Closed Hands Review

Posted: 5 months ago.

Overview

Closed Hands is an text adventure game set in the lead-up and aftermath of a terror attack in a fictional UK city. You follow five core characters brought together by the same event. It's a branching story that you discover and influence as you read and make choices. The attack itself is not depicted, leaving the game to draw a complex picture of the reasons why it occurred, and long-last effects it had on people, communities, and the city itself.

You can choose what order to read the story in, and which characters to follow. This includes reading emails, exploring files, replaying conversations, finding secrets. As you progress you build understanding of the complex effect extremism has on people's perceptions of cultures and communities. Prejudices and racism that exist in the moments after an attack in many communities will be explored in this game, as will the tabloid and media reaction to sensitivity and empathy to those affected.

Game Details

Expected Content Rating: PEGI 12+

Release Date: 05/03/2021

Price: Free

Platforms: Mac and PC

Genres: Narrative

Accessibility: 26 features

Developer: @PassengerGames

Lists

View our choice of games like Closed Hands. This game is good if you want to:

Commitment

Duration: It takes between 1 hour and 1 and a half hours to play a round of this game. You can play through the narrative in around an hour if you follow just one perspective. To play through all the different character perspectives will take around 5 hours.

Players: This is a single player game.

Costs

Closed Hands

	PC	Free	–	–
	Mac	Free	–	–

This game is free to play. Does not offer in-game purchases, 'loot boxes' or 'battle/season passes'.

Age Ratings

Not yet rated, the game includes swear words that would likely result in a PEGI 12 and ESRB TEEN rating. Although the game is about terror attack, this is not graphically depicted or written about directly. The game focuses on the events around this rather than the event itself.

Parents and carers will want to play the game themselves to judge whether younger players are mature enough to understand, process and cope with the subject matter.

Accessibility

If you get lost in the network of conversations you can press a "Hot Button" to jump to the next scene you need to read. The game also provides a graphical representation of the "map" of conversations to help navigation.

There is a lot of reading in the text. As a whole there's 130,000 words, although this is split into 6 characters that can be engaged with separately.

There isn't remapping but it's a mouse controlled game and you can use any mouse button to trigger an action.

Our Closed Hands Accessibility Report details 26 accessibility features:

Games Like Closed Hands

Our experts have hand-picked the following similar games for you. These offer a similar way to play to Closed Hands or are games with a similar theme or topic. These are good alternative games to Closed Hands, or are a younger rated alternative for players not ready for PEGI 12+ or ESRB TEEN games.

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This game is rated PEGI 12+Our review includes potentially triggering words:racism.