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.
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.
Reviewed on Jan 21, 2022