Out Of Hands

The gameplay is rooted in familiar deck-building and turn-based tactics, but it feels refreshingly different because of how it ties into the narrative.

There is an astonishingly sublime presentation to this game that I don’t quite think I’ve seen replicated in any other game that I’ve had interest in playing; I’ve stumbled across games with surrealist imagery in the past, but they were usually reserved to genres or gameplay loops that I didn’t have interest in jumping through.

It’s a haunting collage of photographed hands, stop-motion animation, hand-drawn textures, and flickering video elements that evoke discomfort without relying on gore or jump scares.

It offers a unique means of escalating the difficulty of battles after each fight.

While it utilizes the standard 3-energy-per-turn mode of play, the mechanical intrigue comes from the fact that energy is spent acquiring weapons, which can be banked between turns, and since most enemies die after attacking you and you are fully healed between encounters, you can push yourself to build a strong hand (har har har), then unleash a devastating round on your follow-up turn.

I have a soft spot for games that can hit a thematic soundtrack, and I feel like Out of Hands’ compositions hit just the right auditory g-spot, where the tracks have a mixture of catharsis, adrenaline, and tension, sometimes all at once.