A downloadable game for Windows

Buy Now$8.00 USD or more

With a new addition of an epilogue Human Upgrade Labs is finished!

A free demo containing around a third of the game is available below.


In this game you will be playing a role of a fool, I'm sorry, a volunteer who signed up to participate in the tests going on in the Human Upgrade Labs in the far future Earth. You heard rumors that anyone who manages to pass the various tests designed to improve you in every conceivable way will have new and amazing possibilities unlocked in life. That, or be completely broken mentally. The tests you take will essentially be various mini games, over 30 of them, placed into several different categories, using multiple, sometimes experimental visual styles and combined into a single story.

Multiple new levels become available at a time, so you can choose the order in which you want to progress through the game while discovering more about this strange future world. Some levels are meant to be played once like this one where you will be teaching a robot to feel:


Or this one where you have to tell apart old tech from cutting edge tech:


Or this one where you have to haggle for funds with accountant from your nightmares:




Other levels track your best score and test how far you can push a specific skill. Like this one where you need to prevent as many wooden enemies from escaping as possible:


Or this one where you have to guide observation( spy ) drones past a sentinel creature:


Or this one where you have to gather funds by planting solar power generating trees:


All levels get you closer to a final epilogue level offered only to the ones who can complete the majority of the tests, or get high enough scores in certain levels and receive the invitation earlier this way.

Also each level unlocks new character customization options:


Many levels also give a deeper glimpse into the strange world this takes place on:


And why is the world cube shaped anyway?




If you want to see what was added over time then check out the devlog below, especially the updates marked as major.

The images I included probably gave you a hint, but I am primarily a visual artist and I work as an illustrator and concept artist in daily life. I am making this game by myself whenever I can find free time. It serves as an outlet for a lot of my stranger ideas and a great motivator to keep pushing my art skills. Obviously I'm learning a lot about programming, game design, world building etc along the way. I like to experiment with various art styles and different subject matter so I came up with the concept for this game in order to be able to place all those different ideas in one game and still somewhat make sense. My previous game - Dream mechanic, served the same purpose, but this one gives me so much more freedom due to the mini game approach. Obviously not everything I come up with can fit in due to story reasons, or maybe because something wouldn't make sense game play-vise and stay as little side projects, but in this game variety is the key. I enjoy making that and I enjoy playing games that provide something different from the standard forest and lava levels and I hope that you will enjoy that aspect of this game as well.

Updated 23 days ago
StatusReleased
PlatformsWindows
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(1 total ratings)
AuthorAugustinas Raginskis
GenrePuzzle
Made withMagicaVoxel, Adobe Photoshop, Unity, Corel Painter
Tags2D, Character Customization, Creepy, Experimental, Horror, minigames, Psychological Horror, Sci-fi, Singleplayer
Average sessionA few minutes
InputsKeyboard, Mouse

Purchase

Buy Now$8.00 USD or more

In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $8 USD. You will get access to the following files:

Human Upgrade Labs.rar 639 MB

Download demo

Download
Human Upgrade Labs Demo.rar 639 MB

Development log

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Comments

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Really enjoyable artwork and worldbuilding! The puzzles, less so unfortunately. It feels like a lot of them rely on not being able to retry only the wrong answers just to pad out the length as you're forced to repeat a large amount of work just to get back to trying to slot a few answers into the right place. These mainly apply to the guess the category or order puzzles. 

You could apply some nice aspects of the other puzzles like you have a number of wrong guesses you can make or the answer solving once everything is correctly organized. 

Still, looking forward to how this progresses in the future! 

Hey. I'm glad you enjoyed the parts you did and thanks fro the feedback.

You might be right about the category matching puzzles( the ones called pattern recognition lessons in game), I kinda made them stricter than other levels for no particular reason by not allowing some mistakes. I'll need to think about this, likely I'll add some allowance for mistakes depending on how complicated and long each level is.

One other thing I'm planing to start adding in the next update to solve a similar issue is making some alternative ways to unlock further levels. I know not everyone would enjoy each type of puzzle equally so for example I will be adding a feature where you can open a lesson way on the left side of the level panel by getting a high enough score on a lesson that is on the right side of the panel, potentially skipping several levels for the unlock.

Anyway, let me know if you have other feedback, this sort of stuff is helpful.

Will do! The only other thing I could think of that would be nice would be to skip all of a dialogue section if I've already seen it before. Some of them are quite long and I'd have to click my way through each page to get through it if I'm retrying a puzzle.

(+1)

Yup, that has been on my list of things to do for a while and hopefully I can manage to get to it for the next update. When I test things in engine the dialogs move quicker for some reason so I tend to forget about this because it takes less time to scroll through. 

I realized I should add this kinda obvious thing a while ago while I was playing Monster Hunter World where you hav an unskipabble 20 minute intro with each new character. At least that means even large companies can miss the same things some hobbyist like me misses, haha

(+1)

It's been approximately two million years, but I did end up making a couple changes you suggested in your comments: I made so that you can make a certain amount of mistakes in the category matching puzzles and now the longer dialogs are skippable. So yeah, thanks for the feedback.

(+1)(-1)

Man, at first I had a thought that those assets were AI, I hate my brain so much. Thankfully fingers, details and veery distinct style made me doubt my thoughts and reading description, I feel reassured. Absolutely glorious work on aesthetics, one of the best I’ve seen on this site!

Even though it seems the game is nowhere near my usual liked genres/gameplays, I will still play it, just because of how beautiful and intriguing it feels :3

(1 edit)

Hey. Yeah, I know, AI spam kinda annoys me these days, also reminds me when I got a bunch of my work uploaded to NFT sites without my knowledge. But nah, I did draw this stuff myself, you can check out some progress gifs in my arstation as well, if you like to see how I make this stuff. For example: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/14q0BG


And thanks. Hope you like the gameplay as well. Let me know what you think when you try it out.

My playthrough of a few of the lessons. This game is already amazing.

That's awesome. I appreciate the effort and I love the edits you included. I watched the entire video and made some notes to fix a couple things as well.

By the way, when the little text is hard to see in the lessons, you can zoom in with the mouse wheel.  The controls are always listed in the pause menu in each level.

Thank you so much for watching! Glad you liked the edits, I'm kinda new to making YT videos so its really nice to hear when people say they enjoy things about it! I really need to check out that pause menu! XD

I just want to say that I absolutely have fallen in love with your game and I'm only 6 lessons in. I've just finished editing a YouTube video for it which I will be posting hopefully tomorrow, but, I'm blown away by the visual style of it and I'm really interested to discover more about the world this game lives in. The slow world building through the 'Instructor' character is layered and interesting and I could spend hours changing their appearance. l had to force close the game as I couldn't find away to get to like an exit to main menu thing, which I was worried would destroy my progress, I'm not sure if I just missed an explanation of how to get to it or if there isn't a function for it at the moment? Thank you for making this, please keep adding to it.

Awesome, thanks. I'm glad you're enjoying my little game. I've spent way too much time procrastinating customizing the instructor myself, haha.

I would love to see the video when it's posted.

There is an official "quit" button in the pause menu in every lesson. You can find that by pressing esc and I did mention it in one of the early dialogs. I should probably add a quit button in the science chamber as well ( an oversight on my part), but the progress is saved as you complete things so you shouldn't loose anything even if you close the game in other ways.


I will definitely keep updating the game, I already have an extra level done. Comments like this really help the motivation going.

Posted the video as a new comment :) Ahhh, I was in the science chamber when I was trying to exit. But thank you for letting me know! I tried to load the game and I didn't lose any progress. Looking forward to playing more of this!