DEV ACCESS - Marching orders
PLAY Magazine UK|May 2023
Enhance producer Mark MacDonald discusses weird and wonderful action puzzler Humanity
Mark MacDonald
DEV ACCESS - Marching orders

Back when it was first announced in 2019, Humanity was a curious and mysterious thing; a game revolving around huge crowds of people, this central focus probably triggers unintended anxiety in a post-pandemic world. The obfuscation of what exactly the game was supposed to be was at least intentional, according to producer Mark MacDonald.

Now that a time-limited demo has been released, it’s clear that Humanity is quite unlike anything Enhance, best known for its transcendent synaesthetic experiences, has done before. That’s mostly because the concept comes not from studio head Tetsuya Mizuguchi but from outside games. “It’s our collaboration with this company called Tha, [which is] headed up by a very influential younger guy named Yugo Nakamura,” MacDonald explains. “He’s very well known in Japanese design circles. He and Miz got along like a house on fire.” Similarly the atmospheric audio, consisting of otherworldly fragments of synthesised vocals, is also the work of external sound artists, leaving Enhance to focus on the game design.

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