Humanity

Humanity
Information
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Developer	tha ltd., Enhance
Publisher	Enhance
Platform	PlayStation VR2, PlayStation VR, PC VR, Meta Quest
Device	PlayStation VR2, PlayStation VR, Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest Pro, Oculus Rift S, Valve Index
Operating System	PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Meta Horizon OS, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S
Type	Game
Genre	Puzzle, Action
Input Device	Gamepad, Tracked motion controllers
Play Area	Seated, Standing, Room-scale
Game Mode	Single-player
Release Date	May 16, 2023 (PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam); March 14, 2024 (Meta Quest); May 30, 2024 (Xbox, Windows)
Price	US$29.99 (PlayStation Store, Steam); US$24.99 (Meta Quest, launch price)
App Store	PlayStation Store, Steam, Meta Horizon Store, Microsoft Store
Website	https://humanity.game

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

Humanity (stylized HUMANITY) is a puzzle-action game in which the player controls a glowing Shiba Inu that places commands on the ground for huge, marching crowds of people to follow. It was created by the Tokyo design studio tha ltd., led by designer Yugo Nakamura, together with Enhance, the publisher founded by Tetsuya Mizuguchi. The game released on May 16, 2023 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and PC through Steam, and each of these versions can be played on a flat screen or in an optional VR mode with PlayStation VR2, PlayStation VR or PC VR headsets.

A Meta Quest version followed on March 14, 2024, and Xbox and Windows versions on May 30, 2024. Humanity was nominated for Best VR/AR Game at The Game Awards 2023 and won VR Game of the Year in the EDGE Awards 2023. Its online User Stages service, which let players share levels made with the in-game Stage Creator, was shut down at the end of March 2026; the Stage Creator itself still works offline.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Developer and publisher, platform release dates and prices, VR headset support, User Stages counts and shutdown, development history and interview quotes, review scores, awards and all cited sources. About review dates.

Gameplay

The player is a Shiba Inu at the end of the world, where people have lost their sense of purpose. In a series of stages, which the game calls "Trials", the dog has to guide streams of people to pillars of light. Each level is built on a cube-based, isometric 3D grid with an adjustable camera. People walk out of one or more doors in a continuous line, and the player moves the dog around the grid to place commands on individual squares; people who walk over a square carry out its command. The basic command is Turn. Later commands make people jump (in long and short versions), float, swim, climb, push blocks and shoot, and stages add water, fans, climbable walls and enemies. Later in the story, a rival group called the Others appears.

The Story Mode has 90 stages (some Enhance announcements say "90-plus") and boss battles. Each stage holds gold figures called Goldies, which stand in fixed positions that are often harder to reach. Unlike ordinary people, who keep coming no matter how many are lost, a Goldie that falls off the map is gone until the stage restarts. UploadVR reported that stages come in collections of roughly ten, each themed around a new command, mechanic or environmental complication, and that collecting Goldies is needed to progress. In its review, IGN noted that the game includes solution videos for the basic solution of each stage, and that progression unlocks cosmetics and extra features such as speeding up time. Enhance executive producer Mark MacDonald told Game Developer that the game keeps no score of how many people the player loses.

Stage Creator and User Stages

The Stage Creator is a level editor that uses the same elements as the Story Mode. Players can test their stages and upload them from inside the game. Patch 1.07, released on July 13, 2023, added the Machines (turrets, drones, lasers and other late-game elements from the Story Mode's Sequence 7) to the Stage Creator. User Stages were shared across platforms, including the later Quest version. Enhance gave the size of the user library as over 5,500 stages in August 2023, over 8,000 in March 2024 and more than 30,000 shared stages by December 2025.

In December 2025 Enhance announced that User Stages would end service at the end of March 2026, after which no platform could upload stages or play other players' stages. On March 30, 2026, Enhance confirmed the feature was offline. The Stage Creator still works, but there is no longer an official way to share stages.

Virtual reality mode

On PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and Steam, VR is optional and the whole Story Mode, along with community stages, can be played in a headset. The Stage Creator is the one mode without VR support; players have to switch back to the flat-screen mode to build levels. Players can move between flat-screen and VR mode without losing progress. The PlayStation Store lists sitting, standing and room-scale VR play styles for the PS5 version, with PS VR2 Sense controllers optional; the PS4 version supports PlayStation VR. On Steam, the game lists Quest 2, Quest 3, Quest Pro, Oculus Rift S and Valve Index as supported headsets.

UploadVR's Harry Baker played the VR mode on PlayStation VR2 for a hands-on piece published two days after launch. He reported that it ran at 120Hz with reprojection, which he found "barely noticeable" in this type of game, and that the PS5 VR visuals had slightly reduced lighting and level of detail compared with flat-screen play. He called camera control with the thumbsticks and buttons of the Sense controllers "serviceable, but not the most VR-first implementation", compared it with the motion-controlled camera of Little Cities, and called the lack of a VR level editor "a huge missed opportunity". He concluded that the game was "an excellent release and nonetheless compelling in VR". IGN's reviewer wrote that the camera was handled well "both in and out of VR".

