If you liked ALAN WAKE 2, I KNOW WHAT YOU SHOULD PLAY NEXT
Okay, so if your favorite parts of Alan Wake 2 were spooky forests, ominous buildings,
and blend modes….. I can’t help you, go play Control or something.
But if you were someone who couldn’t get enough of Alan Wake’s methodical detective
puzzles, and who wants to piece together a real mystery on a red-thread conspiracy corkboard…
You should play A Hand With Many Fingers.
And my first piece of evidence is the problems I had with the Case Board in Alan Wake 2.
In Alan Wake 2, FBI agent Saga Anderson solves mysteries by going into her ~Mind Place~,
a forest cabin where she can use her seemingly psychic intuition to
tell if characters are lying, listen to cool tunes, and more importantly:
Connect evidence on this Case Board.
You take out photos of suspects, or facts about the case from this file cabinet,
and sort them into their proper categories on the board. When Saga places something
correctly, it pops into place and a thread connects it to the clues that came before.
There’s a satisfaction in choosing the correct place to put a clue
and watching it slot neatly into its row. And you can’t really do
it wrong — if you try to put a clue in the wrong place, Saga will tell you so.
Nah
But… as excited as I get every time I can add something to the Case Board, I have my gripes too.
The way the Case Board works is satisfying,
but also rigid. The story won’t advance unless you’ve placed the correct pieces on the wall.
Here are some minor spoilers for a puzzle in Chapter 2 of Alan Wake 2, to explain what I mean.
This happens in the first couple hours of the game, depending on how fast you play.
After reading this poem and some other clues in the Cauldron Lake area, I deduced that I
was looking for a human heart and that it must be in the General Store.
I trashed the place looking for it. Then I did a circuit of all the other locations, thinking I must
have missed something. Finally, after a good hour of running around, I found another clue...
...in a walkthrough online. It said I was right! The heart WAS in the General Store, in the freezer. Great!
There was just one problem.
There was nothing in the freezer. After painstakingly retreading all the steps
that had led me to this point, I realized there was one thing that I had missed:
putting something on the wall that made Saga say “HEY I SHOULD CHECK THE FREEZER.”
("Nightingale’s heart is at the general store, in a fridge.")
Next time I went into the General Store, boom:
dark substance, and a human heart in the freezer. Sherlock Holmes over here!!!
So yeah, this was sort of my fault? The game does make it clear that you need to be putting
clues on the board to progress the story. And if I hadn’t internalized that before,
I sure did after wasting my freakin’ time for over an hour. Alan Wake 2 is a great
game — but it didn’t feel great to have solved this puzzle myself through logic,
only to be unable to progress because I hadn’t done one finicky little task.
Luckily, there’s a game that gives you the conspiracy board of your dreams,
with no hand holding, excellent sound effects, and tactile…ness.
You can play it in about two hours and it only costs five bucks.
It’s called A Hand With Many Fingers.
This isn't gonna be on camera. No.
Dumb.
A Hand With Many Fingers is an investigative game about a real horror story: the Central
Intelligence Agency. You’re a grad student sifting through documents in a CIA archive,
doing research for your professor. You have a corkboard and a world map,
a radio playing some jaunty tunes and a TV that can flip between videos of
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Everything I need for a great night!
The first documents you’re given set the scene:
a newspaper article about the mysterious death of a Sydney banker, and a photo of three unknown men.
Now you’re gonna put those clippings on your corkboard.
Anywhere on your corkboard.
You have complete control over how you arrange things. Sometimes that might
mean simply shifting documents around in a more logical way,
or so that you can fit in another newspaper clipping. Other times it means completely
disassembling your masterpiece because you’ve gotten something wrong, dummy.
Moving photos around and finding new connections between them makes you feel
like a detective, searching not just for a clue,
but that eureka moment when the greater mystery starts to fall into place.
When you place a document there’s a satisfying sound,
and the (sound effect) of string when you connect two items.
Once a box is emptied of relevant documents, you survey your handiwork: do you want to pursue that
new name you just found? Outside the research room is a Card Catalog of cabinets arranged by region,
with a drawer for each year. In THOSE drawers are cards with names on them,
and on THOSE cards are box numbers for the REAL archive, which is downstairs and even BIGGER.
It’s dark in the archives, and there was always a sense that I was going to turn
a corner and run into like, freaking Slenderman. OR HENRY KISSINGER! AHH!!!
This is the kind of game that tells you up front to get a pen and paper ready,
because you’re going to be TAKING SOME NOTES. And your corkboard arrangements are an extension
of that, a way to organize your thoughts. You might take advantage of the world map,
placing notable figures in their original countries — this could help remind you where
they’re from when you’re looking for more information on them in the Card Catalog.
Or you might create a little biography section,
so that you can easily identify faces when you find yet another photo of a white guy in a suit.
It’s all about how you research and how you learn.
And you are learning.
Because all of this is real.
Without spoiling too much real history from 50 years ago,
the death of that Sydney banker, Francis John Nugan, set off the collapse of the
Nugan Hand bank and the unraveling of an international conspiracy involving the CIA.
After you finish the game, an incredible Wikipedia rabbit hole awaits.
You might just discover that a real historical figure mentioned in this game stars in another
game about international spy agency skullduggery, and find yourself making
a documentary about it that’s releasing in 2024: Spycraft: The Great Game… ANYWAY!
If you loved the methodical feeling of placing clues on Alan Wake 2’s Case Board,
and want something that really lets you roleplay as a detective,
without being a cop: turn to A Hand With Many Fingers.
It’s a game that doesn’t underestimate the player. You interact with the corkboard
and the map in this totally self-directed, tactile way that makes you feel like a genius.
And hey, you might just end up uncovering a real conspiracy.