Thursday, July 14, 2022

An older playthrough: "The Hand of Glory"!

Nope, that's not the Cross of Coronado. That one's been in a museum since 1938.
I'm Lars (Lazarus) Bundy, eccentrically dressed detective of the HPD. There's a serial killer on the loose and I have to catch him. A girl is kidnapped and I have to find her. Thus starts the point 'n click adventure game The Hand of Glory. Which has no dirty connotations whatsoever.

Starting out in my fancy Miami apartment! Now if only I could go shopping for new clothes...
There are limited locations and items in this game, so it's fairly easy to solve the puzzles. Common sense gets you far. But one puzzle, involving a particular code, blew me out of the water. Perhaps it's because I did it in different playing sessions, and at the end of my second session I had forgotten a clue from my first session, very early in the game. Should have jotted it down in a notebook of my own.

Meet Alice Sharp. She can Sherlock an NPC just by looking at them with her fancy named abilities...
Lars is an okay character, trying out stuff sometimes gives a funny scene as an easter egg. What did come as a surprise was a second playable character in the form of Alice Sharp, intern at the HPD and helping me out for a bit.

Yay, a map! Always fun... Gives games a big sense of scale.
Curious to see where it all leads to, but for some reason I'm not all that fully engaged in this game, as if there's something off. Not saying it's bad, perhaps it's just the character concepts: some look clearly cartoonish, others try to reach a more realistic human design, still others are a weird mix of both. Backgrounds are nicely detailed, though, and I love being able to read the newspaper every morning (very GK-ish), and I even got a death scene once!

Gabe? And is that the Fig Family coat of arms? #lucydreaming
You can find the The Hand of Glory on Steam and on itch.io!

And you can wishlist the second game, Roots in the Sky, on Steam as well!