Finally, a game brave enough to ask: 'What if your hands were baseball bats?'

As VR technology grows in complexity, it allows us to do more complex things in games. Our virtual hands, once only capable of being able to open and close, have progressed to the point where we can, well, point. Make specific gestures. Type, press buttons with individual fingers, manipulate objects, and perform delicate tasks.

Of course you can, it's just trickier, and that's the point. What the Bat? is the next game from developer Triband, the creators of the incredibly funny and surprising not-golf game What the Golf?, and this time the slapstick comedy is taking place in VR. The premise is, your hands are bats, but you still need to complete a bunch of minigames which include:

Hitting a baseball (so far, easy)
Hitting a soccer ball thrown by an elephant
Getting a hot dog from a vending machine
Carrying an egg (now it's getting tricky)
Controlling a shark with a joystick
Carving a sculpture
Brushing your teefs
Petting a dog (it gives you gloves for this one)
Ironing a sock
Taking a bath
Abducting sheep with a UFO
Making satellites kiss in space (huh?)
Having feet
Making toast
Fishing
Hitting a trophy that came out of a toilet

Based on the variety of surprising moments in What the Golf? I suspect there's far, far more weird little games and twists in What the Bat? than shown in the announcement trailer. It looks extremely goofy and playful, and I'm now sitting here humming the theme song, which goes: "What the what the what the what the what the baaaaaaaaat."

To experience the frustration and comedy of having bats for hands, you will naturally need a VR headset. What the Bat? will be available sometime this year on Steam and for the Meta Quest 2. Here's the official site.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.