If you love Alan Wake 2, you should play A Hand with Many Fingers

Alan Wake 2 has been out for over a week now, and it’s already become the topic of many a watercooler conversation here at Polygon. The long-anticipated follow-up is a top-to-bottom redesign of Remedy Entertainment’s 2010 action-horror game, introducing new puzzle and combat conceits and the parallel campaigns of protagonists Saga Anderson and Alan Wake.

One of the boldest new mechanics the game introduces is Saga’s “Mind Place,” an interactive 3D space that allows you to look over clues (in the form of photos and flash cards you acquire throughout the game) and assemble them into maps of connections on a wall called the case board. The story is advanced by doing so. And aside from being a novel means of immersing the player in the evolving narrative of the game’s mystery, Alan Wake 2’s case board is the latest example of the detective story trope of the so-called conspiracy board, in which a collage of media from different sources is connected by lines of red string.

Colestia

You can see the conspiracy board in many TV shows and films. True DetectiveYou can also find out more about the following: It’s Always Sunny in PhiladelphiaThe following are some of the ways to get in touch with us: Silence of the LambsYou can also find out more about the following: The Usual Suspects. It was even present in 2007’s BioShock. If you’re looking for a mystery to dive into after you’re done trudging through the dark woods and even darker alternate dimensions of Alan Wake 2Play a gameThe Hand With Many Fingers, a thriller investigative game where you must connect the dots to uncover a Cold War-era conspiracy involving CIA. Yes, I’m being serious!

Created by David Cribb, a Canberra-based developer who makes politically focused games under the pseudonym “Colestia,” The Hand With Many FingersThe game places the player in the position of a graduate student sent to a CIA archives to do research for his professor. Open a box of newspaper clips, audio transcripts and photos to begin your search. Then, you will need to draw links between key events, players and the archive to uncover the mystery that surrounds the murder of a well-known Australian banker. The more you progress in the game, the more you discover clues to help unravel the web of connections between a former merchant bank, an international drug trafficking network and the American Government. It’s late, and you may not be the only one in the archive.

The Hand With Many FingersThe closest interactive videogame equivalent is the game Feels Like All the President’s Men. This game gives players the necessary tools for assembling clues. It asks them the fundamental questions that any investigation must answer: Who, What, Where, and Why? The answer to each of these questions is color-coded across the various documents you comb through over the course of the game — these, in turn, lead you to flip through index cards in search of a new box of clues that must be retrieved from the archive’s basement.

The Hand With Many Fingers’ equivalent of the case board is far more open-ended than that in Alan Wake 2You will be able to determine the boundaries between your investigations as they expand. If you’re looking for a tense, engrossing detective game that substitutes the supernatural horror elements of Remedy Entertainment’s latest game with a riveting sense of paranoia and tension, you should definitely give this game a shot. With an average run time of around an hour and a half, it’s the perfect game to play after you’ve wrapped up Alan Wake 2.

The Hand With Many FingersPurchase the game on Steam or Itch.io.