A Hand With Many Fingers takes inspiration from a real-life conspiracy, which adds a attractive layer of authenticity to the gameplay. For those familiar with the background, the overall experience won't unveil anything groundbreaking, but it still manages to captivate and entertain.

One commendable aspect is its ability to generate a shady atmosphere that keeps players on edge. The game effectively employs subtle techniques such as the sounds of other people despite the player being alone or a car conveniently halting right in front of their office window. These elements contribute to a steady build-up of paranoia, adding to the overall tension and suspense of the narrative.
While the game successfully builds up this paranoia, there is a missed opportunity to further heighten this feeling throughout the entire experience. I wish there had been a moment or two at the beginning that would have made the player feel safe again. For example, the phone rings once, but no one is on the line. From this point on, you are supposed to feel insecure and observed. Perhaps there should have been another call a little later, in which the situation is clarified and you briefly have the feeling that everything is okay.

Additionally, the mechanics surrounding the archive in the game are well-executed. Players will find themselves immersed in the process of sorting through files, piecing together clues, and uncovering hidden secrets. This particular aspect of the game adds depth and complexity to the overall experience, providing a satisfying challenge for players to overcome.

However, there are a couple of areas where A Hand With Many Fingers falls short. The absence of a hint system can be frustrating for players who may find themselves stuck at certain points in the game. During the last ~10 minutes, I felt overwhelmed with all the information on the conspiracy board, that I really would have appreciated a hint to push me into the right direction.

Lastly, the ending feels rather abrupt. It would have been satisfying to see a more fleshed-out ending.

Despite minor shortcomings, the game offers a unique and intriguing dive into the world of conspiracy. With its basis on a real story and its effective build-up of tension, the game manages to entertain players, making it a worthwhile experience for those interested in delving into a short mystery-filled adventure.

I wasn't originally going to write a review for this game but its occupied my mind for a week or so after playing and I take that as a sign from the BL gods.

A Hand with Many Fingers is a really interesting game which struggles to stick the landing through an admittedly somewhat deliberate anticlimax.

I love detective games, I have played dozens of them from the point and click jenny leclues to the subversive pentiment to the more VN-like Paranormasights. There is something almost primal in the urge to solve a mystery, a challenge from the creator to the player to unravel their cleverly constructed puzzle.

IRL I once found some photographs inside a hollow tree (really) which I somehow managed to track down to the owner and get the "backstory" of them and how they had ended up there.
The photos were not much of a clue, other than one which seemed to show the old woman on tower bridge in London with old looking buses. 80s maybe? Probably a holiday picture. For a day or two I speculated on the pictures and their origins, followed a few leads from a business card found at the "scene of the crime" with a long ass name and a telephone number written behind one of the pictures. The number was a dead end, the line was no longer in use. Perhaps they moved out? I searched for the long name on google and found it within a few government websites from records of a few lawsuits/petitions to the local government, most of them dead ends.

But then, I found the name under a website made by a mexican PhD student who had done a whole genealogical study of a particular historical town in mainland spain, which showed the name of the woman on the business card and her children. More leads! I searched those and found that one of them was a lawyer who had actually represented Leonel Messi and Jordi Pujol? He lived in Barcelona however, and was probably busy. Another was a veterinarian somewhere far from me. 2 others however, were a lawyer and architect respectively and lived in my home town. The lawyer had an office and phone number, but this during a holiday so no response. I decided to go to where I found the pictures and luckily I found one more of the same woman at the beach which looked like one the local beaches and more importantly another phone number which I politely whatsapped explaining the situation (a bit awkwardly admittedly).

Now, eventually we met up and I gave her the pictures and got most of the answers to these mysteries, some of my "deductions" were right and some were completely wrong but it was still incredibly gratifying and thankfully she wasnt like, creeped out or anything which I slightly feared especially cause I knew her by name from the website, she turned out to be a friend of a neighbour of mine, small world.

