The desperate coziness of HumanitZ

I’ve been playing HumanitZ off and on for two days now, trying to decide how I feel about it. I recognize that that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but don’t take my indecisiveness as a comment on the quality of the game. In fact, two days in, I’m starting to realize that the ambivalence I’m feeling is more of a feature than a bug. It is, I think, a good thing, actually.

The best word I can come up with to describe it is “challenging.” Not confusing, exacting, difficult, frustrating, or even fun, per se. Challenging. In a good way, to be clear.

HumanitZ sits at this weird intersection of several genres that I tend to 1) like, and 2) get bored with — namely: zombie stories, and survival-crafting and base-building games. 

Zombies kind of oversaturated pop culture for the first twenty years or so of this century. I love a good or even bad, if we’re being honest (like Z Nation), zombie story, but even I was getting tired of the concept. Now that we’re a few years post-pandemic, it seems like society’s appetite for brain-eaters is returning. (To be clear, COVID is still very much a danger and a problem, but we, as a collective society, seem to’ve decided to just not worry about it anymore — go get your vaccinations, folks!). Hell, I’m even, god help me, considering getting back into the Walking Dead universe of shows — which I’ll probably regret, but let me have this hope for now.

Survival-crafting and base-building games tend to fall on a continuum between abundance and scarcity. Plentiful ammo and resources make for a power fantasy game where you’re building whatever you want whenever you want and marching through the zombies like a one-man army kind of like the recent Resident Evil games. Scarcity means you’re counting every bullet and weighing every encounter like your Lasts of Us.

There’s also a continuum of, basically, realism versus coziness. Really real, and you’re worried about starvation on top of the undead. Super cozy, and you can focus on aesthetics instead of wondering where your next meal is coming from. Both ends of these continuums are valid and fun, they’re just different kinds of games.

HumanitZ skews toward scarcity in all things — even zombies. Depending on where you start your game, it can take hours before you encounter a “zeek.” In those peaceful hours, you’re scraping together resources to start building tools and some sort of base, however temporary.

The first few tools go pretty quickly. Two stones become a stone knife that lets you cut down bushes to get sticks and fibers. Those (plus more stones) become an improvised hammer and axe. And now you can get wood from trees to start building campfires and workbenches. It’s all pretty standard for a survival game.

And, at first, it all feels like something approaching coziness. The lonely, post-apocalyptic setting weighs on you with its abandoned homes and cars and skeletons, but you get to just kind of do your own thing. Sure, your neighbors might be undead, but you can kind of ignore them if you don’t wander too far.