videogameblog

A Hand With Many Fingers

Howlongtobeat.com said this game was 90 minutes long so i thought i would easily take at least two hours to beat it but i got to the end in 40 minutes? which means i can't log it on backloggd since it didn't take 2 hours so this one doesn't count towards the 12 i guess. Gonna be swapping it for A Highland Song. Wanted to write about it anyways since I liked it alot. In this one you only have a pinboard, a map and access to a large archive of newpaper clippings and documents. It's pretty similar to 'Her Story' in the archival organisation aspects but instead approaches the format from a phsyical perspective, while 'Her Story' has the player navigate a digital archive. Cameron kunzelman writes about the open interpretiveness of this game in The World is Born from Zero (which also has my favorite piece of writing about the last of us in it). the interpretiveness/lack of structure to this one was probably my favorite part, I really felt like i was feeling around in the dark for most of the game and didn't know 100% if i was looking in the right places or finding the right documents so it still felt extremely satisfying to find the right name in the right drawer. The interpretiveness of gameplay is applied to all aspects of the gameplay, and looking through the steam activity page it was fun to see how differently everyone else laid out their pinboards. It would have been way cooler if the pinboard in Alan Wake 2 was more like this one. They also manage to build a surprising amount of tension for how minimalistic the visuals are? At one point the phone rings as you're descending into the creepy archive basement and after that I felt as if someone was watching me the entire game. There's some other similar cool moments but I dont want to spoil anything.

If anything the only real problem I had with this one was it's length.. I really thought i was just getting started and it just ended abruptly. There was definitely some intentionality to the abruptness of the ending but it left me unsatisfied overall unfortuntately. I hate to critique games for their length but this is a rare case where I think it definitely could have benefited from a little extra content. Still overall very enjoyable and I had fun with it.

6/10 dis was fun thanks cameron kunzelman