Okay, but why did I spend three paragraphs explaining a personal anecdote other than to pat myself in the back and maybe reveal to the world that I am the detective game equivalent of Don Quixote? Well, for all my love of detective games and stories, I think they are still a great unsolved problem/white whale of gaming, and that irl experience kind of helped me understand why. Its not really the solving of a mystery per se thats compelling, its more so having to grapple with the question, feeling like youre pulling on threads and confirming or denying your initial suspicions. Is gameifying a detective story just wrong headed? Are we trying to square the circle? As I said I think no detective game has ever got it 100%, with every approach coming closer in some respects and farther in others.

Thanks to A Hand With Many Fingers, I am more optimistic about this question. I genuinely think its come the closest to recreating the emotional reaction I got trying to track down those pictures. Its admirable just how... simple it is? You start off with a few newspaper clippings with a highlighted date, 2 names, 1 picture and 1 location. You then write down for example "1970, John Smith, Paris" (not an actual example in game) and go to the 1970 section of the "Europe" filing cabinet which has cards sorted by surname. You find the smith card which contains 2 codes. SN 231/1 and SN 357/15. You then go to the archives and get two boxes with more newspaper clippings and pictures etc eith their own dates and names and maybe they give a missing "piece" for a previous element, you get more leads, put the relevant info on the corkboard and the unravelling of the conspiracy begins.

And for the hour or so it took me and my friend with whom I was backseat gaming the game with (he had the pen and paper) it was wondefully engaging for something so minimalistic. I joked to my friend how grateful he must be to take a break from his master's thesis to play a fun game which was essentially a research based detective game.

The game also pulls off a few tricks as you delve deeper into the conspiracy, a light quickly turns on and off, a parked car speeds off etc. I thought they were a bit cheap but they definitely worked at creeping my friend out a bit (not a hard thing to accomplish, admittedly).

The thing is, at the end of it all, and I guess I should drop a spoiler warning here,(I do recommend this game and it takes like an hour to complete so you might as well) the game just sort of ends. After an educated guess I looked for the final file in the correct cabinet and got a key to the B annex. Just a single box was left. A loud sound as I picked it up and hurried to the corkboard. A car had crashed through the window! I opened the box and got some important materials which I hung up on the corkboard and which further confirmed our suspicions I had about deleted records and CIA involvement in the whole affair. Whats the next lead... oh the credits are rolling. What?!

We were very confused. You can admittedly go into a sort of "free mode" where you can just get access to all the files but we pretty much had em all. It was a sour taste after such a compelling playthrough.

I read up on the actual events described within the game because it turned out, they are based on actual events (I mean, I knew the iran-contra affair was real but I didnt realize it wasnt historical fiction) which are somehow even more crazy than the game's depiction of them. However the abrupt ending soon made more sense in context : there was a massive cover up, like the game sort of points out there are many missing records and deleted evidence, dead men tell no tales and whether suicide or not, John Nugan was too dead to be interrogated. As much as we dig and speculate, ultimately we will probably never know the full story.

So I do "get" what A Hand With Many Fingers is going for but is making that point really worth making such an abrupt ending to a wonderfully engaging journey? Am I wrong in my assessment that it isnt the solving of a mystery per se thats satisfying? Maybe, I dont know. I think its hard to weigh up authorial intent versus your own subjective experience of the game. On the one hand its unfair to demand that art be made specifically to pander to you, like the infamous football manager ign review, but on the other hand I think people put too much stock on "intentionality" as a get out of jail free card from criticism, and I am even guilty of that myself.

Its worth noting that the decision to make a resolution inherently impossible is entirely self inflicted. Clearly this was a passion project from a dev interested in the Nugan Hand bank story but no one was holding a gun to their head to set their game with a really interesting set of mechanics in the real world and a real conspiracy and at the same time Zodiac is also based on a real life unsolved case and that managed to create a more satisfying conclusion than this.

