Hand Physics Lab (2021)

First Impressions / VR Setup: The game opens in a huge, empty white space — instantly giving off minimalist vibes. I immediately got a “Wii Play” nostalgia hit, which was hilarious. I first tried it with hand-tracking, which works really well on the Meta Quest 3, though some limitations exist: if your hands go too low or one is hidden behind the other, tracking can fail. After a few moments, I switched to controllers for certain levels, which made things much smoother.

The environment feels immersive, almost like a giant sandbox. It’s not realistic, but you genuinely feel like you’re “inside” this strange, ominous nothingness.

Gameplay / Mechanics

The core fun comes from how objects react differently depending on how you touch them. Even small tasks, like screwing in a lightbulb, feel interesting in VR.

Some highlights include:

Shooting mini-games, which were satisfying and fun. Planet-building puzzles, where you arrange the solar system. Creative VR exercises, like shaking your own hands in a mirror — which forces you to think invertedly and creatively. Less enjoyable were some of the repetitive block-sliding puzzles, which felt tedious after a while. Overall, the puzzles are clever but can overstay their welcome.

Difficulty / Progression

The game is generally easy, though earning all 3 stars in every puzzle might be quite challenging. There’s a minimal reward system — some eggs to collect — but the gameplay itself is enough. I completed both the main puzzles and a bit of sandboxing. While sandboxing is fun, the structured puzzles kept my interest the most, loved petting the cat at the end.

Atmosphere / Immersion

Hand Physics Lab is relaxing, slightly funny, and very minimalistic. The hand-tracking mechanics make the experience feel immersive in a way that only VR can achieve. You really feel “present” in the sandbox.

Personal Take / Recommendation

What I loved most was the interaction with objects and the small creative VR challenges. The only downside is some puzzles became increasingly tedious, but it didn’t ruin the fun.

I’d highly recommend this game to:

Anyone trying hand-tracking in VR for the first time. VR newcomers or kids looking for a playful, safe sandbox. Players who enjoy creative, physics-driven interactions reminiscent of old Wii Play vibes.

Rating: ★★⯪☆☆ (2,5 / 5) A charming, minimalist VR sandbox that’s fun, creative, and perfect for experimenting with hand-tracking — just skip the overly repetitive puzzles if your patience runs thin.

I thought this game would have just been one of those gimmick experience that you try once for 10 mins and you are done, but I ended up completing all 100 levels!

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First, the game, despite a very simple aesthetic, is very pleasant to look at.

My favorite thing about it is the in game UI, which is so juicy to use!
The feeling of pressing down the flat buttons and making them enters their own outlines is so satisfying and helps in getting the feeling of actually doing that operation, if you don't have any kind of haptic feedback (since you are using your own hands). It's also so responsive to what you do with it that it does really feel that you have it in your hands.

The holopad and its different pages are also beautifully designed, and the UX in this game in general is 10/10. I've spent a lot of time just navigating the holopad because even just doing that was so entertaining for me.

One of the smartest touches is making surfaces bounce a bit when you try to move them: this helped in giving you the sense of actually interacting with something which normally would have been solid and still, but that otherwise would have meant that your hands would have instantly moved through it, reducing the feeling of having actually touched that surface, since your action didn't have any consequence, either on the object, or as the feeling of touching something in real life.

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As for the game itself, it's basically like using your real hands to do something as simple as moving some blocks to specific position, using your fingers to color eggs, or more complex things such as using some gestures to move a remote-controlled car.

It doesn't seem that interesting (gimmick aside), but to me it felt so novel! I felt true joy while doing these simple tasks, because it was so cool to see this hand tracking technology working so well with physics. It was simply fun.

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I felt like a toddler finding out about his own hands and starting to learn how to use them. Since the interaction is not perfect and you have to get used to how to use your virtual physics hands, it does give you that sensation of learning to use a "new" body part.

This managed to immerse me so much inside the VR experience, and it's something that is incredible important but not always a game manages to do it, often because the gameplay ends up not being that VR, like when you just have to point and click stuff instead of having to actually grab it.

In this game instead, you are always doing "real life" movements and, thanks to the use of physics as a mean of gameplay, everything reacts in a very real way, letting you basically try whatever and check the result of that.
It feels at time like you are experimenting the capabilities of your new hands, and it often delivers.

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Besides, despite being simple, the things you have to do are often new, keeping that sense of wonder always high.

It doesn't take long actually to complete all 100 levels, they are very simple and fast to complete, but I think this is a good thing, because it puts you in a good mood and the levels just flow one after the other.

It would have been interesting to also see some harder puzzle, but, for an experience like this, it's also nice to be able to complete it in a few sessions, having that feeling of wanting a bit more, instead of being left with some hard puzzle just for the sake of it and leaving the game incomplete. It's good to complete a game after all.

That said, especially with some minigames, that are some missed opportunities which I think could have been explored a bit more. One example is the climbing minigame, which could have at least had an actual route to climb, even if simple, than just a ladder, but also some extra level where you needed a bit more precision with your hands.

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From a dev perspective, I'm impressed by the talent of the dev, who managed to tackle so many aspects of game design (as a whole, not only gameplay but also art, ux, ..) and succeeded in creating such a well designed and polished experience.

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The weaker part of the experience, and possibly the only one, is the soundtrack, since it's made of random free music.
I can understand that this way the dev, which I think is just one person, could save some money, but maybe it would have been worth it to create a few custom tracks, even just 4-5 would have done the trick.

There is actually another annoying thing related to the hands, which is the way that the game detect the grab gesture.
It triggered too easily and too often, even when I was just waving my hands or gently pushing something, and felt very annoying and frustrating on some puzzle where this caused an object to snap to my hand, losing all the progresses in moving it into a particular spot with a specific orientation.

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I honestly recommend this to anyone who has a VR headset. Even if you just play it once for the gimmicks, it will still be worth it and I think it might even spark again your enthusiasm for the VR, if you are one of those who have kind of lost it after the novelty wore off.