"Humanity" is the best game I played this year. It is so good I am making this post just to tell you about it. As a one-sentence summary, it's "Lemmings" except that the lemmings are the entire human population of Earth. There is a Shiba Inu (you). The game is available on Steam and Playstation.
The game is a collaboration between Tetsuya Mizuguchi (from Rez), Yugo Nakamura (a legendary graphic designer and Flash artist), and Tha (the firm that designed this public toilet in Shibuya, Tokyo). The music is by "Jemapur" and is a reactive soundtrack that constantly surprises without ever distracting (okay, one song distracted, but there's a button to skip to a different song). The visuals are so simple they're practically a Unity default project but the game finds ways to make its very simple primitives look constantly stunning, and delights in finding as many ways as possible to use "a particle engine made of people" for a cool visual effect. You are also allowed to give your humans hats.
In the game, you (a Shiba Inu) drop various kinds of barks that direct an endless stream of walking humans in various ways. The game allots you different barks in different levels, which allows it to achieve one of my favorite game design tricks: emulating many different genres in a single game without ever altering the mechanics, only the dynamics. Depending on the level structure and the available verbs Humanity veers between a clockwork-building tile puzzle game, a freeform 3D action puzzler, a stealth game, or an action RTS. Almost everything it tries works, and bouncing between all the different ideas the game has is a real roller coaster. Meanwhile the humans themselves keep surprising you, moving like an organic crowd of people or a fluid in ways that constantly pull you back from viewing the maps as just tiles and blocks. The game constantly surprises and even once it's done there's a wealth of optional levels and a giant repository of online UGC puzzles. I played this game months ago but I'm still thinking about it.
