Hand Physics Lab v1.1 | 2021 Review
In an effort to continue to move my entire back catalogue of reviews to Medium, I am publishing this article that is 4 years old. The game has since been updated 3 additional times, so it is very possible that my gripes from before have been resolved, making my statements null. Thank you for reading.
I found Hand Physics Lab when it was just a little app you could side load onto your Quest 2. It was awesome for demonstrating hand tracking to my friends, and really showed the power of the hardware, and potential future we have in virtual reality. It made a fan of me, and though I did find myself uninstalling it from time to time to make space on my ridiculously small 50GB headset, I always found myself reinstalling Hand Physics Lab to show some new friend. But, this last time I went looking for it, I noticed that it’s been moved to a paid app on the official Oculus Store. I was more than happy to pay, considering how much I’ve used it to demo hand tracking, and support the developer.
It’s much more of a fleshed out game than a demo now, however. Puzzles where you have to move things. Sort things. Perform tasks. The hand tracking technology is good, but it’s not necessarily great enough to be able to do these with great precision, which leads to some funny hijinks. A lot of the original tech demo I can see scattered throughout this full version of the game, and it still does a good job at showing users the power of hand tracking.
But, after completing all the puzzles available in every way possible, with me now slowly working towards 100% completion, I’ve got some unfortunate news. I don’t think this new ‘game’ version of Hand Physics Lab has been worth the purchase to me. The SideQuest version was a quick, self-contained, well-rounded, and polished micro-sized experience. This version of the game in its larger scope, however, I feel completely misses the mark of why it was so popular in the first place, and waters down its original greatness.
To be clear, I don’t mind the inclusion of the puzzles, and some of them admittedly have brought me a nice laugh in their absurdity. But, on the other hand, some of these puzzles are agonizingly frustrating and this can be for several reasons. Sometimes the physics betray you, or your in-game hands can’t get close enough because of your hands in real life, or there might be too much drag on an object. Part of the appeal is the fact that it’s not perfect, but when you’re challenging the player to beat the puzzle in a limited amount of time, and you’re dealing with these issues, that’s when these gripes really start to bog down the entire experience for me. Again, it’s not great, and I wish it were better, but it doesn’t necessarily break the game for me.
A much larger complaint of mine is that the new sandbox is a slow and cumbersome mess, as compared to the old sandbox in the SideQuest app. Gone is the singular, fluid scene that felt like some back door into a hidden side project of Portal’s Aperture Laboratories. Now here in the game version, we have a clunky selection menu with even less activities. It was fun in the old sandbox to flip switches, instantly change from skin, skeleton, hand, etc., and move fluidly with fun animations of things coming in and out of panels between sandbox scenes. I don’t want to load into the keyboard scene, then get returned to the main menu when I want to show off something different, just to go back into the sandbox menu and select the cat scene. In the old version, the convenience of transitioning between activities was literally the flick of a switch, with just the animation as the load time. I miss it dearly. But even this was not enough to make my opinion completely sour.
What Hand Physics Lab did that broke me and caused me to write this entire review, is the music, or lack there of. Every music track contained within is from the Creative Commons, and you better like all of them, because it’s repeats of the same five tracks over and over again. It’s music you’ve heard, too. Understandable to include creative commons type music if it was still a freebie SideQuest project! But, seeing as it costed me money, it’s insulting to hear the same music over and over and over again, when I can easily go on Fiverr and buy custom-made tracks for 30 bucks. I’m not kidding, if I have to hear any of those tracks again, I’ll explode. There should be an option to turn them off, because it really makes the experience seem cheaply made and unoriginal. It severely impacts the tone of the experience because of this. I hope the developer at least considers letting me demo this game to my friends in silence.
Overall, The old sandbox was much better. I hope the developer brings it back and improves on the concept of it. But more than anything else, I can’t possibly spend any more time in this game until there’s a toggle for no music, or custom music is added in. Otherwise, it’s an okay game, that makes for a decent enough hand tracking demo.
Originally published at https://backloggd.com.