But few are tedious, and that’s appreciated because the linear level design means they all have to be solved in sequence. Some are less inspired, like plugging in cables to open doors. A few stand out, especially those that involve breaking down walls and watching them crumble into physics-affected pieces, or using the fully functional catapult (which is worth stopping to mess with after you’ve figured out how to solve the puzzle it’s used in) to launch yourself across the map. Mostly, they involve moving things around so that you can climb up to a higher platform or cross a gap.

Puzzles are fairly creative, bearing in mind that this is a game without a Portal-like twist to make you think outside the box of something resembling real-world physics. Demonstrating some clever less-is-more thinking, all of Human’s levels take place on floating islands in the sky when you fall off the world you paradoxically plummet down onto the same floating island, right near where you fell from. The lack of detail probably helps make the low-polygon environments look good, and also helps the almost flawless collision detection between objects that allows these puzzles to function. Each stage is distinctly different, ranging from a medieval castle to industrial loading docks, cliffs, and a garden. Likewise, virtually nothing in all of Human is textured - only colored and shaded - giving it the look of a work in progress, except with the consistency of a finished product.

As mentioned you can customize him in the menu, using MS Paint-style tools to fancy him up as you please, which I suppose could also be done tastefully. But as soon as I learned that he feels no fall damage and will always eventually pick himself up off the ground, I laughed along as he clumsily waddled along like Gumby with a full diaper. In the early levels I winced when he tumbled off cliffs and when physics contorted his pool noodle-like limbs in unnatural ways. His animations are driven by inverse kinematics, meaning they’re dynamic and react to interactions with the world around you, and that they’re hilarious.

The biggest part of that charm is our doughy, completely untextured (by default) protagonist.

Human fall flat ps4