QUByte Classics – The Humans by PIKO

Genre: Compilation / Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

The Humans is a Puzzle-Platformer originally released on Amiga computers in 1992, and soon after ported to PC, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Game Boy, among other less-popular game platforms. Then, in 2022, the Atari Jaguar version of the game (redubbed Evolution Dino Dudes) was included in the Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, and the Super Nintendo and Game Boy versions of the game were included in this Compilation, released on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

This game has players controlling a tribe of cave men trying to accomplish various goals, often needing to work together to do so. You can look at this game as a sort of halfway point between the other classics Lemmings and The Lost Vikings – like in Lemmings, you complete goals by assigning roles to your various humans, but like Lost Vikings, you control them directly rather than having only a passive influence over them.

The presentation for both versions of the game looks decent but unimpressive, with simple 2D pixel art visuals backed by repetitive chiptune sound. The game does try to inject some personality by having little cutscenes, but I think these haven’t aged well, and are nowhere near as amusing as they may have once been, and it doesn’t help that you’re often forced to sit through these primitive animations and sometimes menu screens.

Unfortunately, this problem with pacing permeates throughout the entire game. In part this is because the controls are stiff, cumbersome, and unintuitive, making things unnecessarily difficult and time-consuming as you try to switch to the right human, assign him a task, then get him to prepare that task, then get him to do that task. Now picture having to repeat that process for a group of five or six. Now picture doing that multiple times in each level.

One early level requires players to get a group of humans across multiple gaps. To do so, each of them must pick up a spear, switch to the “jumping” action, prepare the jumping action, then jump. Repeat this four more times… oh, but one of your humans doesn’t have a spear? Well, then you need to swap to another human, get them to the “throwing” action, then prepare that action, then execute that action, so they can toss the spear to their unarmed companion. That entire paragraph was just to get your humans across one jump, in a level containing many jumps.

You do at least have save states if you mess up, as well as the ability to reassign buttons, with some display options as well, including different color palettes for the Game Boy game. It’s a decent smattering of features, but nothing impressive.

In the end, The Humans has the basic framework for a decent Puzzle-Platformer, but the game is ruined by poor controls and tedious, slow pacing that makes this game a terrible frustration to play. Unless you’re a Puzzle-Platformer fan with the patience of a saint, skip this one.

tl;dr – The Humans is a Compilation of the versions of this Puzzle-Platformer that originally released on Super Nintendo and Game Boy. Unfortunately, poor controls and absolutely terrible pacing issues make this game torturous to play. Skip it.

Grade: C-

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