ranzware
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A grizzled detective one week away from retirement sits at his desk in a dimly lit office, clearly frustrated by a criminal mastermind who continues to elude him. Strewn across his desk and pinned to the bulletin board behind him are photos of the perp he’s been pursuing but cannot clap the cuffs on.
But wait: the photos are all of a long, weird, bendy arm that’s been stealing things. That part you definitely haven’t heard before.
That arm is you. In My Arms Are Longer Now, “You’re a very long arm. You steal things. It’s a comedy game,” explained Matthew Jackson of Toot Games, the small Australian studio behind the surreal heist game.
You snake your weird long arm through levels like a subway car or a kid’s birthday party and take stuff that doesn’t belong to you, like a bicycle or a briefcase or a pair of earrings, or maybe even, as the saying goes, candy from a baby.
“It’s nice to be naughty and cause a fuss and be cheeky,” said Jackson, who cited Untitled Goose Game as an influence when we spoke at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco last week. “I think it’s fun to just also be horrid. There’s a word that we overuse sometimes, when we talk about the game. Is it grotty? That’s the vibe. And there’s a real line to that as well, because if you go too grotty, you’ll gross people out. And if you don’t go grotty enough, it kind of feels a bit too plain and simple. So you want to have a little bit of disgust in both the actions and the art style to keep people hooked onto it, right?”
The long, bendy arm, as described on the game’s store page on Steam, is a bit “yucky” and “disgusting,” and it sounds like there’s potential for it to become yuckier as you play.
“We’ve got some, like, arm customization along the way, like skin tones, hair, tattoos,” Jackson said. “I really want to do long acrylic nails, but it’s proving to be a technically challenging task.”
And while your fingers do the walking through the games’ levels to make you rich (or net you about “60 bucks”), don’t forget there’s a determined flatfoot on your heels.
“You are causing all these crimes, and the level progression is like the sort of journey of you, the long arm thief, and this detective chasing you,” Jackon said. “So, not to give too much away, but essentially you’ll have to reckon for some of the crimes that you’ve committed along the way.”
There’s no set release date for My Arms Are Longer Now yet, but I’m excited to get my hands (which are attached to my disappointingly normal-length arms) on it.
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Kurt Indovina
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