Jackbox’s first externally published game looks like the shot in the arm the stealth genre needs, and it’ll be out this year

I played a demo of My Arms Are Longer Now at PAX Australia and it was a real good time. It’s a stealth-comedy game, though not in the sense that you’re surprised to find out it’s funny. It’s funny from the first second you twist your upsettingly wiggly arm across the floor of a train carriage then get caught trying to steal someone’s bike right in front of them.

But it is a stealth-comedy game in the sense that it’s a stealth game as well as a comedy one, with a detective who apparently learns of your bizarre wiggly crimes, and witnesses who will notice when you try to, say, pinch their bike right in front of them.

My Arms Are Longer Now is being published by Jackbox Games. Yes, the people who make the Jackbox games are called Jackbox Games, and this is their first step into publishing a game developed by other people. Those other people are Toot Games, a studio founded by Matthew Jackson and Millie Holten, who you may know from the Aunty Donna-adjacent actual-play series Trope RPG and the reality-adjacent web animation Long Head.

I love stealth games because I played Thief: The Dark Project at a young and impressionable age and it made me long for a life of crimes I could experience from behind a computer screen, but without having to commit identity fraud or trick people into downloading malware. Stealth games are a bit of a cursed genre though, because decades later most games about leaning around corners in the dark still aren’t as good as the ones from the ’90s.

Which is why I’m looking forward to a game that does something more drastic with the idea of thievery than “adding multiplayer” or “what if you were also really good at just killing people and then stealing from them.” Which is exactly what My Arms Are Longer Now promises to do when it comes out this year. You can wishlist it now on Steam.