I think my appropriately ambiguous feelings on the game are whats kept it in my mind all these days after playing it. So at the end of the day, whats my conclusion on all of this? Well, I think the bottom line is

FILE 2 REMOVED 11/08/2023

Connect the dots, sheeple.

This game was a blast of an hour and a half. I had my spiral notebook out, taking proper notes. That is what the dev recommends and it really helped set the tone and prevent severe brain stumping moments.

Except the last bit of the puzzle, which I think is especially designed to have you searching a bit more. By then you are (hopefully) invested and willing to do some trial and error.

The give of the corkboard when I pin another scrap of newspaper to it. The tactile feeling of the yarn as I extend it from one pin to another. This is true archivecore. Give me more, game devs.

THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN
MARKED FOR DISPOSAL
OS 210/64
OS 504/6

A Hand With Many Fingers is a short and humble corkboard sleuthing game that posts the player into an archive of boxes, paper slips, and a whiff of conspiracy.
I don't have much I'd like to split hairs over about mechanical specifics; the game is relatively thin on substance, as well as in the scope of the overall investigation. The ending is also rather abrupt, which is a little disappointing! Also… shocked to learn that there was a kernel of truth to much of the names and events depicted?? Never knew!! Genuinely wish the game went further into exploring the atrocious under-the-table dealings of the CIA, and I’d def hold it against AHwMF for only giving us the top layer. O well, I've always desperately wanted a sleuthing game that granted me the power to Pepe Silvia across a few corkboards, linking articles and photos with a hieroglyphic cobweb of red twine - and this is the closest I’ve found yet!

I’d most like to compliment the game for its stellar employment of oppressive atmosphere, how well it builds a sense of paranoia without cheap tricks. As my corkboard grew more complex, my search for the truth turned almost frantic and conspiratorial. Milling over a filing cabinet I was sure to find the information I needed in, and turning up blank. “I know the man I’m looking for was here, in this year… right? Who was he with? Why was he here, anyway?”. The phone rings, and when I pick up, nobody answers. Did I just see someone looking at me from the building across from me? Has that car just opposite the office window always been there? The looping classical music sample on the radio becomes annoying, so I turn it off, only to realise that the sheer quiet of the archive is host to a palpable hostility. Come to the end, I was a jumpy mess, skipping heartbeats at subtle audio cues like bugs skittering and lights flickering. I kind of loved that, and frankly genius that it managed to wrangle these feelings out of me where the gameplay loop is essentially just admin work!! The untapped power of beige, babye.

This was one of the few games that I've played that really made me need to write things down with pen and paper: high praise in my book. The experience of trying to piece together the fractured files of assassinated public figures, clandestine operatives, propped-up businessmen, and dubious actors in a global plot to "spread democracy" is so enticing, rich, and at times overwhelming.

But the moment where AHwMF gets so good and really chilling is how it simulates (and triggers) paranoia. There are many different versions of this, but they all come from chilling and calculated sound cues and give you the unnerving feeling of being watched. As you dig deeper into the archives and piece together more of the relationships between the subjects, these start to become more unsettling and in some ways make you question the reality you are constructing on your pinboard. It's a subtle and truly effective design method that triggers such an immediate and terrifying sensation.

These gestures, along with the depth of research put into this project, make this game one of my top 5 of 2020 hands down.

Now you too can win the coveted CIA Award for Excellence in Journalism!

