REVIEW · 2023-05-15
HUMANITY
Reading the split verdict on a modern Lemmings led by a Shiba Inu
First Impressions
HUMANITY launched on May 15, 2023 — developed by tha ltd., the studio of web designer Yugo Nakamura, with Enhance, the label of Rez and Tetris Effect creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi, publishing. You play a glowing Shiba Inu placing commands — turn, jump, swim — beneath an endlessly marching crowd, guiding it to the goal across 90 story stages, with a stage creator and optional VR.
As of my 2026-08-14 snapshot the Steam aggregate stands at 93% positive out of 505 reviews across all languages — Very Positive — with an 84 on Metacritic for PC. The recent page is rougher: the online service for user-made stages closed in March 2026, and nearly every recent negative review is about that. I will come back to it in the closing.
Across the helpful positive reviews the vocabulary is strikingly consistent — 'zen', 'abstract and ambient', 'consistently engaging' — and almost every one reaches for Lemmings, one reviewer writing that it lights up the same areas of the brain.
HUMANITY — Steam store screenshot
Putting the Mechanics into Words
The reviewers' collective description goes like this: the crowd never thinks, it just walks. What you manipulate is the floor — tiles that say turn right, jump, swim. One long positive review called the result a living diagram, and the moment the crowd starts flowing through a finished plan is the single most repeated image in the pool.
In Puzzlebyrinth terms, the game removes the verbs from the player's hands and embeds them in the board. Where 7 Billion Humans turns crowd-commanding into literal programming, HUMANITY makes space itself the program; the resolution of observation is the flow, not the individual.
One negative review objects that identical setups can produce different outcomes — RNG in a puzzle game. That is the price of simulating the crowd as a fluid: the design leans toward civil engineering, a plan that is roughly right, rather than a chess problem with one exact answer. Which of the two you came for decides your verdict early.
HUMANITY — Steam store screenshot
Place in the Lineage
Both sides measure the game against Lemmings. The positives feel their brain light up in the same places it did decades ago; one negative flatly says it does not reach the 1991 original, citing controls and sound. Heir or substitute — the same yardstick, opposite verdicts.
My reading: HUMANITY discards the resource management at Lemmings' core — how many do you sacrifice — and treats the crowd as a fluid that keeps pouring. The critique shifts from rescue to the shaping of flows, an image not far from the crowd scenes of INSIDE promoted to protagonist.
Professional critics ran warmer than users on the most divisive part: Edge praised how it actively changes genre partway through, and Eurogamer called the stage creator terrifyingly powerful. Metacritic's 84 collects that enthusiasm; on the user side, the same genre-shifting is the main battleground.
HUMANITY — Steam store screenshot
The Texture of Difficulty
The cleanest split in the pool is the genre shift. Positives credit the game for morphing from puzzle-platformer into RTS, bullet hell and stealth while staying consistently engaging. The representative negative calls the first third some of the best logic-puzzle play in years and the pivot a betrayal, describing constantly wrestling with the camera.
Read as design, the texture of difficulty swaps midway: the first half is planning difficulty — which verb on which tile — while the back half adds execution difficulty, precision and real-time judgement. Refreshing the curve by swapping genres instead of adding verbs is bold, and it knowingly leaves the pure-thought audience behind.
On raw challenge the pool is mild — neither too hard nor too easy, harder in the best ways. Finishers report roughly 13–24 hours and HowLongToBeat lists 17–20 for the story; stages are short and retries fast.
HUMANITY — Steam store screenshot
Sources
This piece was written from the user reviews on the Steam store page as of 2026-08-14. No review text is quoted verbatim; typical claims are reconstructed.
・Steam: HUMANITY (Very Positive, 93% of 505 reviews)
・Read via WebFetch: top 17 helpful positive reviews, 9 negative, 10 recent
・(Official) Enhance: update on HUMANITY user-generated content; Metacritic 84 and the Edge / Eurogamer verdicts referenced via Wikipedia
Closing
First, the elephant on the recent page: in March 2026 the online service hosting roughly 30,000 user-made stages shut down, and recent negatives concentrate almost entirely on it — half the game's value gone, bought it for the creator and sharing. The store still headlines the intuitive Stage Creator; the gap is an operations problem rather than a design one, but a buyer today should know it.
Against Steam's 93% I land at 8.5. The purity of the first half and the invention of writing verbs onto the floor are worth a 9; the genre shifts are a defensible choice that invites dissent, and the loss of UGC genuinely lowers today's package. What remains — 90 stages and the sight of a crowd flowing through your plan for the first time — still earns the price.
Recommended if you carry memories of Lemmings, care about crowds as material, or enjoy a game that keeps changing shape. If you want nothing but pure logic, budget for the possibility that the first half satisfies you and the second half loses you.
HUMANITY — Steam store screenshot
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