Human: Fall Flat is a physics-based puzzle game that's all about clumsy exploration. Take control of a bouncy, plastic person and wander around levels in the sky as you figure out how to manipulate the world so that you can hurl yourself off of a cliff and land flat on the next level.

Human: Fall Flat is a platformer that's all about embracing clumsiness. Unlike games where you play as a competent protagonist who solves complex puzzles, Human: Fall Flat lets you play as an uncoordinated, goofy person who simply has to walk from one end of the level to the other.

While there are certainly a number of puzzles that you'll have to solve along the way, a lot of the difficulty of the game comes from its unique movement mechanics. In Human: Fall Flat, you walk funny. Characters have been described as “drunk” and “uncoordinated” by many reviewers, and they're not wrong. Worse, the game has a very unique control scheme that requires you to manipulate each hand individually and factors the current camera angle heavily into your movement. A lot of the time, the puzzle isn't “what should I do” so much as it is “how the heck do I have to hold the camera to grab this thing correctly.”

Like many other recent puzzle games, Human: Fall Flat has a number of puzzles that you solve by manipulating objects in the environment in a somewhat realistic way. You'll crush walls and jump on rubble, haul objects around to use them as weights or platforms, and stack things on top of other things. The result is a very uncurated experience, where your solution might look totally different from the solution used by a streamer.

Human: Fall Flat is a game that revels in its basic nature. It eschews textures almost entirely in favor of solid colors. While the models used are occasionally complex, most of the objects you see are very simple, very flat, or both. The game layers a sparse set of sounds over a surprisingly good soundtrack, but the music appears far too infrequently for it to be a big selling point of the game. All of these elements combine to deliver a strange, alien, utilitarian feeling that's reinforced by the oddness of the movement and controls.

As long as someone else is playing, Human: Fall Flat has its share of intentional comedy. The animations are all wonderfully strange, and you'll frequently find yourself losing your balance or failing to complete a totally basic set of moves and falling flat on your face. When you're the one playing the game, however, the game can lose its charm very quickly. The controls aren't clunky in the way that something like QWOP is clunky, where you can master them over your playtime. Instead, they feel random and incredibly punishing. This means that you may find yourself losing your patience at the game rather than giggling at the absurdity of the situations you find yourself in.

There are two things that Human: Fall Flat excels at. First, it's a great game for people to watch. If you're stuck in a situation where you need to entertain other people, try playing Human: Fall Flat and letting them watch. It's a lot more fun and less frustrating as a spectator experience. Second, the game has a very good coop mode that helps take the sting out of your failures. Not only will you get to laugh at your partner's failings, but you'll also be able to fling each other around and use each other's progress to help save your team from setbacks. The game is much more fun in these social settings, and you should take advantage of coop or play in front of friends rather than going at it alone.