One of the great things about the Steam Deck, especially with Heroic set up so it can seamlessly work with my GOG, Epic and Amazon game libraries, is the huge number of free games I manage to accrue and actually play. Super Adventure Hand was a recent one, free on Amazon Gaming, which I’d stumbled over on the Switch eShop as “eeeer, dunno”. Can’t argue with free though, can you.
And, I’m glad I didn’t pay full whack for it. There’s nothing especially wrong with it, it’s just a bit dull. It starts off with you, as an arm and hand, having the arm severed and kidnapped. You then have some mild platformy and simple puzzley levels to work through in order to get it back.
As a hand, you can grab things like handles and switches, climb up most walls, and “flick” baddies (which are mostly feet, the natural enemy of the hand, apparently). Platforming mostly involved flinging yourself across gaps and grabbing on to the other side, although moving, rotating and intermittently electrified platforms made this a bit harder. Puzzles are often of the “drag boxes to the right places” variety.
There are a few levels which differ from these two staples, such as a couple where you drive a car for some reason, a handful (ha) where you have a skateboard (sadly without any Techdeck fingerboard tricks), and some where you have to rescue mini-hands.
As I said, the game is fine. The wonky physics and sometimes pushing the stick forward flips from “climb up” to “climb down” mid-climb can both be a bit annoying but near instant restarts and mostly generous respawn points mean they’re not really an issue. No, the main issue is that it’s just a bit boring. Ten minutes in and the quirkiness of having Thing to control wears off and you’re left with a pretty generic, and somewhat short and easy, platformer.
