#Yugo puzzle series

“Where is this going? What is this trying to get to?” he recalls asking himself, over a video call from his Tokyo office.

#Yugo puzzle series

It grabbed of his attention and then wouldn’t let it go, inspiring a series of searching questions. Mizuguchi, who simply goes by “Miz” to most people who know him, first saw Humanity in 2017 while sitting on a judging panel at a Unity showcase in Tokyo, back when it was still just a tech demo. This strange, compulsive game is the product of a collaboration between tha and Enhance, the video game studio founded by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, celebrated designer of 2001’s Rez (another game inspired by heaving bodies) and 2019’s Tetris Effect. 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. 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.

The execution is anything but: a luminous shiba inu dog is the pack’s leader, scampering about brutalist architecture suspended high in the clouds. The setup is simple: direct an endlessly spawning mass of people towards the light in a series of self-contained levels. 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 resulting puzzle game does something unusual for the genre.