‘One Hand Clapping’: A Sonorous Sensation
One Hand Clapping combines unexpected gameplay mechanics, lore, and surprisingly silent storytelling. The premise is generally a mystery. You are dropped into a world swirling with atmosphere and intrigue, something deeply reminiscent of how Journey brings you through a staggeringly beautiful, mostly peaceful, and at all times mysterious world. What is this world? Who is this character? In some sense, as a player, you aren’t worried about answering those questions because the raw novelty and beauty are captivating. Atmosphere acts in context as a narrator.
This peaceful introduction of your character is met with something rather disturbing: a massive blob with a million legs. It runs by, moaning incomprehensibly. This blob monster runs past, reminding me of the climax to Inside. The contrast between your innocent looking character and this uncanny monstrosity inspires a brief moment of dread about what’s to come.
Your character then emerges from a kind of energy cloud, enshrouded in pastel colors that breeze by you, lighting the sky with peach, pink, and orange wind. The dim palette of blues and greys in the background nicely blends between your character and the world. It feels like a melancholy city that recently experienced rainfall. A singular street lamp breaks the illusion, like a beacon that implies to you, “hey, this way is forward.”
Its at this point that the game mechanics make themselves known. The game instructs you to sing at your lowest comfortable range, which then calibrates which notes the game will request from you. I can’t think of the surprise I would have felt during this first moment if I hadn’t already been streaming with my microphone connected. Unless you’re a streamer, a microphone isn’t always (or even usually) an essential to playing games.
Your character is pink with big, dopey eyes – almost like a cartoon ghost – donned with a green scarf around its neck. The character animations match up your inputs almost precisely: it sings when you sing, its mouth opens and it tilts its head back. It immediately becomes clear that singing (or humming or whistling) manipulates objects in the game world. Singing lifts objects, builds bridges, and eventually solves increasingly complex audio puzzles.
As you set off on your journey into this unknown land, you pass buildings with ghostly black figures pressed up against windows. All of their eyes – dozens, maybe hundreds – all hungrily peer at you. In alleyways, the music loses its light-hearted, carefree adventure tones and sharpens into darker more dramatic music. Again, this tension builds by virtue of atmospheric context. Soon you are overtaken by the aforementioned massive blob monster. The screen fades to black.
You are dropped from the ground above, deep into a dark, cavernous underground. The dank and dingy cavern is complete with dripping water, haggard rocks, and a singular beam of light pining in from above. Your character enters a tunnel not altogether out of place in a submarine – and then emerges into a breathtaking vista that, again, reminded me of Journey in its ability to navigate so many kinds of places in such a short while.
The protagonist strides across purple sands, darker violet rocks. You sing to activate a staircase, revealing a beaming golden sun with a halo of rays decorating its edges. Windy clouds wisp above against an otherwise pale blue sky. Far in the distance, a series of tall, sharp structures stand erect. Whether these structures are a densely populated city, or a long abandoned one, is never clarified. For me, the world felt long forgotten.
Enter the second character of One Hand Clapping, a little green guide of sorts. He looks like Gumby and sounds like Kirby, with some interpretive design in between. This green guide demonstrates the notes it wants you to sing. And, reminding me of the singing charts throughout Rock Band and Guitar Hero, you have to gently move your voice up the steps to unlock the next area. (A brief moment to acknowledge the clever dual meaning of “steps” here: steps in the physical world as well as steps in a musical key.)
Progressive music picks up as you follow your newly found guide across this desertous landscape, where you start to encounter new pieces of lore. For instance, you pass a tall, blue, rounded structure that, when you walk by it, appears to have some kind of life to it. Its three eyes seem to light up when you pass, like its saying hello. They follow your movement. But for an otherwise still object, they’re kind of endearing.
The puzzles increase in complexity and start to take the form of actual musical lessons in pitch control and shifting between notes. These notes get more precise, where you have to hit tiny gems with the right frequency in order for a bridge to form (in a purple cave) allowing your passage.
Soon, you pass yet another blue sentient thing, this time with two diagonal lines – instead of three circles – as eyes. The only thing I can think of is that these little blue sentient things – oracles, let’s call them – are actually serving an instructional function in the game. This theory isn’t strongly supported, but going back through this game for a second time – I noticed that they seem to correspond to the upcoming puzzles. But exactly how they serve that instructional function is beyond my speculation.
And here’s where it gets a little weird. Your character enters a very dark room, surrounded by concentric circles. These circles spiral around you like the rings of Saturn, but instead of tiny little moons and asteroids these rings are peppered with musical notes. And you’re tasked with connecting your way through increasingly demanding puzzles and this bizarre, celestial place.
It’s a relief tinged with melancholy when you emerge back outside from the celestial experience. And you notice that now there’s a peculiar new detail in the landscape: the Sun has grown an eye-ball like core to it. Its rings now have changed, going inwards and landing in a pupil. It feels like this world is watching you. Maybe your time at the center of musical solar systems has awakened some kind of potential in you.
As you summit the final mountain, your Gumby guide sings up to the sun, who lights up marvelously, spinning bands and rays of golden stars, beaming down on the guide. Then something even more unexpected happens: the Sun joins in harmony with the guide, singing away in booming tones. And then you kind of realize that your guide has brought you to meet the sun itself.
You sing to the Sun in harmony with the guide, and your music brings the world to life. This three part harmony magically resurrects a city out of the desert, distantly in the background. The melodies get more and more complex while the Sun literally pulses out rhythmic bass energy. It’s a breathtaking moment. The vigor of life is on full display for all.
With the city restored to its beauty and prominence, you are given a unique moment in the game: to sing your own song. You can sing whatever you’d like. And it feels really personal and special after being challenged this whole time, like a vocal fingerprint or signature. With this final act of singing your own melody, your character sprite vaporizes into the rainbow energy from the game’s beginning, once again, ascending into the rising sun.
And that’s One Hand Clapping. A stunning and surprising game that has some, from my perspective, boldly creative design work. Not only have I never seen the mechanical integration of visceral, musical input and atmospheric storytelling, but I was shocked to learn that this mini masterpiece was created by a small group of students. Pioneered by game director, Thomas Wilson, One Hand Clapping was created in a game development program at the University of Southern California. It’s always rewarding to see one person’s vision brought to life by such a small, talented, young team.
I was constantly blown away by the visual design and purely implied, wordless storytelling. But also the music gives this game almost a 50% boost in terms of its reception. It’s no secret that immersive music can make or break a game. And I’m hard pressed to describe this game without its music; the sound design composed by Aaron Spieldenner is crucially integral to the success of One Hand Clapping.
I feel lucky to have experienced such an organic and clever project, however experimental. We’re very lucky when games stick with us long after we have put down the controller, and in this case, the microphone.