A Hand With Many Fingers excels at a difficult task, which is establishing a strong tone and sticking with it for the entire runtime. There's the little paranoia that digs at you from the beginning, dog-eared by a sense of intrigue — ooh, uncovering a CIA conspiracy, what fun! — that gradually starts to erode at you as the mystery gets harder to keep track of and sudden phone calls provide nothing but dead air on the other end. Fluorescent lights crack, pop, and flicker as you walk through the long corridors of the basement archives, waiting for something to inevitably be waiting for you around a corner; the sounds of footsteps and clattering boxes draw you upstairs only to find that there's nothing there; lights across the street turn off when you look at them; cars park and peel away moments later, making it impossible to tell if they're staking you out. These are all little twists of the screw that compound the (intentional) frustration that'll start eroding from your ankles up as you flick back and forth between your real-world notes and the articles pinned to the corkboard. I know Michael Hand was in 'Nam in 1965, but the archives don't go back that far, and even if they did, Paul Helliwell's Washington accounts that should be in OS 267/4 are all missing, and the other boxes are all marked to be destroyed. These little facts pile up on you — Bernie Houghton was in both the Middle East and Africa with Ed Wilson, who was in Hong Kong back in '77 with Michael Hand, and Hand was in both Sydney and Southeast Asia with Frank Nugan — and none of it really adds up beyond the fact that all of these men are involved in a great and terrible gunrunning scheme between the CIA and the Contras. The broad strokes are there, the general gist of things is there, but it's the exact details that elude you beyond the game and into reality once you look up the Nugan Hand Bank and realize that all of this shit really happened.

Allegedly. I want to stress that this shit all actually happened allegedly. There's no proof that the CIA was involved in the criminal dealings of the Nugan Hand Bank. Nugan's suicide is only allegedly suspicious, given that the gun he shot himself with was wiped clean of fingerprints. William Colby's business card was found in Nugan's pocket when he died, and Colby was at one time the Director of the CIA, which raised some questions. Just some questions, though! Questions which were asked by people who, at the time, were incredibly shocked that the New South Wales investigatory commission ruled out American involvement without really even looking into it. This is the same New South Wales government body who are, as it is commonly known today, ridiculously corrupt and — allegedly! — propped up by the Alameddine crime family. Oh, and Ferdinand Marcos worked with the Nugan Hand Bank, too. Why would the president of the Philippines launder his gold buillion through an Australian bank that had $80 in liquid assets and was only able to run because Nugan took out a loan against himself? We may never know. Let's not forget to mention that Nugan transferred over two million dollars to the Liberal Party of Australia to oust then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who was opposed to the Vietnam War, began decolonization efforts in Australia and abroad, and broadly told the United States to go fuck itself with regards to the Cold War. Whitlam was only kicked out due to then-Governor General John Kerr's efforts, who the CIA went on record as calling "our man". That last part isn't even speculation, it's all documented. Anyway, that's unrelated. Any CIA involvement in this story is just a baseless conspiracy theory. Allegedly.

Regardless, it does feel a bit like the game is playing itself. Names, locations, and years are all highlighted in unique colors so that you never really have to look too hard to find the next bit of progression. Even code names for people or locations are underlined with an explanation scribbled onto the same slips of paper, meaning that there's very little for the player to actually need to suss out. Location data and the card catalogs don't seem to update unless you specifically zoom in on an article while holding it, meaning that you can get stuck because you pinned a message to the corkboard and read it there rather than reading it while it was in your hand. This is kind of an inherent danger when it comes to puzzle games, because I guarantee that there are quite a few people out there who would say that, even with all of the help, the game is too hard. Still, it's certainly a shade too easy for me.

The ending is abrupt, but I'm honestly not sure what else it could be. You kind of get the feeling from the outset that you're not going to be going home after your research has wrapped up. There are so many details about the Nugan Hand Bank and the subsequent fallout that are left out of this — luckily, they're easy to find with a few simple searches online — but I would have liked to have gone through them in the game rather than through JSTOR articles. Again, this is less that I think the author failed at what they were trying to do, and more that they succeeded at doing something that doesn't wholly work for me. A Hand With Many Fingers is still a wonderful game that I had a great time with, and I'll always value something that's less than an hour long that gives me more material to wig out my relatives with at family dinners.

