Hand
"These spider-like menaces would love nothing more than to get their fingers around your throat and squeeze. Watch for them scuttling along walls and ceilings. The last thing you need is a handshake from one of these fiends." — Blood Beastiary
Hands (also known as Hands from Hell, Hell Hands, or Choking Hands) are common enemies in Blood and Blood II. They are small severed hands that crawl along on their fingers (much like Thing from the The Addams Family), and attack by leaping up and strangling the player. When being strangled, the player must rapidly press the Use/Interact key (the space bar by default) to dislodge the Hand. Alerted Hands cry out "I'll swallow your soul!" in a comically sped-up voice, as a reference to the Evil Dead trilogy.
Blood[edit]
"The corpses that the minions of Tchernobog use to make zombies aren't always in the best of shape. Sometimes, only a limb is salvageable. Usually, the Cabal's surgeons can fashion various bits and pieces into a serviceable undead soldier, but certain leftover parts can be effective all on their own. If one of these horrors gets hold of you, you've got to push it off before you can kill it." — Blood Manual
Choking hands are nuisance enemies. They don't travel in great numbers, since only one can damage the player at a time. Their small size makes them difficult to target.
Despite what is claimed by the game's manual and website, the Hell Hand is only ever seen scuttling along the floor, and never upon walls and ceilings.
Upon player death, using the "krueger" cheat code to receive 200 health will dislodge the hell hand.
| Difficulty Level | Hit Points |
|---|---|
| Still Kicking | 4 |
| Pink on the Inside | 7 |
| Lightly Broiled | 10 |
| Well Done | 14 |
| Extra Crispy | 18 |
Note: a common issue when playing Blood on modern hardware is being unable to counter the Hell Hand's choke attack (done by repeatedly pressing the USE button to dislodge it from Caleb's neck, default key being Space) - this is true on Blood (v1.00) through One Unit Whole Blood (v1.21). Something related to the faster processing of the game may be the cause of this issue when playing on lower resolutions. Increasing the game resolution somehow fixes this issue entirely. So when playing under XP's emulated DOS and/or DOSBox, simply change the resolution from 320x200 to 640x480 (or higher). If the player is okay running Blood outside DOS, this issue is also not present in source ports like NBlood or BuildGDX.
Blood II[edit]
Although the Cabal no longer uses zombies proper in this game, Choking Hands return, and behave exactly the same way. Once in a while, when the hand is damaged, it will flip you off, and stay that way until you get close enough for it to chase you again.
