Sony announced Humanity during the 2019 PlayStation State of Play livestream. Developed by Enhance and Tha Ltd., Humanity is billed as a “human behavior simulator” and appears to be some sort of puzzle game in which players control huge crowds of humans.
Following Humanity‘s State of Play announcement, The Ltd. founder Yugo Nakamura elaborated on the game’s inspiration on the PlayStation Blog. Humanity is meant to show how a transcendental, god-like entity would view human behavior, the same way a human beings make observations about bird migrations. As a self-proclaimed “just another guy drowning in human society,” Nakamura said it hasn’t been an easy process to imagine what human behavior would look like from the outside. But Nakamura’s team kept pursuing the idea, hoping to create a game that would make an other-worldly being say, “Ah yes, so this is what human beings are like.” In order to create the game, Nakamura spent time observing groups of people around Tokyo.
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The result of Nakamura’s work appears to be quite strange: Humanity‘s aesthetic is incredibly surreal, showing massive groups of people wandering around geometric environments that float in large, empty spaces. While Nakamura did not explain just how Humanity will play (though he said several times that it would be fun to play), some of the game’s challenges appear to involve simply navigating these environments as the humans stumble around. The State of Play reveal clip showed some combat, as well, with groups of humans wearing multi-colored shirts battled groups of humans wearing black shirts, using light-up batons and guns to defeat the enemy.
Though no release date was specified for Humanity, it’s set to launch sometime in 2020 for PS4 with PSVR support. Publisher Enhance, which previously published the similarly ethereal Tetris Effect, began working with Tha as a publisher, Nakamura said, but Humanity has become more like a co-production between the two companies.
