Backlog Bingo 2025: Hand of Doom

1/5. Gets the "not problematic" point but zero of the others.

For a bit of background, there's a set of horror game collections called the Dread X Collections, in which a handful of developers (usually around ten) will make bite-sized / game-jam-sized games (the games are made under a seven day time limit, so they can't be more than game-jam-sized) to be put into a horror game bundle which is then sold for ten bucks. You know what you're getting in these: small, often experimental games that sometimes work and sometimes don't, but they're cheap and often at least have an interesting idea or mechanic to play with in the bite-sized runtime. Hand of Doom is both the title of a game in the 2020 Dread X Collection (i.e., the first one) and of its 2023 fully-fleshed-out remake; this review is of the latter.

This sort of "flesh out a game jam game into a full thing" game isn't uncommon: Inscryption, Hollow Knight, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, SUPERHOT, and several other very popular and successful games made this transition very well. Hand of Doom, though, is just...excessively fine, like, the 90s FMV art style is unique, the cutscenes being similarly done in an intentionally bad 90s FMV game style is funny, but the entire game is just missing that special something for me.

This is billed as a dungeon crawler, but I think that term is a huge stretch: it's nothing like what I'd normally associate with the term, as there's no Wizardry DNA, no Rogue DNA, and the Diablo DNA is limited to the fact that your spells are made from combinations of the syllables "eth, tal, ist, ort", which are runes from Diablo II. I would basically describe Hand of Doom as an adventure game, there's more DNA from King's Quest or Monkey Island here than any of the standard dungeon crawler oeuvre, as 90% of the game is "figure out what item needs to go where to solve the next puzzle that gets you the next thing you need to unwind your search space a little bit more, wash rinse repeat". There is combat...but your attack cooldown is fewer frames than the enemy hitstun dealt by landing an attack, so every single fight that isn't a puzzle boss (n.b.: the final boss is not a puzzle boss) reduces to "walk up, mash attack to stunlock it until it dies". This not only makes the combat extremely unengaging but there's also just not very much of it anyway, so it's hard to think of this as anything more action-RPG-shaped.

Gameplay largely consists of doing things until you get a new spell, which you cast by clicking the runes in the bottom right of your screen in a certain order and then hitting the INCANT button. Solve some puzzles, talk to the water wizard, learn that ETH TAL ORT IST makes it rain, use this to put out the wizard that's on fire so she can teach you etc etc etc. Solve some puzzled, learn that IST ETH IST ORT surrounds you with stone armor, this makes you heavy enough to not get blown around in wind and also to sink in water, use this to solve puzzles so you can etc etc etc. It's a perfectly fine gameplay loop, but...there are a lot of very good adventure games out now and I never found this one tickling my brain or making me resort to paper like Quern or Riven did. The places that I used notes were mostly to write down commonly used spells because I kept having to open the in-game spellbook to look up TAL IST TAL ETH ORT TAL (which I had to look up to type that; I have learned nothing clearly) and the animation to do so takes several seconds. Puzzles are either exceedingly obvious ("this thing is on fire and can be put out with the rain spell", "this large pile of wood can be set on fire") or obnoxious pixel hunts ("the next step is at the bottom of this lake somewhere, have fun" or "the spell that drops you into the shadow realm to hunt for invisible things lasts for literally five seconds, have fun spamming it" (it really does not help that the shadow realm spell is the TAL IST TAL ETH ORT TAL block mentioned above, giving it a casting time longer than its duration)).

Okay, I did chuckle at the fact that the ice mage is named Blizzard Wizard. That's good.

Idk where I learned this phrase, but there's just no "there there". The final area handed me "destroy the 13 macguffins to make the final boss vulnerable then kill it" and I mostly just thought "okay so I'm going to have to solve 13 puzzles using every random spell I've found throughout the game" and then that was...exactly what I got. Walk up to a giant boulder, look up what the wind spell is to push it, do that. Walk up to a lake, look up what the ice spell is to freeze it so I can walk across it, do that. At no point did I really feel like I was...solving puzzles? Instead of looking up the intended solutions in-game? The sole exception is in an alchemy-lab type area where you have play Pipe Mania to get blood from point A to point B to power devices. But, well, there are plenty of "work backwards from B to A to figure out how these pipes could possibly work" puzzles in FRACT OSC and that game also gave me cool synthesizers to play with as a reward for the moral equivalent of playing a game from 1989.

There's just nothing here that I'd feel like revisiting or putting a friend through when several other more-interesting-to-me games exist, and when the game does descend into pixel-hunting it's very annoying. So, meh. I finished it, it was short, but I was bored by about halfway through and mostly only managed to finish it by doing so during a series of voice calls when I could have the actual entertainment be "talking to friends". That's not exactly a ringing endorsement, for sure.