Humanity is an action-puzzle game that puts you in the role of a Shiba Inu trying to rebuild mankind after its destruction at the hands of a rogue AI, and it launches today on Xbox. If you’ve got Xbox Game Pass or PC Game Pass, you can download and play right now! If you’re not yet familiar with Humanity, check our announcement Xbox Wire post here.
When you’ve got a job as big as single-handedly (paw-edly?) saving the human race, you could probably use a few pointers. We’ve got you covered. Here are seven tips to ensure you start off on the right foot—er, paw.
1. Fixing Your Flow
In each Humanity stage, you place commands on the ground to direct the humans over obstacles and solve puzzles to get them into a goal. The goals fill with light as humans stream into them. But sometimes, you may notice a goal isn’t filling or only fills partially. This means you need a bigger flow of humans to trigger it. Check your route and make sure no people are straying off the path and that you have a steady number walking in.
2. Don’t Worry About Losing Some Humans
Humanity‘s story takes place in a hub area called the Testing Grounds, with AI “Cores” running experiments to rebuild mankind. The humans you lead are made of light—so when they perish, they turn back into light and walk through the door again. So don’t feel bad when you (inevitably!) lose a few to cliffs or falling blocks or weapons. The only human-shaped characters you should be worried about losing are the bonus Goldy, which unlock game progression, cosmetics, and more. And for them, consider…
3. Putting Your Humans in a Holding Pattern
The never-ending, always forward-moving line of people doesn’t need to be stressful. If theme parks have taught us anything, putting humans in a queue can save everyone from headaches. Make the queue work for you by directing the humans into a circular or back-and-forth pattern when you need to temporarily hold something safely. It’s perfect for ensuring you don’t lose any bonus Goldy mid-stage.
4. Use Diving for Quick Traversal and Higher Jumps
At the end of the game’s Prologue, you learn a very important technique—diving. When you hit the jump button in mid-air, you’ll dive into the horde of humans and can traverse among them as if they were water. It’s a great way to travel around stages quickly, but there’s a more advanced trick to it. You can use momentum as you emerge from a dive (pressing jump again) to jump higher than you normally can. This allows you to scale walls that are three blocks high with ease.
5. Make Use of Retry Keep Commands
Not long into Story Mode you’ll unlock the ability to Retry a stage but keep the commands you’ve already laid down in place. It’s called Retry Keep Commands, and it’s maybe the most important option when you’re puzzling out a route for the humans to take. Because if you realize you’ve made a mistake that there’s no time to correct, you can simply reset the flow of humans with Retry Keep Commands and make fixes (you can also optionally use Retry Clear Commands to clear the stage entirely).
6. Stuck? Check the Solution Video
Humanity is a puzzle game; sometimes you might need a hint—a push in the right direction. We didn’t want you to get stuck on a puzzle. Select Solution Video from the pause menu and watch as much or as little of the clip as you want. It won’t spoil how to get the Goldy though. That’s up to you!
7. Want More Humanity? Play Thousands of User-Made Stages
Here’s one of the biggest tips of all. If you love a particular type of puzzle in Humanity or just want to play more even after you finish the story, go to Play Stages from the title screen. Here, you’ll find playlists of user-made levels—almost 10,000 have already been uploaded. Each stage even indicates how difficult it is so you can find stages that meet you at your puzzling skill level. You can search by specific puzzle types and sort by the highest-rated, clear rate, or newest uploads. For launch, we have a specially selected playlist of stages inspired by Xbox.
And there you have it, seven essential tips to get the very best experience from Humanity. It’s available right now on Xbox, and with Game Pass and PC Game Pass. Best of luck saving mankind!!