I have just tried Hand Physics Lab, a game all focused on physical hands interaction on the Oculus Quest, and I have liked it a lot. Let me tell you why in this review.
But before starting, l want to thank the people at XR Bootcamp, an entity that offers professional courses about AR and VR, and for which the author of Hand Physics Lab is a teacher, for having made this review possible! Thanks Ferhan, you are amazing.
Hand Physics Lab – Video Review
Here you are the video review I’ve prepared for this cool VR experience. Inside it, you can also watch many minutes of gameplay to see if you like the game 😉
Hand Physics Lab
Hand Physics Lab is an experience for Oculus Quest developed by Dennys Kuhnert that is all about hand interactions. The game is intended to be played using the Oculus Quest native hands tracking and makes strong use of believable physics. It is pretty original, and it can be a glimpse of how future hand-tracking-driven games may be.
Gameplay
In Hand Physics Lab you are provided with more than 80 levels, and in every one of these levels, you have to perform a very simple task. There is a lot of variation, but just to make you understand what these tasks may be, I can provide you some examples: stacking objects, pressing buttons, painting objects, throwing stuff, etc… Every level is completely independent of the others, and it is very short. Some levels are as short as 10 seconds, and usually, the maximum duration is a few minutes. Only once I took 20 minutes for a level, but just because I had not understood how to make things work.
To perform all these tasks, you have some skeleton hands, that are the tracked version of your real hands, with which you have to perform actions respecting all the laws of physics. This means that for instance, your hands can’t trespass the table you work on; you can’t lift things that are too big; objects fall down if you haven’t stacked them well; and so on. This of course makes the tasks more difficult, because the program is not helping you at all in performing them, you are alone against the laws of physics.
But more than the physics, what actually works against you is the glitchy hands tracking on the Oculus Quest. While you perform these tasks, your hands will disappear, be locked in space, having misdetections of the fingers pose, and so on, not because the programmer chose so, but because the hand tracking is having issues. This is where most journalists defined the game as “frustrating”, and where I absolutely don’t agree with them. Because for me, the problems with the hands are the most fun part of the game.
Sometimes I speak with Massimiliano Ariani, the game designer of New Technology Walkers, about gaming and VR, and he once taught me that a game is fun because it challenges you imposing you rules you have to respect to perform a task that otherwise would be very easy. Let’s talk about golf, for instance: you have a tiny ball that you have to put in a hole, and you can do that just by hitting it on the ground using a golf-club. Wouldn’t it be much easier to just take the ball with your hands and put it in the hole? Yes, of course, but that wouldn’t be a challenge, and so wouldn’t be a fun game.
The same holds for Hand Physics Lab. Would it be funny to stack cubes with a stable controller? Absolutely not, it would be a dull task: you take them, you stack them, and game over in some seconds. Where is the challenge? Where is the fun? Hand Physics Lab is amazing exactly because the hands do not work as intended: if you mix the glitchy tracking and the unforgiving realistic physics, every task becomes a challenge. Do you want to stack cubes? Well, it would be a pity if when you have almost completed your task, hand tracking stopped detecting your hand and when it recovers, the virtual hand makes a fast movement and throws away half of the objects you have already stacked. Do you want to throw a skull? Well, it seems that hands tracking doesn’t work well with fast-moving hands… How you cope with all of these issues makes the game interesting.
Basically, the game is all about patience and finding creative solutions to win the level. For instance (little spoiler ahead) in one level I had to play basketball with a skull, but the hand tracking couldn’t detect properly my throwing movement… so in the end, I just moved physically with all my body next to the basket and dunked the skull inside it. I lied, cheat, and stole (cit. a great man), and in the end, I solved all the puzzles.
Of course, there is a lot of frustration because you will see the game unfairly destroying all your good intentions. But it is intrinsic in the gameplay, and you have to absolutely embrace it. Playing this game reminded me of the “positive thinking” that Chinese people propose or that fool and genius Ted Talk by Marina Abramovich where she said that art is embracing all our discomforts. And here you have to play with your discomfort all the time.
Another thing that may frustrate some users, is that the game doesn’t explain what you have to do in every level, nor what all the items are for. You have to learn all by experience and experimentation, and this is the reason why you have the first levels that are all very basic: this way you learn how to use your virtual hands and how to interact with the various items that the game proposes to you. This is cool on one side, because it adds the additional challenge of having to understand what task to perform and how to do that (if you like light conundrums, you will love it), but on the other side, in some levels, this may be a problem. For instance, I hadn’t understood what was the purpose of the laser in a level, and I lost 20 minutes on it, while actually, the expected playtime was around 3. So, sometimes it may be an issue, but most of the time, it is on the pros side.
