WhenThank Goodness You’re Herelaunched earlier this year, I wrote thatevery culture deserves a game like it. My Arms Are Longer Now has answered my prayers, and feels like an Australian spin on Panic’s absurdly charming slap ‘em-up.
The demo, whichyou can play on Steam now, will take you barely more than ten minutes to finish, if that, so you might as well play it instead of reading this. Since you’re already here, though, let me extol My Arms Are Longer Now’s virtues. You’re a thief with absurdly long arms – think Mr. Fantastic or Elastigirl. Unlike them, though, you’re not a hero using your stretchy limbs to fight evil. You’re a thief.
Billing itself as a 2D stealth-comedy game, you use one of your magnificently long, flaccid arms to rob people, steal things, break stuff, and slap strangers. (Thank Goodness You’re Here also has a lot of slapping, by the way.) The Steam description says you can do things like “put a sock on your hand and flirt with a lonely guard” to pull off the perfect heist, which seems… tonally correct.
In the demo, you’re making your way through a train. You slap a loose tile off the ground and your arm emerges like a snake through the exposed hole. Presumably the train is also still moving, so exactly how this works is unclear, but let’s move past that.
You can pinch stuff off a nearby hooligan, who’s muttering praise to you even as you grab a dollar off them and slap them in the head. You can make your arm “fly” to reach objects higher off the ground – I use this skill to grab that thing you find on trains that lets you break the glass. I then break the glass of the emergency release, open the doors to the next carriage, and snake on in.
Apart from a little post-it in the top corner of the game telling you how much money you’ve nicked and the big ticket items left for you to steal, the UI is pretty minimal. A big draw here is in the art and voice performances, which, again, are vaguely reminiscent of Thank Goodness You’re Here – characters are rendered in a cartoony, hand-drawn caricature style, and voice acted with thick Australian accents and lots of panicked screaming. It’s all very funny and off-beat.
Adding to the humour is the janky physics. Your arm is mostly flopping around, less of a muscular snake and more of a rubber hose. You can wrap it around itself, various objects, and across huge environments. It’s particularly entertaining trying to solve puzzles, knowing that you’re not being at all stealthy but being met with the mildest of protestations and resistance. My floppy arm grabbed a man’s dog and all he said was something like, “Where are you going?” in the mildest way possible. He also didn’t mind when I stole his train pass to give to the ticket inspector who boarded, nor when I gave him a little smack on the head for his trouble.
My Arms Are Longer Now’s demo is great. You should play it.