The Americans who were indicted or convicted due to their participation in the Iran-Contra affair were ultimately pardoned by George H.W. Bush in January of 1993, two days before Bill Clinton took office.

bom jogo de investigação. o processo de juntar nome com ano e local, depois buscar em uma gaveta o número do arquivo pra finalmente poder ir buscá-lo em uma sala é muito bom, realmente te faz sentir um investigador ligando os pontos. porém acho que seu grande pecado está em não terminar bem sua história. sim, é baseado em uma história real e nem tudo na vida tem um final definido, mas chega a ser anticlimático, do tipo de ficar se perguntando "eu realmente terminei a história?"

mas acho bom deixar claro, novamente, que não é um jogo ruim, longe disso. nessas duas horas que fiquei pra zerar, estava engajado com a história, só acredito que seu final é abrupto demais (pelo menos é possível ficar mais meia hora depois lendo as páginas da Wikipedia sobre todos os pontos do jogo)

Unlike anything I ve every played before.
In A Hand With Many Fingers you access an archive filled to the brim with CIA documentation, grouped by time periods and continents. You dig through mountains of papers and pictures, cross reference time, locations and people to find the next scavenger hunt clue as to which files to check next, and slowly unravel a (Real world) CIA conspiracy.
Love detective games, and this is a unique take on it. A really strong proof of concept, if a bit barren, and just kind of ends out of nowhere?
Bonus points for appealing to my sensibilites (Fuck the US and their decades of destructive foreign policies fucking over democratic nations all over the globe

É muito interessante o conceito. Descobrir uma conspiração real conectando os documentos de um arquivo virtual é uma ideia maneira. Mas fica difícil de defender quando é tudo tão mal feito.

O visual é absurdamente pobre em imaginação. O jogo tem um único ambiente, mas ele é completamente quadradão, desproporcional e sem textura alguma. O gif animado do Reagan se pronunciando sobre a guerra às drogas na televisão (de tela plana nos anos 80?) é horrendamente mão pesada e completamente desconexo com a estética do jogo. O quadro de cortiça também é pequeno demais e dá bug quase sempre que eu tentava prender um papel nele. As tentativas de criar suspense com o som são bem qualquer coisa pq além de cansadas eu sei que a CIA não vai me matar agora, eu to claramente jogando um videogame feião feito no roblox que por alguma razão foi lançado no steam kkkk fica difícil levar a sério

Me entediei depois de uma hora. Fui ver o final no YouTube e, nossa, era esse o mistério? Pensei que eles já tinham revelado que a CIA tinha matado eles pra queimar arquivo logo nos primeiros 5 minutos.

I wouldn’t go into A Hand With Many Fingers expecting a singularly fascinating mystery to uncover. It has strengths! But I would say they are in two, disappointingly parallel traits. On one hand, it is a subtly burdensome emulation of a mystery blooming. The archives are designed with a clever inefficiency that draws out paranoia and itchy obsessiveness, giving you just enough space and ambiguity to stretch out the red twine. In the connecting lobby of the archive is a large, exposed window overlooking the opposite side of the street. Just once in my full 1.25 hour long playthrough, a light was on in an apartment as I ascended the stairs, and before I could make any shapes out, it flicked off. Things like this happen every-so-often, and put just enough static in your mind to never feel fully comfortable. It doesn’t help that Reagan is gnashing away on some poor CRT in your periphery the entire time.

On the other hand, this is explicitly based on a true story of a conspiracy centering the CIA, drug trafficking, and arms dealers, so there’s an inherent edge and, dare I say, glamour to it all. Frankly, I don’t know how you’d possibly convince someone that this game’s subject matter wasn’t baseline fascinating considering there’s an actual aftermath that, regardless of its success, the game would be guiding you towards.