The Meta Quest version is a standalone release. It runs on Meta Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest Pro and includes the full Story Mode, the boss battles, the Stage Creator and cross-platform User Stages.

Before the game launched, the team also tried the crowds in augmented reality. HUMANITY - AR Experiments ran at Media Ambition Tokyo from May 12 to June 8, 2021. Visitors at Roppongi Hills used an AR app to place crowds of people in the plaza in real time, and a short film of the crowd behavior was shown on the 52nd floor of Mori Tower.

Development

tha ltd. is an interactive design studio in Tokyo, founded in 2004 and led by Yugo Nakamura. Its clients have included UNIQLO, MUJI and ISSEY MIYAKE. Humanity was Nakamura's and tha's first video game. Nakamura is a web and interface designer, motion director and professor at Tama Art University.

The project started as a side experiment at tha in 2017, built around putting as many people on screen as possible. Game Developer reported that Nakamura's tech demo began with the question "how many digital people can we put on-screen at once?" tha showed the demo at the Unity Festival in Tokyo to a panel of judges that included Mizuguchi. Enhance joined in early 2018 as publisher and also worked on level design and gameplay consulting. In a PlayStation Blog feature, Nakamura said the idea came from asking how a transcendental being would interpret human behavior, in the way people interpret bird flocking with Boids, and that he studied crowds at Tokyo train stations and event venues.

Interviewed by Game Developer, Mizuguchi called the Shiba Inu, which Nakamura "dropped in" one day, the "missing link" between players and the puzzle stages. MacDonald said that because the game had a PS4 version and a minimum-spec PC version, most levels could hold up to 5,000 people, with one special level going up to 10,000. Nakamura said that "level design is just really, really hard". tha first designed the stages alone, found the task near "impossible" and asked Enhance for help; Mizuguchi said the teams were "helped a lot" by user testing. The soundtrack is by the electronic musician JEMAPUR; the official soundtrack has 26 tracks.

Humanity was revealed in Sony's State of Play on September 24, 2019 as a PlayStation 4 game with optional PlayStation VR support, then planned for 2020. In May 2021 it was still described as scheduled for release in 2021 on PlayStation 4 and PS VR. A gameplay trailer shown during a PlayStation State of Play on February 23, 2023 accompanied the announcement of a May 2023 release that added PlayStation 5 with PS VR2 support and PC through Steam with VR support. A limited-time demo with 10 stages ran until March 6, 2023; in that demo only Meta Quest headsets and controllers were officially supported on PC.

Release

Platform	Release date	VR support	Notes
PlayStation 5	May 16, 2023	PlayStation VR2 (optional)	Included in the PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium Game Catalog from day one
PlayStation 4	May 16, 2023	PlayStation VR (optional)	Included in the PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium Game Catalog from day one
Windows (Steam)	May 16, 2023	PC VR (optional)	US$29.99; also playable on Steam Deck
Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest Pro	March 14, 2024	Native VR	US$24.99, with a 20% pre-order discount
Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One, Windows (Microsoft Store)	May 30, 2024	Not stated	Available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass at launch

The PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions are sold together on the PlayStation Store at US$29.99, and as of October 2026 the store still lists the game in the PlayStation Plus Extra catalog. Steam lists the PC version at US$29.99 with a level editor, full controller support and English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese language support. In August 2023 Enhance said the game had passed one million downloads across PS5, PS4 and Steam and released a free Steam demo with 10 Story Mode stages and 3 User Stages. Limited Run Games took pre-orders from July 16 to August 18, 2024 for physical PlayStation 5 and Xbox editions at a US$39.99 MSRP. These included a soundtrack download card designed like a Japanese telephone card and a companion booklet.

Reception

Aggregator or publication	Score
Metacritic (PlayStation 5)	86/100
Metacritic (PC)	84/100
Metacritic (Xbox Series X)	88/100
OpenCritic	86 (Top Critic Average), 95% of critics recommend
IGN	9/10
Eurogamer	4/5
Game Informer	8.5/10
GameSpot	8/10

IGN's Gabriel Moss called it a "beautiful, modern reimagining of Lemmings" and wrote that its "powerful level editor has dizzying potential". Eurogamer's Christian Donlan described it as a "delightful, ingenious and generous puzzler". UploadVR's VR hands-on called the game "compelling in VR" but criticized the VR camera controls and the missing VR editor.

At The Game Awards 2023, Humanity was one of five nominees for Best VR/AR Game, alongside Gran Turismo 7, Horizon Call of the Mountain, Resident Evil Village VR Mode and Synapse. The award went to Resident Evil Village VR Mode. In EDGE magazine issue 393, the EDGE Awards 2023 named Humanity PlayStation Game of the Year and VR Game of the Year, and ranked it fourth among the best games of the year. Enhance also lists Game Informer's 2023 Best Puzzle Game award and Shacknews' Indie Game of the Year among its accolades.

See also

• Tetris Effect
• Rez Infinite