3 hours ago
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Most stealth games cast you as a spy, an assassin or a master thief. My Arms Are Longer Now dispenses with most of the criminal person, to send in just one spectacularly badly behaved limb. It slithers across floors, winds around furniture, steals things and slaps anyone within reach – finally answering the question nobody asked: what if your own arm turned to crime?
As Toot Games co-founder Matthew Jackson puts it: “You are the bad thing that happens to the people.”
The idea began as a much simpler prototype made during a weekend game jam themed around the idea of lost and found. Jackson and fellow Toot co-founder Millie Holten, who met through Melbourne’s improv and sketch comedy community, wanted an idea that could be understood – and raise a laugh – in a single still image. A grotesquely extended arm proved to be just that.
Since then, the game has been all about comedy. It has more than 40 speaking characters, voiced by Australian comedians who perform the written dialogue before improvising alternative takes. “It’s a vessel for jokes,” Jackson says. For almost a year, development largely involved trying to “cram jokes into the game”; only later did the team realise the physics of the increasingly sophisticated arm had become fun in their own right. Players can personalise its skin tone, hair and accessories, making it less somebody else’s disembodied crime spree than a freaky extension of their own body.
The stealth here owes something to Untitled Goose Game: characters react to your crimes, but, Jackson says, “There are no fail states in the game.” A museum guard might smack the arm, or beg it to stop before they are fired. Anyone can be slapped, including an infant. While searching for a publisher, Jackson repeatedly asked: “Is someone going to come and tell us you can’t slap the baby?” Jackbox Games, thankfully, did not.
Making that slap possible required rather more sophistication than the joke might suggest. The original game was flat and 2D, but Holten’s concept art showed the arm looping over tables, under chairs and around objects. Six months into development, the studio took the risky decision to rebuild in 3D. Working with developer Cherie Davidson, Jackson created a procedural, tube-like limb and a system that uses forced perspective to preserve the illustrated style while allowing the physical collisions the game needs.
The work never quite ends. The team calls another session tinkering with the troublesome appendage “going into the armpit”.
That labour is particularly demanding because comedy is finite. “You can hit a joke, and that joke’s done. You’ve burnt that,” Jackson says. Some publishers suggested adding more puzzles, but Toot feared they would obstruct the punchlines. Jackbox understood that it was meant to be “a good time, not a long time”, with players who do poke into every corner rewarded with optional interactions and voice lines.
Jackson’s ultimate ambition for the game is appropriately simple: “I hope players say it was funny. That’s truly it.” And after three years in the armpit, 48 speaking characters, and one non-negotiable baby slap, Toot Games has gone to extraordinary lengths to reach gaming’s funny bone.