That’s kinda the problem, though. While the game trots around a more and more complicated set of names, locations, and events, the contents of said texts reveal themselves to be actually quite bare with stimulating information. As convenient as it is that the game highlights all mechanically important information, it does lead to a bit of tunnel-vision, especially near the end of the game when the details and combinations are disparate enough that brute force is not only possible, but tempting. I can’t speak fully to this, but I reckon that there’s a lot of interesting bits to this story that simply don’t show up in this game because the primary goal of this game was to be a clear, coherent set of puzzles more than a violent document-cyclone that answers questions just for more to be raised. There’s a version of this game that’s the latter in some parallel universe. It might not be nearly as digestible - hell, it could be unplayable garbage. But the thought that it could exist eats away at me every time I think about it.

A really engaging game about investigating a real life CIA conspiracy. You comb through archives to read real world documents about some Strange Events, pinning together a wider picture of collusion and manipulation.

Its kinda hard to sort of pin down the tone its going for. The gameplay most involves moving from upstairs to downstairs, picking up a box, opening the box, and reading the documents. To mix up this pattern, the game adds little tricks to amp up your paranoia. A phone ringing with no answer, a flickering light across the street, was that car always there..? Its a great touch but it also adds a sense of Narrative to a real life story. And because of that, its easy to expect putting together these clues will tie up in a nice tidy bow.

But the thing is, with conspiracies like this, a lot of pieces of evidence are just destroyed. Which is something the game points out! So it can't end with a big I've Solved Everything reveal. There's just a point where there's no evidence left and you just have to work with the clues you got. Frustrating for a narrative, maybe, and you can feel the difficult the game has in making a satisfying ending out of it. But its messy in a real way that I appreciate.

The game presents you with a very interesting way of linking together information in order to progress and find new links to continue cracking the mystery, and I would gladly play more games in this style. However, the game ends pretty abruptly; just when you think you're about to stumble upon a huge goldmine leading to the big twist, the game ends. Also, exploration mode was advertised as allowing you to view all the documents freely to see what you missed, but to me there was no discernible difference between original game mode and exploration mode to make these documents accessible. Overall, good concept, but really really short and the mechanism to backtrack and see what you missed doesn't seem to be working.

I wanna give this one an A for Effort. I love the premise, I love the structure, and I really love playing it. The process of navigating documents and file cabinets is so engrossing, I would gladly play more games in this style. And I'm happy to see more games expose the truly monstrous history of the CIA. The game also does a lot of interesting little things, even having a few genuinely delightful surprises along the way. I really want to front load this with compliments, because it really does some of this stuff incredibly.

But, unfortunately, I think this game does a bad job of actually delivering the information it wants you to uncover. I honestly don't feel like I know much more about the actual conspiracy this game was about. I know the names of the major players, but I only have a vague understanding of their actions. The game sets you up with a very specific question to guide you. And I'm not even sure I get the answer to that, frankly.

I reopened the game before I posted this review to pore over the documents once again to see if I was just missing something. And I can't say I have that much better an understanding of what was going on. I do not consider myself a particularly easy to confuse reader or player. Maybe I was just too sleepy for it to all come together in the way it was supposed to, and maybe that's my fault. Maybe it's because the highlighting system causes you to fixate on names, times, and places, rather than to focus on the actual content of the documents you are going through. (My notes, originally detailed, devolved into a list of reference numbers). Maybe it's because the documents are too sparse and too vague to give me a good understanding of the details. Maybe I'm just stupid. But I needed much more concrete and explicit explanations of the geopolitical situation, or just the basic situation, for that matter. Maybe that makes me stupid.

When the game cuts to credits, I only just started to feel like I was understanding what was going on. I see the silhouette of the conspiracy but nothing more. I understand its shape, but not its nuances and structure. The game spread out its arms and said "Tada!", but I was still waiting for the rabbit to come out of the hat.

I typically hate the criticism of "I Don't Get It!". But in this case, the goal of this game (ostensibly) is to inform me about a real life series of events in a way that is engaging. Was I engaged? Absolutely! Did I feel like I learned something? Not really!