And yet you are still single…
7 Billion Humans (2018): 3 out of 10: There are some reviews that are difficult because the game is complicated, some reviews that are difficult because the game does not leave an impression, and some reviews that are difficult because the game is clearly doing several things well while also making you want to fake your own death rather than continue playing it.
7 Billion Humans falls firmly into that last category.
This is not a cheap-looking game. It is not a lazy game. It is not one of those baffling digital storefront curiosities where you wonder if the developer lost a bet. In fact, for a relatively small and unique PC game, 7 Billion Humans has quite a lot going for it. It has a hilarious sense of humor, a charming art style, and a surprisingly good soundtrack. I would genuinely recommend the soundtrack on Spotify, which is not something I say about every game that makes me question the value of human leisure.
The problem is that the actual gameplay is, for me, one of the most mind-numbing things I have ever experienced.
The basic idea is that you are programming little office workers to perform tasks. This sounds cute, and visually it often is. But in practice, it reminded me of old BASIC programming, except at the end of the ordeal you do not even have a usable program. You have simply made a tiny group of digital employees move boxes around until the game decides you are allowed to continue suffering on the next screen.
Now, I understand that a lot of video games are essentially meaningless chores wrapped in colorful lights and cheerful noises. I am not above that. Give me a match-three game and I am pretty much in heaven. Give me one of those block-busting games or that game with the ball shooting around and the unicorn and the little orange dots, you know the one, (Peggle) and I can lose an embarrassing amount of time. There is no grand purpose to those games, but let’s be honest: there is no grand purpose to most video games unless you are planning to put “defeated Bowser” on your résumé.
So the issue is not that 7 Billion Humans is pointless. Most games are pointless. That is part of the deal.
The issue is that 7 Billion Humans feels like work without reward. It feels like doing homework for a class you are not taking. It feels like being assigned a task by a middle manager in a company that does not technically exist. And while I can respect that, I cannot say I enjoyed it.
The Good
The presentation is easily the best part of 7 Billion Humans. The game has a very sharp sense of humor, especially in its cheerful corporate dystopia. It understands the comedy of treating humanity as a resource to be organized, optimized, and shuffled around like office supplies with shoes.
The art style is also quite effective. It is clean, expressive, and fun to look at. The little humans have just enough personality to make the whole thing feel playful, even when the gameplay is asking you to do something that feels like filing a tax return through a Rube Goldberg machine.
And then there is the music by Kyle Gabler, which is much better than it needs to be. The soundtrack has a real personality to it, and I say this without sarcasm: it may be my favorite part of the game.
There is also no denying that 7 Billion Humans knows exactly what it is. This is not a game failing to be an action game, or failing to be a platformer, or failing to be a cozy little time-waster. It is a programming puzzle game. It wants you to think in commands, loops, conditions, and little worker routines. For people who enjoy that kind of puzzle design, I can absolutely see the appeal. The game is not incompetent. It may even be very good. It is just very good at something I apparently hate.
The Bad
Unfortunately, the gameplay itself struck me as absolutely tedious. I do not mean mildly slow. I do not mean “not quite my thing.” I mean mind-numbing. This is a game where the central pleasure is supposed to come from figuring out how to make a group of tiny humans perform a task efficiently. But to me, it felt less like solving a puzzle and more like being forced to write instructions for a room full of confused interns.
There are puzzle games I enjoy. I have never been much of a Tetris person, but I enjoy Q*bert. I have never been a big Dark Souls fan, but I genuinely enjoyed its predecessor, King’s Field. Taste in games is strange. Sometimes a genre works for you, sometimes it does not, and sometimes a game enters your house, sits down at the kitchen table, and starts explaining logic gates until your soul leaves your body.
That is 7 Billion Humans for me.
The game’s defenders could reasonably say that this is a personal taste issue, and they would be correct. I am not arguing that the game is broken. I am not arguing that no one should like it. I am not even arguing that its puzzles are poorly designed. I am saying that the actual experience of playing it made me feel like I should do almost anything else.
I once reviewed a lawn-mowing game and found it tedious, partially because I already have to mow my own lawn on a regular basis, particularly in the summer when the rain turns Florida into a greenhouse with mosquitoes. At a certain point, I realized my time might be better spent actually mowing the lawn.
And yet I can spend ten hours in The Sims 4 instead of developing real-life relationships during a particularly depressing Saturday.
So clearly, the line between “pleasantly pointless” and “why am I doing unpaid labor?” is not always rational. But 7 Billion Humans crossed that line for me very quickly.
The Ugly
The ugly truth is that 7 Billion Humans may be an okay game, perhaps even a very good game, that I simply did not want to play.
That is always a slightly uncomfortable review to write. It is easier to review something that fails obviously. Bad graphics, bad controls, bad writing, bad design. Those are all easy targets. You point, you laugh, you move on.
But 7 Billion Humans has serviceable graphics, a strong sense of humor, a good soundtrack, and a clear creative identity. It has things that deserve praise. It is made with wit and style. There are people who will find its programming puzzles satisfying and maybe even addictive.
There is something uniquely dispiriting about recognizing the intelligence behind a game while simultaneously realizing that playing it feels like being trapped in a cubicle inside another cubicle. The whole thing has a clever corporate satire wrapped around gameplay that, for me, recreated the exact sensation of meaningless office busywork.
In Conclusion
7 Billion Humans is a smart, stylish, funny little programming puzzle game with a good soundtrack and a genuinely amusing sense of workplace absurdity. I respect it. I can see why people who enjoy this sort of thing might enjoy it a great deal. I also found it almost unbearably tedious.
This is not a case of a game I expected to love and then hated, which is its own special category of disappointment. This is more a case of admiring the wrapping paper, appreciating the joke, tapping my foot to the music, and then realizing that the actual present inside the box is a spreadsheet that wants me to solve it.
So, yes, 7 Billion Humans has decent graphics, good humor, and a very good soundtrack. It is also absolutely not for me.
For the right player, this may be a clever and satisfying puzzle game. For me, it was a reminder that sometimes the difference between entertainment and work is not the activity itself, but whether your brain has decided to cooperate.