(A screengrab from the trailer for “A Hand With Many Fingers,” via YouTube.)
You stand in an office, staring blankly at a corkboard full of spare news articles, bank statements and secret CIA cables. Red strands of yarn form a wild, asymmetrical web that Charlie Day would appreciate. But right now, you’ve hit a dead end.
Initials on a money transfer from the Caymans. A banker’s suicide in Australia. A partially redacted intelligence report suggesting a gruesome incident in Vietnam decades earlier. A headline exposing clandestine U.S. involvement in Angola.
Exasperated, you turn around and look at the boxes of files you’ve already gone though, stacked haphazardly on the ground. You note the boxes’ file numbers and, as a last resort, you turn back to the board to check those numbers against scraps of information you’ve already gathered.
Then you see it. You’ve been through six boxes, but there are seven mentioned on the board. A breakthrough could be just steps away, deep in anonymous archives in which you’ve spent the last few hours, if the files haven’t been destroyed already.
Therein lies the revelatory magic – incredibly narrow that it is – of the 2020 game “A Hand With Many Fingers,” which game-maker Colestia describes as a “first-person investigative thriller” based on a real, fascinating Cold War tale of intrigue.
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“Thriller” is an exaggeration. Except for a couple creepy moments, the entirety of the game consists of just walking from the office to a card index room to a file room and back. No enemies, traps or even a sense of urgency. There is a fairly shocking moment towards the end, but I won’t spoil it here. The 3D graphics are as simple as they come, clearly from a developer who cares far more about the story than any window dressing.
But a game like this is absolute catnip for a narrow spectrum of players – namely, me. As an investigative reporter who adores delving into obscure documents to uncover strands of a larger story, especially related to the Cold War, I was enthralled and found myself playing through the few hours of the game in one sitting. Just one more box to open, just one more file to analyze, just one more clue to write down on an actual, real-life notepad.
The fact that the tale upon which the game is based is true makes it all the more compelling. The evidence piles up recounting the exploits and mysteries of a bank called Nugan Hand, a real firm that employed ex-military and CIA-linked figures – reportedly including a former CIA director -- all over the world and allegedly conducted some very, very shady business in the 1970s.
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“Over the years, the two words Nugan Hand became shorthand for drug-dealing, gun-running, organized crime and clandestine intelligence activities,” the Sydney Morning Herald wrote in 2015, after one of the bank’s former top officials was discovered in hiding in the U.S.
While the game alleges a tight link between Nugan Hand and the CIA -- the documents it provides are fictitious -- in 1982 the CIA issued a rare public denial of any relationship, according to Newsweek.
The twisting, globetrotting story is the perfect setting for the investigative style of gameplay, which gives players almost no direction beyond basic instructions at the beginning and highlighting potentially relevant information in files as you uncover them. You’re left to find out why it’s important that a Nugan Hand employee went to a meeting in Geneva in 1975 by searching for a file related to that meeting. That file, if it exists, hopefully provides the next clue as the web grows ever large and convoluted.
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But for a game that bets it all on narrative, it did feel like it never quite all came together satisfactorily. I was surprised when the game was ended; I was still waiting for that final revelation that would expose the whole continent of information, rather than the islands I’d discovered and semi-connected so far.
Still, if you’re the kind of gamer who enjoys the high of small revelations and piecing the puzzle together, or just a Cold War enthusiast, “A Hand With Many Fingers” is a fun way to spend a few hours.
Then get the ball of yarn ready and fall down the online rabbit hole reading about the real Nugan Hand for as long as you like.
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