Enhance Games
People. Crowds of them, walking up escalators, flowing around giant blocks, climbing up walls, falling from platforms. Then fighting: thousands of figures forming battle lines, shooting into opposing masses. And then some form of ascent, as a stream of figures walks into a thin strip of blinding light. The trailer for Humanity (pictured), first shown at E3 2019, holds in today’s Covidlaced world a kind of strangeness – so many people, so close to each other – but that only amplifies its power. Its surreal representation of, well, humanity sits squarely in the uncanny as crowds flow together at such scale in stark environments, counterpointed by the plain details of their casual clothes and the brutal simplicity of their violence.
Described as a “crowd action game”, Humanity is being developed by Japanese digital design studio Tha, but it’s being published and supported by Enhance Games, the studio headed by Sega Rally and Rez
creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi and longtime Japanese-English game translator and Metal Gear Solid V
project lead Mark MacDonald. Humanity is an ideal project for Enhance, a combination of striking visual design and large-scale profundity. For comparison, just look to the studio’s debut, Tetris Effect, which explored the idea that the sense of flow a Tetris player can plug into is a kind of shared experience, something deeply human which connects us all.
Led by Tha’s founder and creative director, Yugo Nakamura, Humanity’s tone and form is quite different to Tetris Effect. For a start, it lacks a direct inheritance from Rez and Lumines. It was inspired by Boids, an algorithm developed by computer graphics theorist Craig Reynolds, which seeks to emulate bird-flocking behaviour. It led Nakamura to think about how we don’t understand how birds think, and yet can understand how they move. “The inspiration for our game
Humanity came from thinking of how a transcendental being would interpret ‘human-like’ behaviour, in the same way we humans interpret bird flocking with Boids,” he wrote.
But what kind of game is Humanity? A Chu Chu Rocket-like puzzle game about directing flows of people? That still remains to be seen, but Nakamura is clear about the importance of Enhance’s input, which comes as an assurance that it
will be a game, not some digital art installation. Enhance, after all, has only continued to demonstrate its sterling game design imagination with the release in late 2020 of
Tetris Effect: Connected, which added transformative multiplayer which includes a cooperative mode in which three players fight together against a boss.
And then there’s whatever Mizuguchi himself is working on, which he tweeted last year as being a “new adventure with synesthesia”. It’s thrilling to have the opportunity to follow and play the creative ventures of developers with such singular vision, and Mizuguchi’s journey from rally course to audiovisual experimentalism has been one of the most fascinating. In 2021, it’s only set to continue.