The Stack

There should be a name for works that imitate another work but completely miss the point, taking the superficial details while leaving out the basis of the original’s appeal. As Sleepwalker is to Sandman, as Ai Yori Aoshi is to Love Hina, as most bad fantasy novels are to Lord of the Rings, so The Humans is to Lemmings.

To someone looking at The Humans for the first time today, it may not be clear that it’s a Lemmings imitation. It was very clear in 1992. Lemmings was in the ascendant, and would be on the mind of anyone making (or purchasing) a level-based puzzle game with a 2D side view. Add to that the “save the tribe” aspect, the control over multiple identical and undifferentiated beings, the puzzles based around sacrificing some of your guys to save the rest, the music — ye gods, the music. Lemmings had this gloriously cheesy pop music that would be embarrassing in any other context, but seemed like just part of the fun there. The Humans does something similar, but with more of a cartoon caveman style, which is to say, a boogie beat and an emphasis on simple percussion such as hand drums and xylophones (or synthesized approximations thereof). It’s odd that this style says “cartoon caveman” so strongly, especially since our most culturally prominent caveman cartoon, The Flintstones, doesn’t use it at all, but there it is.

It also plays a lot like Lemmings overall, and not just in good ways. Most of the time, your attention is on the problem of getting multiple beings from point A to point B. Doing this usually involves multiple stages, where each stage is an opportunity to screw up. When you do so, you have no choice but to start over from the beginning: there are no save points within levels. So on the tougher levels, you wind up repeating the earlier stages a lot — a common pattern in action games, but not so much in puzzle games, where the pleasure is in figuring things out. But it serves to pad out the time required to play it to completion. Even worse, both games feature time limits on levels. While this can be part of the puzzle, challenging you to figure out how to complete your objectives as efficiently as possible, mostly it’s just a way to make sure that you don’t complete a level successfully on your first try, even if you don’t do anything wrong.

One of the more overlooked innovations of Lemmings is that it was one of the first games to figure out how to take advantage of the mouse in a realtime context. There had been games that used on-screen buttons to awkwardly give the player’s avatar orders at one remove, and there had been games that used the mouse to control the player’s avatar directly as a kind of joystick substitute, but the makers of Lemmings were clever enough to realize that the very concept of “player’s avatar” was an unnecessary assumption, a by-product of joystick-centric gameplay that a mouse-based game could do without. Instead, it took an approach similar to what would later become the RTS genre. At no point in Lemmings did the player assume direct control over a lemming’s actions; you could switch them from one mode of activity to another, but they were fundamentally autonomous beings that would march ahead without instruction. The result was an active world, one where things were always happening, sometimes more things than the player could easily pay adequate attention to.

And this is the part that The Humans gets wrong. It’s still plugged into the joystick paradigm, giving you direct control of one human at a time while everyone else just stands there and waits. Actually, that’s not quite true: when you pick up a torch or a spear, you can switch to a mode where you stand there waving it to fend off enemies, and remain in this mode when you switch control to someone else. This is the most Lemmings-like of the actions you can perform, and has obvious precedent in the “Blocker” role from that game. It’s also the least-often-useful thing you can do with a spear or a torch. It’s understandable why they did it this way: they were aiming at console ports, something that Lemmings always did awkwardly, and heck, even on PCs, not everyone had a mouse back then. But the end result is the opposite of Lemmings‘ active world. It’s a passive world, one that’s reluctant to even shoot at you.

And while we’re on well-regarded indie puzzle games, I might as well pull this one out. 2D Boy’s World of Goo has gotten enough good press that I didn’t hesitate to purchase it off Steam a few weeks ago when it was on sale, but didn’t have the time to start it. That’s happening a lot lately. Every weekend, Steam puts a large and temporary discount on one or more games, and it’s going to be the ruin of my attempts to reduce the Stack.

My first impression of the game is that it’s Bridge Builder crossed with Gish. Which is unfortunate, because those are both obscure enough titles that I’m going to have to explain them now. Bridge Builder (and its sequel Pontifex) is exactly what it sounds like: a heavily physics-based game in which you have to design river-spanning bridges that don’t collapse under their own weight under various physical and budgetary constraints. Gish, which is on the Stack still, is a gothy 2D platformer about a sentient blob of tar. Coincidentally (and somewhat oddly), these two games were made by the same team. Or perhaps it’s not coincidence: I’ve detected what may be shout-outs to Bridge Builder in WoG‘s first world, suggesting that 2D Boy is a fan of theirs, or at least aware of them.

But to this a third influence must be added: Lemmings, with its chirruping doomed wee creatures that need your help to escape. The goal in each level of WoG is to help the roaming goo balls to reach an outflow pipe, usually by building a bridge to it out of their living bodies, which are most easily connected in triangular grids. Some species of goo can be detached and reused, others are effectively killed the moment you join them to your expanding structure. All survivors are sent to a special area with a competitive metagoal: build as tall a tower as you can, while clouds representing the tower-heights of other players on the net loom tauntingly overhead.

Even though I’m still in the lower ranks hieght-wise, I’m finding it gratifying to look at the details on those clouds and snicker at how much less efficient they are than mine — “He has twice as many pieces as me, and he’s only just a little way above me!” I only wish I could see their structures, rather than just their stats, because I’m curious about how other people are building their structures. (I suppose I should try Google. People must be posting screenshots.) My own best efforts are Eiffel-Tower-like: I start by making as large and as regular a triangle as I can, then when it’s thick enough, I start mining out the middle bits that aren’t needed for support any more, and put them up top. The broadness of the base, even when it’s reduced to a pair of legs, tends to minimize the structure’s wobble.

And yet it still wobbles. Wobbling is pretty much the point of goo; the whole game is built around what’s been called “jell-o physics”. For this reason, screenshots really don’t communicate the gameplay very well. You can look a picture of a nice slim tower and not realize that it’s swaying back and forth with an arc larger than the screen.