudian nightmare, its mass of figures tumbling into an infinite abyss.