Outta Hand review: hands flapping mischief-making

The word that comes to mind after finishing Outta Hand: playable. This game is so damn playable. Its core gameplay mechanic involves a very weird way of moving: you thrust yourself around using hand and arm maneuvers a little like breaststroke, pushing air backwards in order to go forwards. This inventive way of navigating virtual spaces is both fun and frustrating; you improve as you progress but never quite acclimatize to it. 

When you’re inside Beat Saber, slicing those blue and red boxes, you feel like a space ninja but in reality, from the outside, you look like a fool—limbs flailing, arms akimbo. In Outta Hand you feel like a fool, seeing where you need to go but never in total control, like trying to walk a straight line when you’re three sheets to the wind. God knows what I looked like while playing.

The narrative justification for this radically different form of movement is that we play a “hand person.” Our bodies are essentially a face—looking a bit like a Pixar character—connected to two hands. The core objective is to push forward through a wacky, day-glo-coloured factory in order to defeat a mad professor-like character and free his enslaved creations. 

This mostly involves making your way through large rooms and clearing out various bad guys, including gangly robots and cantankerous gnomes—the latter an irresistible choice for a toy factory-like setting. You defeat them by punching them. And as you make the required punch-like motion, clenching your fists and pushing them forward, your arms extend like Mister Fantastic and inflate into huge, swollen, Gumby-esque hands.

Navigating these spaces requires the most time and effort; that core gameplay mechanic remains so strange and zany. As a navigation system it’s so stupidly fluid that it feels almost natural, as if prosecuting the idea that in some far-flung corner of the multiverse, in some wacky cartoonish place drifting around in the cosmos, there might actually be four-handed folk like these, bouncing around and getting up to fists a-flying mischief.

Outta Hand is gimmicky and conceptually limited, but it’s also quite effective in building another reality from the ground up. In most motion picture mediums, including movies and video games, that reality-building process involves the creation of environments to traverse and story elements that thread a narrative path through them. In video games this is often called “world building.” VR productions such as Outta Hand, and the multiplayer game Gorilla Tag (which has a similarly strange hand-based navigation system) add another aspect: the creation of corporeal elements that help define how these worlds work and the nature of our virtual presence.

Developers don’t tend reinvent the wheel—or, perhaps I should say, the human body: most characters we embody have two legs and two hands, being human or human-esque. Us homosapiens have long viewed art through a lens that is, indeed, human centric, perhaps inevitably so: being human is all we are and all we know. There’s something to be said about works of art that imagine a different way of living; a different way of being.

Outta hand isn’t a profound rumination on the nature of existence. But it does propose a different way to view the world, a different way to exist, and a different way to move. It makes incessant hand flapping oddly entertaining.