I loved that the levels are very short, and so the game is ideal to have short gaming sessions during busy days, like the ones that I’m having right now: you can just save 15 minutes and play 10 levels of the game. Every level is different from the others, and some of them have some genius interactions (like one where you have to interact with a mirrored version of yourself): this means having some surprises every time you play it. To me it was very fun because I could have short bursts of gaming that were always interesting and original: when I turned on my Quest, I always thought: let’s see what Dennys has prepared for me today…
For every level, you are awarded from 1 to 3 stars depending on the time you needed to complete it. The number of stars you collect doesn’t stop you from going on with the game, it is just for your personal satisfaction. Every level can also be played with your bare hands, with your controllers, or in 3rd person view, where you see a little diorama version of your hands that do the tasks following your movements.
The more you complete the game, the more you unlock items for the Sandbox. In the Sandbox, you are given the possibility of playing around with all the tools that have been given you during the game (e.g. pistols, eggs, lasers, etc…). Personally, I’m not a big fan of Sandboxes, because I like to have a purpose in games, so I haven’t played that much with it.
I have not measured how much time I have spent in the game, but I guess it’s been around 2 hours.
Controls
Hand Physics Lab may be played with bare hands and controllers. As I told you before, playing it with controllers is just too easy, and breaks completely the point of the game. So my suggestion is to play it with your bare hands.
Dennys Kuhnert is a master in hand interactions and so he’s been able to create an interface that works by just using your hands, without you needing to take the controllers, even just for activating the menus. From the UI to the game, you can just use your hands in a very natural way.
What is weird about using the hands, with all the quirk they have in VR, is the sensation that you have after you have played the game. In the game, the hands seem like made of rubber, and their position is not always equivalent to the one of the real hands, and your brain quickly adapts to your new glitchy “rubber hands” during a play session.
But when you remove the headset, for some minutes, it still thinks that you have rubber hands, and it wonders why your real hands are so solid and so responsive. It is a weird sensation, absolutely not severe, and that goes after a while. Personally, I found it funny.
UI/UX
Since the developer is also a teacher of UX, let’s also talk a bit about the interface of this game that, as I’ve just said, works all by the use of your bare hands. And this, exactly like Cubism, is a game where the interface has been carefully studied for it. Since you don’t have the reliable controllers, where you clearly know when you have activated a trigger, every graphical element must provide you many visual cues to show you it is “understanding” your intentions. So buttons are reactive to touch (that works like a mouse hover) and to pressure (that works like a mouse click), and show visual feedback to express these states. Objects can be grasped, and when you can do that reliably, you can see a yellow circle appearing inside them.
The hands change color to make you understand why they are not reacting as you wish: if they are red, it means that Oculus is not tracking them well, while if they are yellow, it means that the hand is tracked well, but it is not where you think it should be because the physics is blocking it somewhere else (e.g. the hand is blocked by a surface).
There are many cues of this kind that help a lot in interacting with the game and its menus. It is even more helpful that at the beginning of the game there is a long introductory stage that makes you decide some settings (e.g. if you intend to play seated or standing) and then a tutorial that teaches you the basic movements and commands (like the one to open the menu or reset your visuals). So the interface is greatly curated.
It is not perfect though, and the choice of hand tracking has its drawbacks. For instance, the buttons to return to the menu and to reset the level, are in the lower part of your play space (more or less 20cm below your shoulders), and in that region, hand tracking doesn’t work. So to click the “reset” button, you have to look at your hand with your headset. But the reset button also resets the orientation… and since you have just rotated your head just to look at your hand, it means that the “reset level” button also rotates your visuals, that is something that you don’t want. Another example is the gesture to trigger the reset orientation that can be misdetected with a pinch and so while I was stacking objects, sometimes the game wanted to reset my orientation. Most of the time, the interface is great, but there is still room for improvement.
Then it was weird that once, while I was playing the game, the Quest went in standby mode, maybe because it wasn’t detecting inputs from the controllers for a while. I think this is a bug in the Quest runtime
Graphics and Sound
I’m sure you have all seen some GIFs of Hand Phsyics Lab on Reddit or other social media, so I wouldn’t go into much detail describing the graphics. The game has a comic-like graphical style, that is mostly black and white, with some colored details of the objects you have to interact with. It’s a style where less-is-more, and it is ideal for an indie team basically formed by just one developer. But in its simplicity, it is highly curated, and there are always nice details of the few objects are portrayed in the scene. Everything looks very polished.
The music is in line with the fun style of the graphics: it is good to hear, and it helps keeping the spirit up.
Price and Availability
Hand Physics Lab is available on the Oculus Store for €9.99. I think the price is fair for its originality and polish… maybe it’s not that long and replayable, though.
Final feedback
I loved Hand Physics Lab. Not only because as a developer, I appreciated a lot the work Dennys Kuhnert must have put in developing all these levels and the physics-driven engine to power them, but also because I’ve found it original and fun. It’s a new way of playing games, that uses your bare hands, and also exploits the fact that hands-tracking is not perfect to create a challenge. It has levels that are different the one from the others, and it can be played in short bursts, so you can also play it during busy days. It was a continuous surprise to me, and I’ve found it very funny.
Yes, there are some issues here and there, but the overall net is highly positive. If you are ok to accept the rules of the games and play with your frustration, then you should seriously consider buying this game.
Have fun with your new rubber hands 🙂
(Header image by Dennys Kuhnert)