The Magician's Hand takes the legs off a platformer

You play the severed hand of Fabrizio, a magician who has gone missing somewhere in Victorian London. The hand wakes with no memory and one urge it cannot explain — find him, before it is too late. That is the whole setup, and it is doing more work than a setup usually does, because it also decides what you are physically capable of for the rest of the game.

Everything a platformer normally takes for granted turns back into a question. There are no legs to run with, no eyes at head height to look ahead with, and nothing to hold a weapon except the thing you are. The developer describes the moment-to-moment as a mixture of speed, stealth and cunning through dangerous areas, which is the honest shape for a body this small — you are not fighting the level so much as getting across it before something larger notices you are there.

Two structures sit on top of that. The hand grows: it picks up new abilities along the way, and each one is supposed to open ground that was shut a few rooms earlier. And the mini games shift perspective, pulling you out of whatever view you were platforming in and asking you to read the same space from somewhere else, usually in exchange for a secret or another piece of the mystery.

Then there are the boss battles, which are the hardest part to picture and therefore the most interesting. A boss fight assumes an avatar with a dependable attack and a dependable dodge. A hand has neither by default, so it has to invent both — and whatever it invents will be the clearest statement this game ever makes about what it thinks a hand actually is.

How Snake Pass became a platformer without jumping is the load-bearing reference here. Snake Pass wears the costume of a 3D platformer and then deletes the genre’s most familiar verb, and the argument is that the deletion is the design: once you cannot jump, every surface has to be negotiated with the body you actually have, and the game becomes new because of what it refuses to give you. A severed hand is the same bet placed on a different body. If it hops around like a small person, the hand is a costume. If it has to grip, drag and haul itself over things, the hand is the game.

The secret of Mario’s jump is the other half, and it reads as a warning. That essay argues the jump is great not because it is one button but because the same verb produces wildly different outcomes depending on timing, speed and what is under you. The Magician’s Hand promises a steady supply of new abilities, and that is the easier road — bolt on a verb whenever a level needs one, and the hand ends up as a keyring. The harder and better version is that whatever the hand does best keeps meaning something different in a room you have already crossed.

The perspective-shifting mini games run straight into the challenge of cameras, which makes the point that a camera is not merely a viewpoint — it sets what the player can read, how near they feel to the character, and whether the action still supports the experience. Changing it partway through breaks that contract deliberately. Done well, the new angle is the puzzle, and you see a thing that was genuinely unreadable from the old one. Done badly, it is a different game wearing the same title, and you spend the mini game waiting to be given your hand back.

The Magician’s Hand is by Laser Rabbit, self-published, and listed as coming soon on Windows with no date announced. Steam files it under Indie and nothing else. It is single-player, with full controller support and a gamepad recommended, and it carries the playable-at-your-own-pace tag — which in a puzzle platformer usually means the thinking, not the twitch, is where the difficulty is meant to live.

The setting is pulling its weight as well. Victorian London is an unusually good fit for this exact premise: a city already stocked with stage magic, fog and people who disappear without explanation, where a crawling hand reads as uncanny rather than silly. Moody atmosphere is cheap to claim and expensive to sustain, but here the period and the premise are at least pointing the same way, which is more than most first pitches manage.

If the appeal is an unlikely little body earning a large map one ability at a time, Project Ants is the other one on this list — a fallen ant warrior in a 3D insect kingdom, where new movement is what turns a wall you already walked past into a road. Same trade in both: pick a body nobody designs platformers for, then make the whole world a consequence of what that body can just barely do.