Here's the thing: Super Adventure Hand is not a very good game. It is, however, a fun game. The interesting bit is the very specific way it is both not a very good, yet fun, experience.

See, dev teams used to be smaller. Sometimes one guy, sometimes three. So much more fell on the lap of individual programmer talent. And sometimes that individual programmer would figure out a neat trick. A way to do rotating 2D towers, sprite scaling, a bouncy physics system. And because the market was tough, and because standing out was difficult, the team would go on to build an entire game heavily based around that one programming trick. The gimmick came before the game, and it was often obvious that it had.

That's what Super Adventure Hand feels like. Somebody figured out how to do procedural animation for the fingers of a hand crawling Thing-style across the ground and then went "Sure, why not" and made a game around it while diving headfirst into the classic PC tradition of dev art (or, in this case, stock assets) and level design that is clearly amateur and utterly riddled with every foible made by any game in the Chip's Challenge house. Repetitive tasks in individual levels? Unfocused design between levels and a notably uneven difficulty curve? Levels that are mostly "what if we just did a whole lot of X"? All here.

So, is it a good game? No. Is it a game that hearkens back to a very specific era of PC gaming, when weird ideas still had the occasional chance and programmers held the reins? Absolutely. So, nostalgia for me, but not likely for many others.