Tetris Effect Publisher Showcases ‘Crowd Simulator’ Humanity for PlayStation 4

Game publisher Enhance in collaboration with tha ltd. announced the game Humanity. This PlayStation 4 game looks like a crowd simulator with possible puzzle and RTS elements. The game will be released in 2020 with optional support for PlayStation VR.

Humanity was announced during Sony’s State of Play presentation. Judging by the first gameplay footage, Humanity seems to be a kind of physics-based puzzle game. In addition, the game contains a kind of combat mode in which two groups of people are put against each other, which may also include RTS-like gameplay. The game is being developed by tha ltd, a company that is not a game studio. Enhance, the creator of Tetris Effect and Rez, is the publisher of the game. This publisher also assists in the development of Humanity.

According to Yugo Nakamura, the founder of developer tha ltd, Humanity is a kind of simulator of human behavior. He was inspired by large groups of birds and their flocking behaviour. He wondered how they executed their group movements so fluently and effortlessly. He then asked himself the question: How would a superhuman being interpret human-like group behavior? He started by collecting data on group behavior. “Luckily I live in Tokyo, where crowds are common.”

Nakamura mainly wants to find out what humanity would look like to an outside form of intelligence. He asked himself how these creatures would, for example, look at phenomena of human behavior, such as influencers, tweet storms and other social media phenomena. But also, for example, dictators who come to power and are deposed, after which a new dictator comes to power.

Tha is not a game studio. Instead, it’s a team of designers and engineers who collectively produce a wide variety of computer media, including web content, applications, installations, and videos. Nakamura says he used to want to be an architect and that games are the closest thing to architecture in modern digital media today. Due to the lack of game experience, the team didn’t know how to release the game until they showed a demo to an Enhance employee. A few months later, Enhance contacted tha and the collaboration began.

Little is known about the game yet. For example, it is not clear how players should control the crowds and in which genre the game falls. An exact release date has not yet been announced. The game should be released for the PlayStation 4 sometime next year.